Hillary was/is an easy target, being the first woman to get as far as she has… But until R WOMEN are ‘ready’ for a female President - it isn’t going to happen. I really think this is the quiet part…
I understand this but am concerned that if we wait for Rs to come around it won't happen. It's Nelson Mandela's quote:"It always seems impossible until it's done."
There are currently 9 women governors. Of those, four are from R states and 2 from purple states. Of the other three at least 2 have heavy pockets of red (but cities overwhelm their numbers.)
Someone please write the definitive book about why the press decided - starting in 1992 - that the Clintons were not their kind of people. That seems to be the underlying theme of the way the press treated them from day one.
I'd argue it goes back farther, to at least Carter. But the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle and social media combined with the mainstreaming of libertarianism and Goldwater conservatism has made it exponentially worse and impacted these journalists. I don't believe they are as "liberal" as they are presumed (and accused) to be.
Right! Remember when Carter went on the air and took on the oil industry and told us we needed to stop our insatiable appetite for oil? The press excoriated him. Carter was so ahead of the curve regarding global warming. The press didn't see it that way.
Those books have already been published. They were ignored by the mainstream “liberal” media who won’t stand for criticism of themselves. Read Gene Lyons’s “Fools for Scandal” and the later “Hunting of the President” co-authored by Lyons and Joe Conason. Lyons has lived in Arkansas for years and has written a lot about how the media looked down on Southerners as low class. He also wrote a lot about how the national political media were completely bamboozled by political operatives in Arkansas who were using dishonest smear tactics long known to the people of that state.
It struck me recently that Jonathan Alter’s recent bio of Carter “His Very Best” which details Carter’s impressive accomplishments as president was also largely ignored by the media despite the fact that Alter is one of their own. I am convinced the reason they chose to ignore his book is that it is an implicit criticism of them because it contradicts their narrative that Carter was failed president but a great ex-president. In fact I heard Alter say in an interview that that had been his own belief about Carter and that he was surprised to find just how many important policies were put in place by him.
Add in Hillary's own memoir =What Happened= and Michael D'Antonio's =The Hunting of Hillary.= This has been blatantly obvious for decades, and it's going to take a scholar on the level of Robert Caro to sort it all out in twenty or so years.
Sally Quinn was the queen of DC society. All the top journalists and politicians wanted to be invited to her soirées. I once read that David Ignatius said he and his wife were thrilled to get their first invite because Sally and hubby Ben Bradlee were the DC Kool Kids wannabes “Bogie and Bacall”. The age difference was intentional. Miss Sally set out to seduce Bradlee, her much older married boss, when she was a cub reporter at the Post. She started by sending him anonymous memos which succeeded in getting him to have an affair with here. This was publicly known because Bradlee had written about it in his memoir yet Quinn and her inner circle were all appalled by Clinton’s dalliance with Monica. It can’t be more hypocritical than that!
David Broder, the august “Dean of Washington Journalists” snarkily complained that “He (Clinton) came in and he trashed the place” adding “ and it’s not his place”! Clearly Sally’s crowd think DC belongs to them, not to the American people and the president they chose to sent there.
This Guardian article from that time is a great description of their snobbery and narcissism. (The only thing it gets wrong is that Clinton went to Yale for law school, not Georgetown which was where he got his undergrad degree. )
Whatever happened to the Watergate-era Washington Post?
Somehow, American journalism's shining moment has been reduced to a hunting trophy on the wall on top of the fireplace, which the host uses as a conversation piece to entertain the guests.
You know things have changed when Bob Woodward has become an insider in the power circles. His first book about Bush — “Bush at War” — was a fawning portrait of Bush’s handling of the 9-11 crisis and his push for an unnecessary war. Even worse than that Woodward kept the fact that a top administration official had told him that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. As if that wasn’t bad enough Woodward “…..made the media rounds minimizing the scandal as "laughable," “an accident,” “nothing to it” and denigrating Fitzgerald as “disgraceful” and “junkyard dog,” never once noting mentioning he'd been on the receiving end of a leak about Plame.”
After it had become undeniable that the Bush administration had screwed up royally by going into Iraq and then badly mishandling the aftermath Woodward did a 180 and wrote a second book that was highly critical of them.
Robert Reich actually wrote an op-ed in the Guardian criticizing journalists who become overly friendly with the powerful people in government & business that they've forgotten their job holding the rich & powerful to account.
Thanks for reminding me about that article. Here is the link for anyone who is interested. I personally agree with Reich that “acceptance by the powerful is psychologically seductive” to journalists. I do understand their need to have good sources is bound to present conflicts for them but there is no excuse for pulling your punches because you want to be accepted into the club of the powerful.
The other sources of bias that he describes — false equivalence, preference for the status quo and failing to cover options to policy choices are worth reading about too.
Sorry, I can't stomach the gossipy misogyny in your comment. It wasn't necessary. The subject here is supposed to be the press' treatment of Trump's document theft, not the treatment of the Clintons 30-plus years ago.
