Journal fever.

• Author: Gifford, Bill
• Position: Conservative stance of Wall Street Journal editorial page

U-turns, half-truths, philosophical pirouettes, and shoddy repoiling: Is the Wall Street Journal's editorial page shell shocked or simply out of its mind?

Two weeks and a day after becoming a lame duck, George Bush was flipping through the morning's Wall Street Journal when an editorial caught his eye. Headlined "EPA's Most Wanted," it was about a man named Bill Ellen "who is about to go to prison for violating the federal government's wetlands policy."

Ellen was an engineer working on the Eastern Shore spread of Paul Tudor Jones II, the Wall Street trading whiz. In 1987, Ellen began building a 100-acre "wildlife sanctuary" on Jones' property. Since the sanctuary was to be built on wetlands, Ellen, according to the Journal, "was careful to work with officials from the Soil Conservation Service and the Army Corps of Engineers and secured 38 permits for the work."

"Then, in 1989, the federal government, eager to implement President Bush's pledge of |no net loss' of wetlands, issued a new manual redefining them." Armed with the new definition, the Corps declared Ellen's project a wetland and ordered him to stop work - which he did, according to the Journal, in February 1989. But a couple of days later, he allowed two truckloads of dirt to be dumped in a "duck pond." The feds later indicted Ellen and Jones. Jones pled guilty to filling wetlands, and paid $2 million in fines and restitution; a jury convicted Ellen, and he was sentenced to six months in jail.

"No one is safe from an overzealous government enforcement campaign that treats all things wet as equal," the Journal declared. "At a time when drug dealers and other criminals often escape with no jail time, this Vietnam combat veteran can't understand why he must go to prison over a bureaucrat's interpretation of an ambiguous congressional law." The paper called on Bush to pardon Ellen.

Disturbed by this Kafkaesque tale, Bush asked White House counsel C. Boyden Gray to review Ellen's case to see whether a pardon might be justified.

Weeks passed, but no pardon came down. The Journal published a handful of letters supporting Ellen and expressing outrage at the government's conduct. Apparently there was no space to print rebutting letters from the prosecutor, Maryland U.S. Attorney Breckenridge Willcox, or his successor, Richard Bennett.

On January 15, the Journal revisited the matter in a lead editorial titled "The Ellen Pardon," a guns-blazing broadside against federal wetlands law - all of it. Then Bush went, Clinton came, and Bill Ellen sat in jail.

A miscarriage of justice? Not exactly. What Boyden Gray had quickly discovered was that the Journal's account of Ellen's case, apparently based on conversations with his lawyers, bore only the slightest resemblance to the truth. For starters, the "sanctuary" was a hunting lodge. Ellen hadn't violated some bureaucratic "manual," but the Clean Water Act of 1972. He was convicted of filling some 86 acres of wetlands, including part of a tidal creek, something which has been illegal since the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1898. All told, Ellen had filled or altered close to 1,000 acres, though the prosecution focused on areas that were indisputably wet; the new wetlands definition wasn't even an issue.

Worse, Ellen had ignored three cut-it-out orders from the Army Corps, the first of which came in 1988, not 1989. That convinced a jury, and the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, that he certainly did know he was breaking the law. Furthermore, this was no rogue prosecution, but one that had been approved at the highest levels of Justice.

It's remarkable that the Journal would end the Reagan-Bush years on such an ignominious note. The paper's editorial page had practically set the table for the supply-side feast, and it remained a key forum for Republican policymakers and conservative intellectuals throughout Bush's term. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Journal's Jude Wanniski published column after column on supply-side theory, transforming Arthur Laffer's odd little curve from a joke of the economics world into official policy - a feat to rival William Randolph Hearst's instigation of the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Journal also midwifed Star Wars, supply-side's military counterpart.

The degree to which the Journal has shaped public policy is even more impressive when you consider that since Hearst's day, the typical editorial page has withered to an impotent nub. Back then, the editorial page embodied and expressed a newspaper's soul. It was the designated free-fire zone where scores were settled and skirmishes provoked in thunderous copy that would traumatize today's fragile sensibilities. Now, it survives as a gangrenous appendage of that dying beast, the daily newspaper. The editorial pages of even the greatest papers in the land are little more than repositories of conventional wisdom, grindstones for dull axes.

By comparison, the Journal is a geyser. As pungently conservative as its peers are blandly liberal, as combative as they are gun-shy, the Journal harks back without shame to the age of a fiercely partisan press. Its energetic scribes, many plucked from conservative college rags like The Dartmouth Review, will leave no sacred liberal cow ungored. Taking full advantage of their anonymity, they regularly drub liberals, errant and otherwise. It's probably the only newspaper in America that would urge a new president to "bomb Congress."

Supervising this Journalistic Delta House is Robert Bartley, who for 21 years has held the title of Editor, editing a page and a half of commentary plus another of arts. When he took the reins in 1972, Bartley transformed the editorial page from a sleepy purveyor of blue-chip conservatism into an aggressive, illustrious neoconservative forum. His own lack of formal economics training did not hinder him from winning a Pulitzer in 1980 for his supply-side commentary.

The page takes intellectual guidance from a board of contributors gleaming with luminaries such as Paul Craig Roberts and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; its guru and godfather is Irving Kristol. Almost all outside...