Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Stephen Baker and Vic Forbes had been at school together.

From Swampland, posted 20.13 Thursday March 20:

Call me naïve and idealistic, but if something good is to come out of the death of Stuart Goldstein let it be this: let the paranoid right in America shut the hell up. When the President’s tormentor, Vic Forbes, was found dead – and when every possible sign pointed to suicide – the Right immediately cried foul play. Or rather they didn’t cry; they whispered it, as invidious gossip and innuendo, hinting at it in the blogosphere and on Fox. The likes of Rick Franklin did nothing to stop such talk; on the contrary, they exploited it, allowing it to ‘alter the atmospherics’, to change the climate of opinion against Stephen Baker so that they could bring forward their spurious charges of impeachment against the President. Put simply, senior Republicans used conspiracy theories about Forbes to incubate the conditions in which they could hatch their plot to topple a legitimately elected president.

Well, let’s hope they have the decency to at least fall silent now. They have tried to paint the Baker White House as the Corleone family, murderously rubbing out its enemies. The result is that a good man – a man whose life was dedicated to public service – has been driven to his death. Stu Goldstein loved politics and could play hardball with the best of them. He loved the game. But what’s been happening in Washington these last few days is not a game. This is politics as blood sport.

So let there now be a pause, a ceasefire, while those responsible for guiding our republic take a breath. Let both sides pause and reflect. And let this be Stuart Goldstein’s legacy…

From the comments thread at Fox Forum:

Re: Stu Goldstein found dead. Lamestream media are saying conservatives should stop accusing the Baker folks of being involved in Vic Forbes’s death, as if we’re somehow responsible for Goldstein’s suicide. When I heard Goldstein had killed himself, my first reaction was, ‘Sounds like a guilty conscience’…

From Twitter, Thursday March 23:

#stuartgoldstein Maybe Baker bumped him off just like Forbes: because he knew too much…

#stuartgoldstein What if Franklin took out Goldstein, because he knew he was the 1 guy in White House who could defeat impeachment?

#stuartgoldstein I reckon Baker had Goldstein killed so that people would now suspect Republicans of murder…

Washington State, Friday March 24, 11.11 PST

Maggie was too late for the red-eye to Seattle so she left on the dawn flight the next morning. Perhaps thirty-five minutes after landing she was in a white rental car, she couldn’t tell you what make, driving south-west along I-5, the fatigue almost overwhelming her. It was cumulative now, day after day without proper sleep. Besides, she couldn’t stop thinking about Stuart. The initial shock and sadness had given way to new feelings: anger – and fear.

The President’s words on the phone the previous day came back to her: Stuart was not a quitter. He was a fighter. I just refuse to believe…

She had been all too ready to believe it, a fact that now made her slightly ashamed. She had accepted without question that Stuart Goldstein had cracked under pressure, heading to the park in the early hours to slash his wrists.

But now she wondered at the convenience of it. Baker was in desperate trouble and Stu his most trusted and capable lieutenant. If the President was right – that they were facing nothing less than an attempted coup d’état – then it was not out of the question that the enemy, whoever they might be, might see fit to kill Goldstein. After all, someone had murdered Forbes.

But that made no sense: Forbes’s death was surely designed to help Stephen Baker. Goldstein’s death could only hurt him.

On the other hand, the effect of the Forbes killing – apparently so fortuitously solving a Baker problem – had been to damage Baker, enabling his opponents to hint that he was some kind of gangster. What if that had been the objective all along? In which case, couldn’t Forbes’s killers and Goldstein’s be one and the same, bent on taking down a troublesome new president?

The notion that Stu Goldstein – vast, lumbering, cunning and often gross, but also gentle, kind and motivated only by the idealist’s desire to make the world better – could have been murdered filled Maggie with fury. She was haunted by the image of someone stalking Stu, grabbing him from behind, striking terror into a man who, thanks to his bulk and a life of brainwork unrelieved by exercise, would have been utterly defenceless. She could imagine him screaming as his wrists were cut, his blood jetting out. And then his inert body dumped in Rock Creek Park.

Maggie shook her head to stop the images coming. Who could have done such a thing to a man like Stuart Goldstein? Incomprehension turned to fear. If these men had seen an advantage in killing Stuart, wouldn’t she be the very next target? If their motive was the thwarting of Baker’s efforts to defend himself, then surely there was every reason to remove her. She and Stuart were the presidential defence team. She wondered if her conversations and texts with Stuart had been secure. They had been using the White House’s encrypted communications system. But if Stu had been murdered, it had been done professionally; and people like that would have their ways of listening, watching, following…

She checked her rear-view mirror. There was a truck behind her. But behind that? She couldn’t tell. She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel. Her hands were trembling.

Not much further to go now. Soon she would arrive in Aberdeen. Washington State was as far away from Washington, DC as you could be, on the other side of the country, the other side of the continent. The drive had been long, the landscape monotonous but, she told herself, that was all to the good. It gave her a chance to think.

She turned on the radio, trying to negotiate its buttons with her free hand. She wanted music as a distraction, but made the mistake of hitting the AM band and came across Rush Limbaugh instead.

‘ Here’s what kills me about the liberal news media, folks. This is what kills me.’ He paused, leaving two or three seconds for effect. ‘They have such a Short. Attention. Span. That’s right. They don’t pay attention. They forget to take their Ritalin or something, I don’t know. Let me give you an example. Cast your mind back just a few days ago. It was wall-to-wall Vic Forbes.’ He paused again, then fell into a sing-song delivery for the next phrase. ‘Wall to wall! You could not move for Vic Forbes. Fortyeight hours, he was all anyone wanted to talk about. Forbes on the President’s “psychiatric” episode. Forbes on the Iranian Connection. Then Forbes promises the big one.’ Another pause. ‘The BIG ONE, ladies and gentlemen. And what happens? He’s found dead and the liberal media forget what they’d been talking about twelve hours earlier. Clean forgot!’ Now he went high-pitched and effeminate, the prissy voice of the East Coast liberal. ‘ “Whoops! Where was I? I forgot!” And of course, now it’s tributes on MSNBC and in the New York Times to that great liberal, Stuart Goldstein: the heavyweight champion of interest group, Democrat identity politics. That’s who he was, my friends. And heavyweight is the right word. The guy was heavier than I am! And that’s saying something.’

He allowed himself a little laugh, one that made Maggie want to rip the radio out of the dashboard and hurl it out the window. But he was still talking.

‘You see, even I’m at it now. Changing the subject. Let’s not get distracted. That’s how they are, folks. And that’s how the liberal elite want you to be too. Forgetful. They want you to forget that Mr Forbes was about to tell us something. Well, we don’t forget on this show. Not here, no sirree. Let’s go to a call. Bloomington, Indiana, you’re on…’