Sorry, but the OP is 100% correct. It was common knowledge at the time that Sally Quinn was pissed that Hillary Clinton declined to be taken under her wing and turned into a nice little DC hostess and never forgave her. Quinn herself made a career of "fluffing up men" (see Nora Ephron's account from either Crazy Salad or Scribble Scribble) and deliberately broke up Ben Bradlee's marriage to get to the top, and she still has never once apologized or even acknowledged that her feud with Hillary Clinton has had such disastrous results.
So take your "gossipy misogyny" and throw it down a manhole. You may not like it, but that is what happened, and whinging will not change it.
Facts are not gossip which is why I included links. The is nothing misogynist about telling the truth about what powerful people say and do. In the situation I described in my comment the prejudice was from the elite DC crowd and was directed towards both Bill and Hillary and implicitly people from the South.
What's really wild is that the Clintons were both the kind of educated elite that's normally welcome in DC society, plus Hillary was from an upper middle class Midwestern background.
Here is one article that references Bradlee and Quinn’s affair but the details about it — which were reported at the time — are in Bradlee’s own memoir. The fact come straight from him.
By the way Eric B. posted this in response that agrees with another comment in this discussions about the media hatred for the Clintons dating back to 1992;
“yes it’s been the defining press feature for 25 yrs”
‘Toxic Double Standard’ is also Eric’s subhead… tracing that dynamic in the Clinton history can’t hurt. If It involves DC f*ck stories (because that was the gotcha on Bill) - well then so be it. Put everyone under the microscope from that era, right? (The DC establishment at the time didn’t give a rat’s-SS that that ‘private’ incident was between consenting adults…).
One reason out of many, I’m sure: The DC press does not like outsiders. The Clintons, and the Carters before them, were considered too trashy to mingle with proper DC society, which the press considers themselves members of. Not everyone is allowed to be part of their incestuous club.
Nor does the DC press like politicians who have been around for years, which helped explain the dislike for Hillary and is a factor in Biden not receiving credit for his achievements.
The thing that irks me - and this comment applies to some of the other replies I got - that the press gets away with this crap without having to be questioned themselves about it by like everyone. I don't mean you ask a question and then they just turn their back. I mean telling them, "Don't turn your f_cking back on me and answer my question."
Mehdi Hasan tries this - keep asking til they answer… (Strangely, a very progressive friend of mine thought Mehdi was ‘being mean’ to the deflector)… discouraging.
My recollection at the time was that the Greatest Generation saw the Clintons as the rise of the Boomers and were threatened by losing that grasp on power. My parents went off the deep end with the ascendency of the Clintons.
Boomers also didn't like them; lots of Boomer journos were jealous of Clinton's success at early age. i.e. they thought they were smarter than he was so how did he end up in WH?
Look, I know how smart Bill is, because I know exactly the background he came from. He is the only president that had a life that was like mine, and to a scary degree. Like Bill, I spent my formative years living in the boonies of the westernmost South (he in Arkansas; I in Texas, but literally down the road from Hope). Like Bill, my mother had bad taste in men, and was an RN who went to anesthesia school to better her prospects in life. Like Bill, I lived with my grandparents, including having them raise me entirely when my mother was away at anesthesia school. Hell, he has the same birthday as my son, and Chelsea's is close to mine. How's THAT for life similarity?
Anyway, he came from NOTHING. I know he did, because it's what I came from. He had to work super-hard at everything, and where did it take him? To Georgetown University (this is where our lives diverge--as a "white trash" girl, few teachers encouraged or supported me when I showed any hint of intelligence. Far--far--from it). To Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. And to Yale Law.
Guys from podunk Arkansas and working-class families don't become Rhodes scholars or attend Yale Law if they aren't incredibly smart. "Smarter than anyone else in the room" smart. And that's the problem: He was far smarter than the Boomers (or most other generations) were or ever could be, but they couldn't believe some white trash Arkansas boy could be that smart.
Worse, the Boomers were jealous because he showed them what pulling himself up by his own bootstraps REALLY looked like. They knew that, despite every advantage handed to them, they had frittered away their lives with petty BS, while he had overcome every barrier to do something incredible with his.
That's why they hated him. He put a lie to their worthless, over-privileged lives, and they knew it.
Worse, he wasn't especially threatened by his wife having a career, keeping her birth name, and being the main breadwinner for a few years. That was intolerable.
As a non-American, I've observed there's a certain group of people in your country who don't like being told what to do by people more intelligent than them.
However, this certain group of people proudly flaunts their ignorance for the rest of the world to see while not realizing they're being laughed at for their blatant stupidity.
Although, there are people who actually graduated from institutions of higher learning who can be just as ignorant & stupid (whether deliberate or not is a subject of debate).
Wow. So much for being self-made. Incredible backlash… you’d think in this country- above all others - there’d be (at least) a grudging respect. Good grief - what do you strive for then??? The US needs a come-to-jesus moment here :/
I think that’s more plausible as Hillary was born and raised in Chicago… The white trash thing is an excuse/reach. I think they were vilified because they COULD HAVE ACTUALLY MADE A DIFFERENCE. Bill is smart AND charismatic as h-LL.. He could relate to ‘too many’ people for comfort, likely:) And she simply ‘had to be stopped’ :/
That might be true although my Republican parents and some other parents I knew who were also Republicans had no problem with Clinton.
