My appearance on The O’Reilly Factor on May 18, 2004 first put me on Mr. Brock’s radar screen. I had just written a cover story on billionaire Democrat donor George Soros in NewsMax magazine, and Bill O’Reilly wished to discuss it. Unhappily, Mr. Brock had launched his MediaMatters.org Web site only two weeks before, on May 3, so I had the honor of being one of his first targets.

Following are some highlights of the tedious dialogue into which Brock and company have drawn me over the last four years.

NewsMax’s Poe on O’Reilly Factor:
George Soros is a "madman"
By A.S. & G.W. (Andrew Seifter and Gabriel Wildau)
MediaMatters.org, May 19, 2004 6:48 PM EST

Letter to Bill O’Reilly from David Brock
MediaMatters.org, June 1, 2004 5:23 PM EST

O’Reilly Factor Guest Richard Poe Smeared George Soros
A Media Matters for America analysis of a NewsMax cover story
By J.F (Jamison Foser)
MediaMatters.org, June 1, 2004 6:52 PM EST

FOX’s O’Reilly Factor Denies Media Matters for America Time to Discuss Soros Attacks
Press Release by Naomi Seligman
MediaMatters.org, June 3, 2004 3:27 PM EST

E-mail Bill O’Reilly
MediaMatters.org, June 8, 2004 12:23 PM EST

J.W., “Media repeat anti-Soros propaganda by DeLay defenders“, MediaMatters.org, Tue, Apr 19, 2005 2:48pm ET

D.B. & S.S.M., “Echoing Lyndon LaRouche, Horowitz and Poe smear 14-year-old George Soros as Nazi `collaborator’; new book features doctored quotes, factual errors“, MediaMatters.org, 2 August 2006, 10:52 am EST

Richard Poe, “Soros and the Nazis: The Whole Truth, In His Own Words“, ShadowParty.com, 2 August 2006, 03:40 pm ET

David Horowitz, “Soros’ Team Steps Up to the Plate“, David’s Blog / FrontPageMagazine.com, 4 August 2006

Richard Poe, “Horowitz Rebuts Media Matters“, ShadowParty.com, 4 August 2006, 12:18 pm ET

S.S.M., “Horowitz and Poe promised `full-blown’ rebuttals to Media Matters’ debunking of The Shadow Party — so what’s taking so long?“, MediaMatters.org, 8 August 2006, 01:17 pm EST

B.A., “Horowitz: Democrats are ‘apologists for terrorists,’ ‘leftists now support[] Hezbollah’“, MediaMatters.org, Wed, Aug 9, 2006 5:47pm ET

S.S.M., “Fox’s Hill and Doocy Confronted Horowitz with Media Matters Research“, MediaMatters.org, 9 August 2006, 12:30 pm EST

S.S.M., “A Week Passes, More Promises From Horowitz and Poe, But Still No `Exhaustive’ Rebuttal to Media Matters“, MediaMatters.org, 9 August 2006, 06:06 pm EST

R.M., “Following ABC’s falsehood-ridden Path to 9/11, Coulter’s column repeated false claims about Pres. Clinton’s handling of terror threat“, MediaMatters.org, Fri, Sep 15, 2006 8:33pm ET

Richard Poe, “Media Matters’ Attack on The Shadow Party: A Response to 21 False Allegations“, FrontPageMagazine.com, 30 October 2006

Richard Poe, “Media Matters’ Attack on The Shadow Party: A Response to 21 False Allegations“, Poe.com, 30 October 2006

Richard Poe, “Media Matters Discredited: Leftist Libels Against Horowitz Book Debunked“, ShadowParty.com, 31 October 2006, 09:06 pm ET

Simon Maloy, “Facts, Lies, and Richard Poe“, MediaMatters.org, 17 November 2006, 09:39 am EST

Richard Poe, “UPDATE: November 17, 2006“, ShadowParty.com, 17 November 2006

Simon Maloy, “Richard Poe responds to Media Matters (again)“, MediaMatters.org, Fri, Nov 17, 2006 6:26pm ET

S.S.M., “TNR’s Peretz cropped transcript to support his smear of Soros as ‘a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel’“, MediaMatters.org, Mon, Feb 5, 2007 3:22pm ET

R.C., “Schlussel Smeared Soros“, MediaMatters.org, Fri, Oct 12, 2007 8:03pm ET

Granted, Hillary is no spring chicken. Her fleshly allure has diminished over time. But Hillary has other ways of bending men to her will.

