Hammer Watch: Rhino Times editor puts on his tinfoil hat

In his Under The Hammer column in this week's Rhinoceros Times (a Greensboro, NC weekly newspaper, article not online), editor John Hammer regurgitates as serious the intellectually bankrupt idea that "[P]eople who might cause problems for the Clintons have had a habit of dying in unusual circumstances."

Hammer proceeds to offer his "evidence." It requires his readers to suspend their good judgment and abandon all reason. Why Hammer perpetually expects his readers to be so naive, I don't know. It seems rather contemptuous of his audience, as if he must be thinking to himself, "My readers are dumb enough to buy this crap."

First on Hammer's list is the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Hammer writes "[W]hen a top White House official dies of a gunshot wound, you would expect there to be a full autopsy and there was not." Hammer is quite simply wrong about this. A full autopsy was performed. Doubt it? Read this exhaustive investigation into Foster's death. The investigation was conducted by Kenneth Starr, yes that Ken Starr. It concludes that Foster's death was a suicide. To believe otherwise, is to ignore the empirical evidence and assume that Clinton nemesis Starr was in on "it."

Next up, Hammer turns to the plane crash in which former Secretary of Commerce Ron Borwn died along with 34 other people. Hammer describes the crash as "bizarre," although he doesn't explain why the crash was bizarre. In truth, although Hammer incorrectly writes that the crash occurred on a "relatively clear day," the cause of the crash was an improperly executed instrument landing -- tragic, but not bizarre. Hammer reminds us that Brown had a wound in his head that looked like a gunshot wound. He fails to tell us that an examination of Brown's skull by military officials "revealed no bullet, no bone fragments, no metal fragments and, even more telling, no exit wound."

Finally, Hammer offers former White House intern Mary Mahoney who was murdered in a botched robbery. The perpetrator, who was also "accused in the shooting homicide of a security guard in 1993, the attempted murder of a police officer, and four armed robberies" confessed to Mahoney's murder, plead guilty and received a life sentence without the possibility of parole while not once attempting to mitigate his punishment by claiming to be a Clinton operative.

Hammer also incorrectly asserts that victim Mahoney was "going to go public with her story of sexual harassment at the White House." There is zero substantiation of this. Prior to the Monica Lewinsky scandal breaking, Newsweek writer Mike Isikoff hinted that a White House staffer with the initial "M" was about to talk about her affair with Clinton. The "M" was Monica, not Mahoney. Doubt it? Ask Hammer how he "knows" that Mahoney was about to go public.

Snopes has a thorough examination of the distortions, misdirection, fabrications and just plain wrong assertions that people must resort to in order to put forth, as Hammer did, these tinfoil hat conspiracy theories.

If you suspect that your readers are unwilling or incapable of critical thinking, you may think you have an audience for these kinds of conspiracies. Since that seems to be where Hammer is coming from, maybe next week he will write about People With Connections To The Bush Dynasty Who Met With Suspicious And Untimely Deaths.