However the DC power people who had their knives out for the Clintons were significantly younger than the WW II generation. Sally Quinn, born in 1941, was a younger member of the “Silent Generation”. Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Newt and others were even younger than Quinn — all baby boomers like me, close in age to the Clintons.
Paul, that is an interesting comment. I had been living in the DC area since the early 1970s after having grown up in Columbus Ohio and was a subscriber to The Washington Post when the Clintons came into office. The Post back then had the glamor of being a great newspaper with Watergate and all and with a reputation among conservatives as being ultraliberal. What I noticed when the Clintons took over was how critical the Post was of them. What I eventually concluded was that the Post, which was run in those days by old money and staff firmly ensconced in the power structure, was that the Clintons were not "one of them." They were viewed as outsiders from "The South." In those days many in the DC area still felt slighted by being viewed as less sophisticated than other big cities and I think that carried over into how the Post treated the Clintons editorially. I still have to chuckle whenever I read conservative criticism of the Post as being part of a so-called "Eastern liberal establishment."
They must hate the way New Yorkers pretty much think of every place else. I agree that there is a certain chauvinistic attitude from DC society of which the press considers itself a part.
I've come to the conclusion that Trump will be with us until the day he leaves planet earth for good. He will never face justice, not while we have an MSM so frightened to dig into his misdeeds. Not while we have a DOJ too frightened to follow the law when clearly there is so much evidence. How many days ago did the Jan 6 Committee send the Mark Meadows contempt of Congress charge to the DOJ? What have we heard from Garland and company? Crickets! Steve Bannon is still on the air threatening revenge even after being indicted. Something is so drastically wrong in our government and our media. It all points to too many with money and power who want more and who are no longer interested in democracy. Imagine and alternate universe where Hillary won the election. How different things might have been. This is all very bad for my blood pressure.
The defense will, of course, be that the But Her Emails obsession was part of the campaign coverage. Then they’ll go right back to talking about the possibility of Trump 2024 without it ever even occurring to them that the illegal destruction of documents could be a campaign issue.
The press has been wishy-washy in covering Trump's debts and the criminal investigations into the Trump Organization. That coverage seems to have fallen silent.
I think there might be a heavy curtain of secrecy around the whole thing, but it's interesting that this curtain was drawn when Eric Trump became a person of interest. It made me realize one reason Trump has slithered away from accountability - because his kids and others have fallen on their swords for him.
We certainly have enough evidence in video to make a million campaign ads for Drump's lies and misdeeds. The real trick is to get them aired in all the right places to educate Americans.
I find it too painful to discuss media treatment of Hillary Clinton but has anyone ever considered that the “But Her Emails” crowd is on the GOP payroll? Much like the legendary “it’s time for some traffic in Fort Lee,” maybe it’s time for the IRS’s forensic accounting unit to do some investigating …
Remember the whole "vast right-wing conspiracy" flap? Hillary was right - there *was* a vast right-wing conspiracy funded by Richard Mellon Scaife - but she was called delusional at the time.
Yes, but I am trying to block it. Hillary was right, is right, will always be right and had an election stolen from her. I'm mad at the world for that.
After she became the nominee my dad went to Florida and saw about 100 people on the beach holding up signs that said they'd write in Sanders. He said that would just make it easier for Trump to win and they didn't listen. I will never understand how so many people don't get the "DANGER! DANGER!" in their brains when they see Trump that Hillary, Biden, and every non-Trump president in modern history doesn't have. I'm also thinking about how Bill Clinton wanted to push his similarities to JFK because he was young and hip but to me the most iconic part of JFK's image is the "what if/I coulda been a contender" which ended up fitting Bill's wife, Hillary, much better.
Hillary vs. the media was a sad microcosm of the way powerful white men in this country feel about women, especially independent minded, capable, smart women. They are like little boys so threatened. The MSM are already at it with Kamala Harris. They've already begun the negative story lines about her in case she becomes the younger candidate. It will be "But her emails II: the sequel".
"Emails - The Musical" will be performed every time time a Democratic woman runs for or appointed to a high office. New music added especially for Black women. I can see the trailer: "With Liberty And Jazz Hands For All!"
Merrick Garland doesn’t determine laws, he enforces them, we fervently hope. Anyone who can read can make an assessment about current laws. Ms Haberman and the entire NYT editorial staff had no problem accusing Secretary Clinton of all manner of crimes. Their credibility is non existent
As I see it, the most consequential tragedy of Merrick Garland's not being confirmed to the SCOTUS is that he would not be Attorney General today. Perhaps we would have an AG with more fire in his or her belly to realize that the clock is running out on our democracy.