Consider her effect upon journalist David Brock. A ruthless political dirt-digger for the right, Brock nearly toppled the Clinton White House. His Troopergate story in the American Spectator triggered the Paula Jones lawsuit, leading to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Yet, when Brock trained his sights on Hillary, he suddenly went soft.

In 1994, the Free Press awarded Brock a million-dollar advance to write a Hillary exposé. Brock slowly fell under Hillary’s spell, as he wrote. In Brock’s words, he began to “sympathize with the trials and tribulations she faced, and even to see a kind of beauty” in her soul. “In finding Hillary Clinton’s humanity, I was beginning to find my own”, he later wrote.

Released in October 1996, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham turned out to be a whitewash, portraying Hillary as an idealist saddled with an unworthy husband.

Brock didn’t stop there. He publicly renounced conservatism in the July 1997 Esquire. Then he wrote a book smearing his former conservative friends and colleagues as crooks, liars, drunkards, dopers, philanderers, closet homosexuals and “right-wing fag hags“, in Brock’s memorable phrase.

Hillary knows how to return a favor. In 2003, she set up her own personal think tank, the Center for American Progress, with $3 million from Wall Street billionaire George Soros. One of the Center’s first priorities was to give David Brock a job.

Hillary’s Center helped launch Media Matters for America, an activist group dedicated to fighting conservative influence in the media. Brock was put in charge of it. Hillary’s former enemy had become her lapdog. Such is the power of Hillary’s charm.

Hillary worked a similar transformation on Richard Mellon Scaife. During the 1990s, the Pittsburgh philanthropist and newspaper publisher spent millions trying to expose Clinton wrongdoing through lawsuits and grants to journalists. Time magazine dubbed Scaife “king of the Clinton haters“.

Those days are over. Following a March 25 meeting this year with Senator Clinton, Scaife wrote in his newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that the meeting had “changed my mind about her”.

In an April 20 editorial, Scaife’s Tribune-Review endorsed Hillary for president.

Hillary’s most impressive conquest to date is Rupert Murdoch, whose $60-billion media empire encompasses Fox News and the New York Post. When Hillary ran for reelection to the Senate in 2006, Murdoch stunned New Yorkers by endorsing her, even holding a Hillary fundraiser at his headquarters in Manhattan.

Fox News has become Hillary’s favorite network. Her campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe praised Fox in a May 13 interview on Fox & Friends. McAuliffe complained that “90 percent” of mainstream media favored Obama. By contrast, he noted gratefully, “Fox has been one of the most responsible in this presidential campaign“.

What is Hillary’s secret? By what alchemy does she transform bitter enemies into loyal operatives? Cynics might argue that Hillary employs methods more forceful than her winning personality.

They might note, for instance, that the last Clinton administration sicced the Federal Communications Commission on Murdoch, nearly putting his Fox Network out of business. At age 77, Murdoch may no longer have the stomach for that sort of fight.

Dick Scaife likewise felt the Clintons’ wrath. From 1993 to 1997, he gave $1.8 million to the American Spectator to fund investigative reportage on the Clintons. Such grants are perfectly legal, yet the Clinton Justice Department subjected Scaife and the American Spectator to a 14-month criminal investigation. No prosecutions resulted, but Clinton critics felt the chill.

The American Spectator had already suffered years of harassment, including several suspicious break-ins. Founder and editor-in-chief Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. later wrote, “The pressure was enormous. [David] Brock was the earliest to crack under the strain.”

Plainly, Hillary’s enemies-turned-friends have other possible motives for switching sides than mere puppy-dog infatuation. In fact, they have every reason to fear Mrs. Clinton. Staying on her good side may be a matter of simple survival for them.

This brings us back to the superdelegates. Most are leaning toward Obama, at this point. But convention rules allow them to change their minds right up till the end.

