So What's with the Name?

It's a reference to the infamous "Arkansas Project", arguably the most powerful of the anti-Clinton "opposition research" (read: dirty tricks) projects funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and implemented by way of the American Spectator magazine and its parent group, the American Spectator Educational Foundation.

It was through the "Arkansas Project" that the state troopers were paid to tell their initial stories for David Brock's "Troopergate" article in the Spectator - an article which he has long since repudiated as unreliable.

Ironically enough, the American Spectator has not fared well of late: Scaife cut off his funding to the magazine in September of 1997, when it refused to continue to uphold Scaife's slanderous "theory", that the Clintons killed Vince Foster. (Even Ken Starr and Robert Fiske had joined the the legitimate law-enforcement community in agreeing that Foster had shot himself, and the Spectator's editors knew that to continue to state otherwise would be to reveal themselves as blindly partisan cranks.) It got a bit of a bounce out of CoupGate in 1998, but has been on the ropes ever since.

It seems that while many people are interested in hearing the truth about CoupGate -- as the popularity of Salon magazine and the Conason/Lyons and Toobin books attest -- there just aren't enough uncritically rabid right-wingers around to prop up the American Spectator, once it loses its sugar daddy. Perhaps the Rev. Sun Myung Moon can be persuaded to take some of the $100 million a year he loses on his own right-wing publishing ventures (The Washington Times, Insight magazine)and use it to keep Ted and Barbara Olson from having to look for legitimate work.

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