I learned a long time ago that when things don't seem to make sense, it's time to step back and re-evaluate. WR suggested the possibility that some members of the media may have been bought off. It would be naive to believe that wasn't almost a given in this day and age. Another thing to consider is the likelihood that - like many politicians and public officials who tried to stand up to the Trump Mob - some media folks are just scared shitless of becoming a target of right-wing domestic terrorism. Many knowledgeable people have compared Trump to a Mafia crime boss who threatens and intimidates the people who refuse to do his bidding. So maybe the best explanation is the simplest one: plain, old-fashioned fear.
Has Trump ever done more than issue vague threats, though? The most I've seen him do is threaten to back candidates to primary the "RINOs" up for reelection who aren't kissing his ring.
It’s his followers who do the dirty work. R Congressmen are quitting because of overt threats to them and family. TFG fuels it. Remember Michael Cohen was his enforcer pre prison. Like thugs everywhere, I believe he has his ways.
I feel this is why Jan. 6, 2021 occured. He has his ways. He planned everything down to the minute, but might have gotten a bonus with those that went bonkers. I can picture him now sitting in front of a few TVs drooling and laughing while watching it unfold before his eyes while the rest of America was traumatized.
He didn't plan it. His Kraken Circle, including minions like Stone, Guliani, Eastman, etc did the planning and the dirty work. But he was informed and involved every single step of the way.
I find it interesting that you maybe think Drump didn't put in his 2 cents every chance he took. I just can't imagine that a man who said months before the election that if he lost, it would be voter fraud over and over again, and then refusing to concede based on this idea of voter fraud didn't do any planning for committing his own election fraud. I think his planning began well before the 2020 election, and he filled his network with people who had an opinion on how to overturn the election results.
Of course he would claim fraud. He said that about 2016 if he didn’t win. But he didn’t come up with any of the ideas besides ordering Barr to lock everyone up and to find evidence. All the legal maneuverings, the creation of “new electors”, contesting the state results and even the attack on the Capitol—they were his nutro circle determined to use every insane means to help keep him in power.
Well, there have been reports of Girth Vader getting confused over why the White House staffers were shocked while he was having a good time watching the violence on TV.
I read Eric's analysis and used the link to read the apologia in the WP. My reaction was that it was even worse than the manner in which Eric characterized it. I have now canceled WP along with my digital sub to NYT. This was a bridge too far.
One of my husband’s family is convinced that the Clintons have had thirty or more people murdered. She is a graduate of a well regarded university and a successful business woman and a very nice person except when it comes to politics. It’s mind boggling.
So are my relatives. Oh and they believe the Q crap that Franklin Graham rescued "hundreds" of children from tunnels underneath the Clinton Foundation...
Our Failed Political Press ™ has worn out their thesauruses and flipped through their word-of-the-day calendars coming up with new ways to avoid saying “lie,” or “liar,” and now they are stretching for “steal,” and “thief.”
The thing is, just from the professional perspective —having read the generally accepted AP Style Guide and Chicago Manual of Style (and even the elegant Strunk & White)— is that journalists are supposed to write with simplicity and clarity.
They are not following their own style guides, so this goes not just way beyond editorial development discretion, this is well beyond subverting copy editing standards.
You cannot tell me that this doesn’t come from the top. It just must.
Has nothing to do with spine. It’s his outlook. It’s quite possible he’s (witting or not) one of the stealth operatives Safire gleefully warned would change the Times and journalism from the inside.
Ashley Parker is a joke. "Frenzied"? Then why did it take the National Archives several months (since summer of 2021) of "negotiations" with Trump before they were able to get the documnts returned? If it was just a packing and moving mistake, why weren't the papers returned right away?
"To date, the D.C. press has never acknowledged its sins of 2016; made no serious attempt to grapple with what went so wrong."
Absolutely correct. But they did "try" to grapple—their shallow analysis boiled down to one point: HRC ran a terrible campaign, which is why she lost!
Not to mention the "Hillary go away" theme after the election. Quite the difference with Trump's exit (or lack of one). MAGA Maggie and the rest of the media (with a few exceptions) are as hypocritical as the GOP, which is why they are a match made in hell.
And the Clinton bashing continues. From yesterday's NY Post:
Most Democrats want Hillary Clinton investigated for any role in Russiagate scandal: poll
And here are the opening graphs:
"A surprisingly large share of Democrats wants to see Hillary Clinton investigated over her possible role in manufacturing dirt to try to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, a new poll shows.
The survey, conducted by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, polled 1,308 Americans about the mushrooming investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s alleged links to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign."
And this.
"Meanwhile, the new poll found that Americans want greater scrutiny of the Biden family, too."
Add to that the NYT's Jeremy Peters who told Brian Stelter that Dems "don't appreciate the power of Fox News." Peters is a smart guy, but is so entrenched in the bubble of the RW—after all he covers them exclusively—that this statement is just ludicrous. Either we Dems are hysterical over a fake "vast right wing conspiracy" or we are clueless about the main driver of RW BS.
Giving people you deal with as professionals childish nicknames is actually an implicit sign of disrespect. Those journalists were too stupid to realize that even though Bush had made it clear he disliked mainstream national journalists and went around them as often as he could.
I had forgotten about that. They were bologna sandwiches if my memory is correct. I would bet if Gore had served them expensive meals on the plane they would have crucified him for wasting money.
