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The "Freepers" turned their cyberspace coffee klatch into the liveliest, if not the biggest, right-wing Web site on the net.

But Free Republic was more than just a Web site where red-meat conservatives could interact, as opposed to merely read. Freep sponsored anti-Clinton Washington rallies. It took out newspaper ads. It gave a dinner for the congressional managers of the impeachment drive. Freep clubs sprang up in some cities. Lucianne Goldberg, the New York literary agent and catalyst of Monicagate, joined the party, and Web Wunderkind Matt Drudge helped it out with publicity and links. Free Republic became the main soundstage for the anti-Clinton bandwagon, with its "latest posts" page drawing 50,000 individual visits per day.

What a difference a year makes.

Drudge, Goldberg and several other Free Republic stars have left; visits are reportedly down to less than half what they were a year ago; Free Republic's founding guru, Jim Robinson, has been sued by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times; and a swelling number of haters have turned up the volume of death threats, gay-bashing, name-calling and conspiracy theories tying the father of Republican front-runner George W. Bush to drug-dealing by the CIA.

To be fair, Free Republic has always been a home for pugilistic far-right zealots, and its recent traffic decline is probably due to the passing of impeachment as an issue, not just dissent over the crusade against Bush. But disaffected Freep stalwarts say that in recent months Robinson "let all the Y2K, gun-nut, Jew-baiting crazies take over and flame the plain-old conservatives," in the words of Goldberg.

"Well, this is a fine kettle of fish!" wrote one Freep regular in May, echoing the angst of a score of regulars. "I leave for a few weeks to remodel my kitchen, and when I come back everything is falling apart!"

"This site has become loaded with crazies and that's a damn shame," wrote another in an abject letter of resignation, one of a steady stream of Freepers to head for the exits in May, when impeachment was long gone as an issue and an army of conspiracy-minded extremists seemed to float to the top of the message boards.

The top extremist, in the estimate of the disenchanted, is its founder, Robinson, a wheelchair-bound Navy veteran of the Vietnam War who operates the site with his son and an unpaid helper from his home in Fresno, Calif. When Robinson unleashed a windy jeremiad linking Texas Gov. Bush with alleged CIA-connected drug-running under his father, a former CIA director (1975-77), vice president (1981-89) and president of the United States (1989-93), all cyber-hell broke loose.

Untold thousands of conservatives, desperate for the front-running Republican "Dubya" to oust the Democrats from the White House, left, leaving the playing field to the loons. Sources with access to Free Republic's traffic data say visitors and page views are down by at least half from their peak a year ago.

The most prominent defectors are Drudge and Goldberg. The site was thrown into a tizzy for days after their departure in May, with hundreds of anxious posts. One regular said it was "like being in the middle of a huge dysfunctional family dispute."

"Come off it," a regular begged Goldberg, known as "Trixie" on the site. "These little explosions have happened before. This is still the best conservative Web site in existence, especially when people don't get too tired and wired to cope. This will blow over as the others have. Please stay."

But it hasn't blown over.

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