Tilting at Windmills: Hillary's billing; media ignorance; mountaintop removal; the Army's art specialist; the President and the nun.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Humor, anecdotes, analysis - politics and current events - Column

This item is dedicated to Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal. Their conspiracy theories may not be as crazy as they seemed.

Consider David Bossie, Dan Burton's chief investigator, who was recently fired for his role in editing the Webster Hubbell tapes. Here's the background of objectivity he brought to that assignment: He started out with Citizens United, which Amy Waldman described in these pages in a May 1996 article as "an anti-Clinton interest group" that has "done more to shape media coverage of Whitewater than anyone else in Washington or Arkansas." From there he went to a job that a Citizens United fund-raising letter described this way: "Our top investigator, David Bossie, is on the inside directing the probe as Special Assistant to U.S. Sen. Lauch Faircloth on the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee." Faircloth, you will recall, is the senator who persuaded Judge David Sentelle to drop Robert Fiske and appoint Ken Starr in his place, later rewarding Sentelle with a job for his wife on the senator's staff.

The Tobacco industry front group recently ran an ad attacking the McCain bill's tax on cigarettes. The tag line reads, "It's Not About Kids, It's About Money!" This certainly captures the tobacco industry's guiding principle: We don't care about kids, we care about money.

A few liberals have been confused by the argument that the cigarette tax will fall most heavily on the poor. What's wrong with that if it reduces the number of cigarettes they smoke or if the cost keeps kids from taking up cigarettes in the first place?

What one knows of history inspires doubt about history. If you were there it's sometimes hard to recognize the version of events that the historians give us. An example -- see the review on page 48 of this issue -- is the impression that people now seem to have that there was a cover-up of the fact that FDR's legs were paralyzed. What I remember is that everyone knew he couldn't walk unaided. Although he was not photographed in a wheelchair, he was also not shown walking or even standing without the assistance of an aide's arm, or something else, like a cane or a railing. Usually there was both the arm and the something else. He drove a Ford that we were told was specially equipped with hand controls. Furthermore, in the '30s polio was known as infantile paralysis. And because it was a major health problem -- this was before Salk and Sabin -- most people knew one or more victims of the disease. There was no mystery. Paralysis meant paralysis. FDR's birthday was an occasion for dances held throughout the country and sponsored by the March of Dimes with a slogan that went something like "Dance So They Can Walk."

In 1937, my father took me to the White House. There was a reception for presidential I electors, of whom he was one. As we reached the receiving line we saw Mrs. Roosevelt but not the president. When we asked about him, we were told he had been there in his wheelchair but had started to tire and had been taken away. This was not a small, exclusive party. There were more than 500 presidential electors plus their spouses and lots of kids like me. So FDR's paralysis was hardly a secret. Later on, in the 1940s, the White House was guilty of secrecy. They concealed the deteriorating cardiovascular condition that was to lead to FDR's death. It is possible that public knowledge of his condition could have affected the results at both the 1944 conventions and the election.

There are three national rating services that evaluate charities. Two approve any charity that spends at least 60 percent of its donations on the people it is supposed to help. The third only requires 50 percent. This strikes me as a remarkable revelation of how much we've come to accept charities that devote disproportionate sums to fund-raising and executive salaries and perks. The Salvation Army offers a contrast by which the others should be judged. It spends 86 cents of every dollar helping people.

"We're returning to the economy of the '50s and '60s -- a remarkable...