Remember when Republicans and the media accused him of living in a luxurious hotel in DC when he was a kid? The truth was it was a normal apartment building and their apartment was so small Gore and his sister shared a room. It was later replaced by the luxury hotel. They had no problem with Bush growing up in luxury, at least after his early years when his family lived in a modest ranch house in Midland. It’s only Democrats who get berated for being successful because it’s “proof”they are phonies who don’t really care about those who are not well off.
I remember Margaret Carlson on The Capitol Gang whining about the baloney sandwiches Gore served and how she gushed about Dumbya serving lobster ravioli and white wine that was so "scrumptious"...Made me sick to my f'n stomach...
That's classic bullying behavior. Washington journos are the sycophants that hang out with the bully, helping him bully other people in the hopes that he will never train his guns on them.
After every debate my husband and I—and the next day a few colleagues and I—would be dismayed that the pundits called them for W and slammed gore over every little thing. “The sighs.” “The eye rolls.” “He thinks he’s such a know it all.”
Wait, what? What kind of polls were those? Did they just poll the conservatives in South Jersey to get those results. They are laughable, "a large share of Democrats..." No way.
The Beltway buffoons have ignored the reality that if they didn't act like a bunch of crazy gold prospectors that viewed any negative Clinton story like it was paydirt, then maybe the rocky relationship with them wouldn't exist at all in the first place.
Holding the power to account is supposed to the job of the press. However, they seem to be more eager when a Democratic politician is under scrutiny compared to a Republican.
Obviously, a lot of us wonder if this double standard only exists because of the relentless attacks from the right-wing media machine that the mainstream media is "liberal", and are mouthpieces of the Democratic Party (totally untrue).
Hilary Clinton is just one of the many examples of this ugly double standard still plaguing the Beltway press and the whole American mainstream media establishment in general.
It's annoying that the right-wing media machine constantly abuses its right to free speech & expression to divide your country and hurt the quality of its journalism.
The Founders intent was that the press hold power to account. They couldn't imaging that almost 3 centuries later the press would become a billion dollar industry only interested in profit.
I have always thought it very disappointing that despite that clear intent Jefferson and Adams later used the free press to trash each other for political gain.
Two of the most prescient and terrifying films of the last twenty years have been dismissed as fun popcorn movies despite some truly chilling subtext:
- Tomorrow Never Dies, the James Bond outing where the Big Bad is a media mogul blatantly based on Rupert Murdoch who tries to start a war for ratings and market share.
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where a cabal of former Nazis and conservative white rich boys has been gaming the system since the 1940's to end democracy. Cripes, they even cast Robert Redford (who played Bob Woodward AND was the visual reference for Captain America in the 1970's and 1980's) as the villain!
A reminder of the ballad of Sally Quinn. In the 1990s, she wrote a piece in The Post about how the Clintons were just so gauche, as far as the DC establishment was concerned. She quoted a by-then senile onetime capable political reporter, David Broder, saying, "They trashed the place, and it's not their place." And two decades before, she wrote almost the same story about the Carters.
But the Reagans? Lovely people. The Bushes? Establishment. As for Orange Hitler, he was good copy or clickbait. That's all that mattered to these enemies of the people.
Indeed, it's the one thing he got right, but in reverse. They ARE the enemies of the people, but not in the way he thinks.
She and I went to the same college (Smith), albeit decades apart. I've already vowed that if I ever run into her at a Reunion I'm going to call her out on her abominable treatment of the Clintons, and the dire consequences for the country and the planet. If she doesn't like it, big whoop - it's well past time someone told her to her face.
What I still can’t figure out is why so much ink was wasted on what turned out to be a non story. How many angles can one come up with to write about a server kept at home? There was no there there, yet Cillizza found a way to write 50+ pieces about WHAT exactly? How many times can you frame the same story w/no changes even as the facts changed? Eric, another column by you exposing the hypocrisy of today’s msm. We all know what/who TFG is, an amoral, corrupt malignant narcissist but he’s treated as an amusing lark by the press. Clinton was treated like a harridan. For sure, fairness by the press, and some perspective in their writing could have resulted in the election of President HRC.
Actually Cillizza didn’t even understand the basics about issue that made him so. When Powell said he had never used his personal email account for classified communications Cillizza took that to mean that Powell had had a separate state.gov email account for that. Anyone who knew the basics about the issue would have known that state.gov was not a secure server and that it was never supposed to be used for classified communications. (Cillizza had to have known that state.gov had been hacked more than once.)
As Powell later explained there is a completely separate system he used for classified communications which requires sending and receiving messages from inside a SCIF — a “sensitive compartmented information facility”.
This article explains that and other things Cillizza got wrong about he email “scandal”
What really got to me was that Powell openly said he not kept his Sec State emails so had never turned any over as required by our FOIA law. He actually seemed proud of it to me. This is how he dismissed the issue of not turning over any emails on ABC’s This Week:
“I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files”
No one in the media cared that Powell had openly admitted breaking the law.
But I remember how the press praised Powell for just eating cheeseburgers for lunch...compared to Madeline Albright having such obscene dishes as chicken marsala...
