Pubdate: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Copyright: 1999 Mercury Center Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Marie Cocco Note: Marie Cocco is a columnist for Newsday. RUMORS VICTIMIZE HILLARY, GEORGE W. WHAT do the frenzies over Puerto Rican terrorists and George W. Bush's youthful indiscretions have in common? All assumption, all the time. That old newsroom saw about never letting facts get in the way of a good story has roared into real life. None other than Cokie Roberts, diva of the political talk circuit, declared her astonishment at the flip-flop that had Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the end, disagreeing with President Clinton's grant of clemency to 16 Puerto Ricans convicted of terrorist-related activities in the 1970s and early 1980s. "The first lady opposing the president's call for commuting the sentences of some Puerto Rican terrorists, something we thought he was doing for her!" Roberts breathlessly announced at the height of the furor. That's the way it's gone. For weeks the media assumption -- promoted and encouraged by Republicans in New York and Washington -- has been that the so-called sudden clemency grant must have been made to help Hillary Clinton win support among Latino voters for her upcoming New York Senate campaign. And where are the facts that underlie the assumption? Nowhere. One journalist who did delve into the history of the clemency offer was Newsday's Ken Fireman, who discovered that the clemency petition had in fact been filed on the convicts' behalf back in 1993, that it was the subject of countless meetings by the White House counsel's office throughout the mid-1990s and that it finally was handed to the president for a decision only recently because former White House counsel Charles Ruff had been sidetracked by the task of handling the president's impeachment. Ruff had promised the groups supporting clemency to have a decision before his departure in August. Now, this could be complete hogwash. Just more spin from a White House that whirls incessantly. The cynicism is enticing but for the most nit-picking of matters: No one has come up with any facts to the contrary. The same forces behind the nagging that George W. Bush got a few weeks ago about whether his period of youthful irresponsibility included sniffs of the white stuff. Texas reporters and other journalists have been on the cocaine case, but none has come up with evidence Bush used it. No one has come forward claiming to have seen Bush snorting, to have snorted with him or to have sold him the stuff to snort. Yet Bush was hounded about past cocaine use until he finally stumbled all over himself trying to convince us he could pass a federal-employment background check. This set the time frame for possible past use at more than 25 years ago -- enough to shut everyone up, for now. Polls overwhelmingly show real people don't care about Bush and coke. By next November, there's bound to be more on voters' minds than a couple of dozen Puerto Ricans who have gone back to the island. In fact, those most likely to suffer long-term public disdain aren't in campaign war rooms. They're in newsrooms. - --- MAP posted-by: Thunder