However she managed it, Hillary did get Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife to join her team. Persuading the superdelegates seems a small task by comparison.

Poe discusses his column, “Just Say No to Purple Five-Dollar Bills“.

The U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing claims it is making our banknotes “safer, smarter and more secure“. They say the violet stain on Lincoln’s face adds “complexity”, rendering counterfeiting more difficult. The big purple five on the back supposedly helps vision-impaired people count their change.

Hogwash! These goals could be achieved through less drastic means. There is no need to turn our banknotes into Monopoly money.

U.S. currency already features watermarks, microprinting, embedded fluorescent security threads, color-shifting ink and fine-line printing patterns — subtle security measures requiring little change in the dollar’s design. For the visually impaired, high-contrast features could be added in a tasteful manner, without resorting to garish, phosphorescent hues.

The fact is, we are being hoodwinked. The redesign of our currency has nothing to do with fighting counterfeiters or helping people with weak eyesight. It has everything to do with catering to the perverse canons of postmodernist art. The U.S. Treasury has allowed a cabal of avant-garde designers to pull off one of the most audacious practical jokes in art history; the “subversion” and “deconstruction” of the U.S. dollar. We the taxpayers must demand an end to this cultural vandalism.

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle opined that art should be wondrous and beautiful. It should instruct and elevate the masses, he said, giving pleasure and catharsis or emotional release.

Today’s hipster intellectuals reject Aristotle. Instead, they embrace a philosophy variously called “poststructuralism“, “postmodernism” or just plain PoMo. For PoMo’s apostles, art is a weapon of revolution. Its purpose is to mock, degrade and undermine the cherished beliefs of Western civilization. PoMo theorists call this process “deconstruction” or “subversion“.

Photographer Andres Serrano famously deconstructed Christianity in 1989 by snapping a picture of a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum showcased an image of the Virgin Mary which artist Chris Ofili had splattered with elephant dung.

Meanwhile PoMo designers have been doing to national currencies what Serrano and Ofili did to Christianity. Their first target was the Dutch guilder.

From 1964 to 1985, graphic artist Ootje Oxenaar redesigned the entire series of Dutch guilder notes on commission from the Nederlandsche Bank. Oxenaar began the project by studying banknotes from many countries. He found them all “very muddy in color“. Oxenaar later told the PBS series Nova:

“The only banknotes that really inspired me, in fact, was play money, like the Monopoly money, and that is what I think is necessary for banknotes too.”

Accordingly, Oxenaar designed the new guilders to look like play money. He sprang other tricks on the Dutch taxpayer as well. Oxenaar told a British design magazine:

“On the 1000 guilder note, it became a sport for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there. I was very proud to have my fingerprint in this note - and it’s my middle finger!”

The 100-guilder note formerly portrayed Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, a Dutch national hero who defeated French and British fleets in the 17th century. Oxenaar replaced Admiral de Ruyter with an image of a long-billed wading bird common in the Netherlands. “I changed our war criminal — the grand admiral — to a snipe“, he later quipped.

Oxenaar’s radical approach met resistance at first. But over time, he recalls, “there developed a circle of friends who believed in it… a circle of believers.” Our new five-dollar bill suggests that some U.S. Treasury designers may have joined Oxenaar’s circle.

For 67 years, no major design changes affronted the dollar’s dignity. Then the transformation began. The $100 bill was redesigned in 1996; the $50 in 1997 and 2004; the $20 in 1998 and 2003; the $10 in 2000 and 2006; and the $5 in 2000 and 2008. With each mutation, our magnificent greenbacks have been devolving, by slow but steady increments, into play money.

The $100 bill is now undergoing its second redesign in 12 years. U.S. Treasurer Anna Escobedo Cabral recently told a group of grade-school students, “The bill is still a secret, and I can’t tell you what it looks like. It will be very colorful, though!”

Since we taxpayers are footing the bill, secrecy seems inappropriate. The U.S. Treasury needs to tell us where these changes are heading.

Poe discusses his column “Walter Cronkite and the CIA“.

Poe discusses his latest book The Shadow Party, co-written with David Horowitz.

Poe discusses his column, “An Open Letter to Hillary Conservatives“, with guest host Chris Moore.