Meanwhile the right wingnut "press" is today ballyhooing that trump claims Hillary hacked his servers and that it's "bigger than Watergate, and "Treason". In the interest of bothsidesism how long before that "trump says" item hits the beltway front page?
It's being driven by Durham (also from that Post story):
"As part of the probe involving Sussmann, Durham said in a legal filing Friday that he discovered Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a Web firm to “infiltrate’’ servers at Trump Towers and the White House to try to tie Trump to Russia."
What if Durham's "discovery" turned out to be less malicious than what was claimed in his legal filing?
Will the Beltway buffoons ignore the dud, or will they exaggerate/distort the story to pander to the right-wing conspiracy nuts & the GOP assholes?
Also, would it be hypocritical of him to announce this, but ignore the possibility that the Trump campaign also hired another Web firm to "infiltrate" the servers at Hillary Clinton's campaign office?
The fact that it was in a filing on Friday tells me something is not quite right with it. If it were really "big news" it would have been released earlier in the week with more fanfare.
The missing word in your excellent column: misogyny.
I will never stop reminding people how many of the most prominent men covering the 2016 campaign turned out to literally be sexual harassers.
And editors at prominent liberal publications.
Great point!
MISOGYNY (fify:)
Hillary was/is an easy target, being the first woman to get as far as she has… But until R WOMEN are ‘ready’ for a female President - it isn’t going to happen. I really think this is the quiet part…
I understand this but am concerned that if we wait for Rs to come around it won't happen. It's Nelson Mandela's quote:"It always seems impossible until it's done."
They aren’t the problem. If Noem is blessed by Trump they will vote for her. The left has to fall in love which is such an idiotic stance.
Not 100% sure abt that…
There are currently 9 women governors. Of those, four are from R states and 2 from purple states. Of the other three at least 2 have heavy pockets of red (but cities overwhelm their numbers.)
Someone please write the definitive book about why the press decided - starting in 1992 - that the Clintons were not their kind of people. That seems to be the underlying theme of the way the press treated them from day one.
yes it’s been the defining press feature for 25 yrs
I'd argue it goes back farther, to at least Carter. But the emergence of the 24-hour news cycle and social media combined with the mainstreaming of libertarianism and Goldwater conservatism has made it exponentially worse and impacted these journalists. I don't believe they are as "liberal" as they are presumed (and accused) to be.
Right! Remember when Carter went on the air and took on the oil industry and told us we needed to stop our insatiable appetite for oil? The press excoriated him. Carter was so ahead of the curve regarding global warming. The press didn't see it that way.
Those books have already been published. They were ignored by the mainstream “liberal” media who won’t stand for criticism of themselves. Read Gene Lyons’s “Fools for Scandal” and the later “Hunting of the President” co-authored by Lyons and Joe Conason. Lyons has lived in Arkansas for years and has written a lot about how the media looked down on Southerners as low class. He also wrote a lot about how the national political media were completely bamboozled by political operatives in Arkansas who were using dishonest smear tactics long known to the people of that state.
It struck me recently that Jonathan Alter’s recent bio of Carter “His Very Best” which details Carter’s impressive accomplishments as president was also largely ignored by the media despite the fact that Alter is one of their own. I am convinced the reason they chose to ignore his book is that it is an implicit criticism of them because it contradicts their narrative that Carter was failed president but a great ex-president. In fact I heard Alter say in an interview that that had been his own belief about Carter and that he was surprised to find just how many important policies were put in place by him.
Add in Hillary's own memoir =What Happened= and Michael D'Antonio's =The Hunting of Hillary.= This has been blatantly obvious for decades, and it's going to take a scholar on the level of Robert Caro to sort it all out in twenty or so years.
As I've posted before, Howell Raines and Sally Quinn's obsessive hatred of the Clintons seeped into ever nook and cranny of the Times and Post.
100%
Sally Quinn was the queen of DC society. All the top journalists and politicians wanted to be invited to her soirées. I once read that David Ignatius said he and his wife were thrilled to get their first invite because Sally and hubby Ben Bradlee were the DC Kool Kids wannabes “Bogie and Bacall”. The age difference was intentional. Miss Sally set out to seduce Bradlee, her much older married boss, when she was a cub reporter at the Post. She started by sending him anonymous memos which succeeded in getting him to have an affair with here. This was publicly known because Bradlee had written about it in his memoir yet Quinn and her inner circle were all appalled by Clinton’s dalliance with Monica. It can’t be more hypocritical than that!
David Broder, the august “Dean of Washington Journalists” snarkily complained that “He (Clinton) came in and he trashed the place” adding “ and it’s not his place”! Clearly Sally’s crowd think DC belongs to them, not to the American people and the president they chose to sent there.
This Guardian article from that time is a great description of their snobbery and narcissism. (The only thing it gets wrong is that Clinton went to Yale for law school, not Georgetown which was where he got his undergrad degree. )
Whatever happened to the Watergate-era Washington Post?
Somehow, American journalism's shining moment has been reduced to a hunting trophy on the wall on top of the fireplace, which the host uses as a conversation piece to entertain the guests.
