Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! by Andrew Breitbart Page A

machine. I had learned all I needed to do basic HTML, and I thought,
Okay, I know what I need to know, and now I’m going to create websites for Arianna and see where it takes me.
With less than a formidable arsenal, I was about to become a website designer.
    I’d be working out of Arianna’s house in Brentwood, not far from my apartment in Santa Monica. It fit my lifestyle all the way down to the bizarre and cloistered office she provided for me, which was hidden behind a huge painting. It was like a secret panic room situated above her office, accessible only by a spiral staircase, and which itself looked just like an old English study in the board game Clue.
    The first day on the job, I went into her office and she sat me in front of her desk. She handed me a piece of paper that said on the top “Director of Research.” It had a small list of job requirements.
    I asked, “What is this?”
    She countered, “Which of these things can you do?”
    I didn’t get it. “You want me to find somebody to become your researcher?”
    “Just tell me what you can do on this list.”
    The first requirement was the ability to type. “I’m a hunt-and-pecker.”
    She said, “That’s okay.”
    Requirement two: ability to write. “Okay,” I said, “I wrote for my college paper and a couple of local entertainment magazines.”
    “Yes, darling, perfect.”
    Requirement three was the ability to edit. “Uh, I guess,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know those weird book editor symbols, but I know basic grammar.”
    At this point I was getting a little confused. I’d signed up tocreate websites for a rich, conservative columnist and speaker, an easy job, and now this was feeling like a bait-and-switch.
    But before my confusion could turn into anger, I saw requirement four: “Do you know how to use LexisNexis?”
    And it hit me between the eyes that for all of my stumbling and bumbling, I had tripped over the perfect job for an Internet information junkie. LexisNexis was the key to satiating my cravings, a database aggregating virtually every article in the modern history of media, both mainstream and obscure. For a person organizing bookmarks of every newspaper, who wanted to find every piece of information that was out there, LexisNexis was the Holy Grail. This was before Google, and you can find a lot on Google today—but even now, LexisNexis is the greatest thing in the world, and having access to it was a dream come true.
    I’d never felt so good to be duped in my life. At twenty-seven—gulp!—I felt like I might actually have the first job I wanted to keep.
    Then it got even better. Arianna next informed me that there was a story she was working on, and that the source of the story was staying in her house while she wrote the piece. The source’s name was Norma Nicolls, and she was the personal secretary to a man named M. Larry Lawrence.
    Larry Lawrence was the owner of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, and he became the top donor to Bill Clinton; he was therefore rewarded with the ambassadorship to Switzerland. From 1991 to 1996, Lawrence gave $200,000 to Democrats. At the time, the world was just finding out the list of favors the Clinton White House was paying out for high-end donors, including overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom. A cursory investigation into Lawrence’s background showed that he had some suspect business relations in Detroit. Already I was getting excited—this was fun, interesting. Thelayers of intrigue to the story involved sex, politics, and Bill Clinton, one of my personal chosen online investigative obsessions.
    When Larry Lawrence died of cancer in 1996, Bill Clinton provided him a waiver to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was the first Merchant Marine to be given this sacred honor. In the 1990s, Larry and his fourth wife, Shelia, had spent a lot of their time running around to Merchant Marine and Clinton fund-raisers, giving their money and hoping to get goodies back in