Poe discusses his latest column, “Walter Cronkite and the CIA“.

TYPE 1: The Innocent Hillarycon
The first type is the most well-meaning, but possibly the most deluded. Innocent Hillarycons view Hillary as a weaker candidate than Obama, and thus seek to help Hillary win the nomination.

They are wrong. Hillary’s weakness is an illusion. She is playing rope-a-dope with Obama. By hanging on the ropes, and taking Obama’s punches, Hillary saves her strength for the knockout punch.

Rest assured, the knockout will come. No matter how many primaries Obama wins, Hillary will beat him at the convention. Backroom intrigue is her specialty.

Hillary will bully, bribe and blackmail the superdelegates to vote for her. She will claim disqualified delegates from Michigan and Florida. She will steal state delegates through litigation. At the appointed time, Hillary’s media operatives will ambush Obama with allegations of corruption, immorality and extremism.

Hillary has powerful patrons in all the right places. She will win the nomination.

The real purpose of Hillary’s rope-a-dope is to lull Republicans into complacency. In this, she has largely succeeded.

Conservative talk radio jocks have lost interest in Hillary. On February 11, Sean Hannity suspended his “Stop Hillary Express” campaign, arguing that Obama poses a greater threat. Rush Limbaugh told listeners on February 26, “the longer Hillary can stay in this the better for us.” He urged Republicans to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary in the primaries, “to keep that party at war with itself.”

Hillary’s rope-a-dope has paralyzed conservative book publishers, none of whom are assigning Hillary exposés. They fear she will drop from the race before their books hit the shelves.

“When I get anti-Hillary proposals, I tell them, ‘Just wait and see if she becomes president,’ ’’ says Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing. Regnery’s 2004 release Unfit for Command torpedoed John Kerry’s campaign.

No Unfit for Command will dog Hillary this election season. It is too late to assign such a research-intensive book. Hillary has outmaneuvered the dirt-diggers.

TYPE 2: The Crafty Hillarycon
The second type of Hillarycon supports her for Machiavellian reasons. A Hillary presidency would teach Americans a lesson, they say. Her extremist policies would shock the nation, driving voters into the conservative camp.

Nonsense. This is a formula for suicide. As president, Hillary would liquidate conservatives, unleashing the fury of America’s counterterror apparatus against us.

Most vulnerable are volunteer groups like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which patrols the Mexican border to stop illegal crossings. Minutemen were outraged when President Bush called them “vigilantes”. But Bush never hampered their operations. President Hillary would handle them differently. She would declare the Minutemen “domestic terrorists” and send them to Gitmo for waterboarding.

If this sounds farfetched, consider the counterterror policies of the last Clinton regime. Barely a month after Bill Clinton took office, Muslim jihadists detonated a bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring thousands in February 1993. The Clintons responded by declaring war on “domestic terrorists“.

On February 28, 1993 — only two days after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — the Clintons laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told NBC on March 1 that our biggest security threat was, “Americans killing one another with guns”. Attorney General Janet Reno declared on March 13 that her number one priority would be protecting abortion clinics from terror attacks. Then came Project Megiddo, an FBI program targeting rightwing Christians.

TYPE 3: The Spiteful Hillarycon
The third type of Hillarycon supports Hillary out of spite. These are ideological purists whose hatred for President Bush has metastasized into hatred for all things Republican. Since they must vote Democrat or not vote at all, they choose Hillary, claiming she is more “conservative” than the rest.

Spiteful Hillarycons are the worst of the lot, because they are phonies. They know very well that Hillary has not a “conservative” bone in her body. But then, neither have the Spiteful Hillarycons.

What they share with Hillary is anger and vengefulness. They would gladly cast their votes for Mao Tse-Tung, if they thought it would vex President Bush. Their motives are psychological, not political.

This then is the Hillarycon agenda. It is neither a Republican agenda, nor a conservative agenda, nor a winning agenda. It is Hillary’s agenda. Surely we can do better than this.

Poe will discuss his latest column, “Walter Cronkite and the CIA“.

Posted to Poe.com, May 29, 2008, 11:56 pm ET