You know things have changed when Bob Woodward has become an insider in the power circles. His first book about Bush — “Bush at War” — was a fawning portrait of Bush’s handling of the 9-11 crisis and his push for an unnecessary war. Even worse than that Woodward kept the fact that a top administration official had told him that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. As if that wasn’t bad enough Woodward “…..made the media rounds minimizing the scandal as "laughable," “an accident,” “nothing to it” and denigrating Fitzgerald as “disgraceful” and “junkyard dog,” never once noting mentioning he'd been on the receiving end of a leak about Plame.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/benghazi-conspiracy-theory/woodward-liberal-icon-not-exactly
After it had become undeniable that the Bush administration had screwed up royally by going into Iraq and then badly mishandling the aftermath Woodward did a 180 and wrote a second book that was highly critical of them.
Robert Reich actually wrote an op-ed in the Guardian criticizing journalists who become overly friendly with the powerful people in government & business that they've forgotten their job holding the rich & powerful to account.
Thanks for reminding me about that article. Here is the link for anyone who is interested. I personally agree with Reich that “acceptance by the powerful is psychologically seductive” to journalists. I do understand their need to have good sources is bound to present conflicts for them but there is no excuse for pulling your punches because you want to be accepted into the club of the powerful.
The other sources of bias that he describes — false equivalence, preference for the status quo and failing to cover options to policy choices are worth reading about too.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/09/whats-really-wrong-mainstream-media
David Broder once wrote he liked W for president because he seemed like a nice guy he could have a beer with. That’s exactly what we got.👀
Sorry, I can't stomach the gossipy misogyny in your comment. It wasn't necessary. The subject here is supposed to be the press' treatment of Trump's document theft, not the treatment of the Clintons 30-plus years ago.
Sorry, but the OP is 100% correct. It was common knowledge at the time that Sally Quinn was pissed that Hillary Clinton declined to be taken under her wing and turned into a nice little DC hostess and never forgave her. Quinn herself made a career of "fluffing up men" (see Nora Ephron's account from either Crazy Salad or Scribble Scribble) and deliberately broke up Ben Bradlee's marriage to get to the top, and she still has never once apologized or even acknowledged that her feud with Hillary Clinton has had such disastrous results.
So take your "gossipy misogyny" and throw it down a manhole. You may not like it, but that is what happened, and whinging will not change it.
Classy.
There was nothing classy about Sally Quinn's behavior.
Not classy, but thoroughly accurate.
Facts are not gossip which is why I included links. The is nothing misogynist about telling the truth about what powerful people say and do. In the situation I described in my comment the prejudice was from the elite DC crowd and was directed towards both Bill and Hillary and implicitly people from the South.
What's really wild is that the Clintons were both the kind of educated elite that's normally welcome in DC society, plus Hillary was from an upper middle class Midwestern background.
What links?
Oops! I thought I had included them.Here is the link to the David Broder quote:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm
Here is one article that references Bradlee and Quinn’s affair but the details about it — which were reported at the time — are in Bradlee’s own memoir. The fact come straight from him.
By the way Eric B. posted this in response that agrees with another comment in this discussions about the media hatred for the Clintons dating back to 1992;
“yes it’s been the defining press feature for 25 yrs”
‘Toxic Double Standard’ is also Eric’s subhead… tracing that dynamic in the Clinton history can’t hurt. If It involves DC f*ck stories (because that was the gotcha on Bill) - well then so be it. Put everyone under the microscope from that era, right? (The DC establishment at the time didn’t give a rat’s-SS that that ‘private’ incident was between consenting adults…).
It was an easy ‘pile-on’… sadly.
One reason out of many, I’m sure: The DC press does not like outsiders. The Clintons, and the Carters before them, were considered too trashy to mingle with proper DC society, which the press considers themselves members of. Not everyone is allowed to be part of their incestuous club.
Nor does the DC press like politicians who have been around for years, which helped explain the dislike for Hillary and is a factor in Biden not receiving credit for his achievements.
Only Democrats, though. McConnell and Grassley are walking corpses and no one is telling them to go away.
Though, BHO was a fresh face - for all the good that did him.
Also: jealousy?
She was set upon by nasty critics the moment she moved to Arkansas w/Bill and kept her maiden name. All bets have been off since….
The thing that irks me - and this comment applies to some of the other replies I got - that the press gets away with this crap without having to be questioned themselves about it by like everyone. I don't mean you ask a question and then they just turn their back. I mean telling them, "Don't turn your f_cking back on me and answer my question."
Mehdi Hasan tries this - keep asking til they answer… (Strangely, a very progressive friend of mine thought Mehdi was ‘being mean’ to the deflector)… discouraging.
He can be a bit too snarky at times but he doesn't stop asking the questions.
My recollection at the time was that the Greatest Generation saw the Clintons as the rise of the Boomers and were threatened by losing that grasp on power. My parents went off the deep end with the ascendency of the Clintons.
Boomers also didn't like them; lots of Boomer journos were jealous of Clinton's success at early age. i.e. they thought they were smarter than he was so how did he end up in WH?
