This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

After my past two Sunday columns lambasting conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, I figured I had sufficiently beaten on the commentator who, in my mind, ruthlessly slandered a female Georgetown law student for simply testifying before a congressional committee in favor of insurance coverage for contraceptives.

But the commentaries of the past week have me Limbaugh-bashing again. Perhaps you could say that Rush is the gift that keeps on giving. Or, as Al Pacino said in "Godfather III": "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

I was dragged back to the Limbaugh theme, like flint to magnet, after he followed his limp apology for calling Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" with the outrageous claim that she was part of a conspiracy with the Obama White House to bring poor Rush down.

Limbaugh's conspiracy theory predictably was parrotted in several venues by the right-wing media, which has a habit of perpetuating a story self-serving to their cause like a group in a circle tossing a bean bag back and forth.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly found "the smoking gun" in the liberal plot: Former White House aide Anita Dunn is a partner in the public relations firm that represents Fluke.

"Aha!" chimed a jubilant O'Reilly.

Also, anonymous sources were quoted in the noise machine that House Democrats were "playing games" with the GOP leading up to the hearing featuring Fluke.

And the conservative WorldNet Daily reported that Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who it claims pushed for Fluke to testify, has worked with progressive pollster Celinda Lake.

Aha, indeed.

Many of these same players in the Fluke-Obama conspiracy claim were featured in the 2002 book, Blinded by the Right, by David Brock, who detailed a shadowy right-wing organization funded by a reclusive billionaire that paid thousands of dollars to collect stories against former President Bill Clinton and place them in media outlets connected to the organization.

And Limbaugh was in the middle of it.

Brock, who was part of that cabal before he bolted from the group and became a liberal commentator and media critic, had been a writer for the right-wing American Spectator and authored some of the most inflammatory articles of the Clinton era. One included claims of Clinton promiscuity from Arkansas Highway Patrol troopers who Brock says were paid by the anti-Clinton group and whose stories, he now says, were largely made up.

They called it the Arkansas Project, which was funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife through the American Spectator, which was spending $5,000 in fees and tips to find anti-Clinton stories from when he was governor of Arkansas.

According to Brock, it was the Arkansas Project that helped persuade Paula Jones to sue Clinton for sexual harassment. And it was the Arkansas Project that used Jones' case to "probe Clinton's consensual sex life through the deposition process, and then to question Clinton under oath about it. In other words, the Jones case had become a vehicle to create a crime where one may not have otherwise existed."

Brock further wrote that when investigators unearthed what they considered a juicy tidbit to embarrass Clinton or other Democrats, they would devise a multi-media strategy, where often they would have it break in Matt Drudge's on-line blog, "The Drudge Report," then reported more extensively in the American Spectator and turn it over to Limbaugh, who would talk about it continuously, citing as "legitimate" sources the Spectator and the Drudge report.

So when Limbaugh and his collaborators accuse others of launching a conspiracy? Well, there is a term in psychology for that. It's called "projecting." —