Yeah. Smarter. Those fricking dolts.
Look, I know how smart Bill is, because I know exactly the background he came from. He is the only president that had a life that was like mine, and to a scary degree. Like Bill, I spent my formative years living in the boonies of the westernmost South (he in Arkansas; I in Texas, but literally down the road from Hope). Like Bill, my mother had bad taste in men, and was an RN who went to anesthesia school to better her prospects in life. Like Bill, I lived with my grandparents, including having them raise me entirely when my mother was away at anesthesia school. Hell, he has the same birthday as my son, and Chelsea's is close to mine. How's THAT for life similarity?
Anyway, he came from NOTHING. I know he did, because it's what I came from. He had to work super-hard at everything, and where did it take him? To Georgetown University (this is where our lives diverge--as a "white trash" girl, few teachers encouraged or supported me when I showed any hint of intelligence. Far--far--from it). To Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. And to Yale Law.
Guys from podunk Arkansas and working-class families don't become Rhodes scholars or attend Yale Law if they aren't incredibly smart. "Smarter than anyone else in the room" smart. And that's the problem: He was far smarter than the Boomers (or most other generations) were or ever could be, but they couldn't believe some white trash Arkansas boy could be that smart.
Worse, the Boomers were jealous because he showed them what pulling himself up by his own bootstraps REALLY looked like. They knew that, despite every advantage handed to them, they had frittered away their lives with petty BS, while he had overcome every barrier to do something incredible with his.
That's why they hated him. He put a lie to their worthless, over-privileged lives, and they knew it.
Worse, he wasn't especially threatened by his wife having a career, keeping her birth name, and being the main breadwinner for a few years. That was intolerable.
So we literally are at the point where we don’t want leaders ‘smarter’ than us - good l-rd… No wonder V -lad is eating our lunch 😖
As a non-American, I've observed there's a certain group of people in your country who don't like being told what to do by people more intelligent than them.
However, this certain group of people proudly flaunts their ignorance for the rest of the world to see while not realizing they're being laughed at for their blatant stupidity.
Although, there are people who actually graduated from institutions of higher learning who can be just as ignorant & stupid (whether deliberate or not is a subject of debate).
Wow. So much for being self-made. Incredible backlash… you’d think in this country- above all others - there’d be (at least) a grudging respect. Good grief - what do you strive for then??? The US needs a come-to-jesus moment here :/
I think that’s more plausible as Hillary was born and raised in Chicago… The white trash thing is an excuse/reach. I think they were vilified because they COULD HAVE ACTUALLY MADE A DIFFERENCE. Bill is smart AND charismatic as h-LL.. He could relate to ‘too many’ people for comfort, likely:) And she simply ‘had to be stopped’ :/
That might be true although my Republican parents and some other parents I knew who were also Republicans had no problem with Clinton.
However the DC power people who had their knives out for the Clintons were significantly younger than the WW II generation. Sally Quinn, born in 1941, was a younger member of the “Silent Generation”. Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Newt and others were even younger than Quinn — all baby boomers like me, close in age to the Clintons.
Interesting insight…
Paul, that is an interesting comment. I had been living in the DC area since the early 1970s after having grown up in Columbus Ohio and was a subscriber to The Washington Post when the Clintons came into office. The Post back then had the glamor of being a great newspaper with Watergate and all and with a reputation among conservatives as being ultraliberal. What I noticed when the Clintons took over was how critical the Post was of them. What I eventually concluded was that the Post, which was run in those days by old money and staff firmly ensconced in the power structure, was that the Clintons were not "one of them." They were viewed as outsiders from "The South." In those days many in the DC area still felt slighted by being viewed as less sophisticated than other big cities and I think that carried over into how the Post treated the Clintons editorially. I still have to chuckle whenever I read conservative criticism of the Post as being part of a so-called "Eastern liberal establishment."
They must hate the way New Yorkers pretty much think of every place else. I agree that there is a certain chauvinistic attitude from DC society of which the press considers itself a part.
I've come to the conclusion that Trump will be with us until the day he leaves planet earth for good. He will never face justice, not while we have an MSM so frightened to dig into his misdeeds. Not while we have a DOJ too frightened to follow the law when clearly there is so much evidence. How many days ago did the Jan 6 Committee send the Mark Meadows contempt of Congress charge to the DOJ? What have we heard from Garland and company? Crickets! Steve Bannon is still on the air threatening revenge even after being indicted. Something is so drastically wrong in our government and our media. It all points to too many with money and power who want more and who are no longer interested in democracy. Imagine and alternate universe where Hillary won the election. How different things might have been. This is all very bad for my blood pressure.
Take heart. This is worth a read: https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2022-02-11/bidens-loss-isnt-trumps-gain
I saw a CNN New Day report yesterday that reported about Democratic & Republican voters wanting to elect younger presidential candidates into office.
Meaning Biden and Trump aren't seen as viable presidential candidates in 2024 for their respective parties.
If he’s running I’m voting for Biden. I don’t give a damn how young a wingnut trumpian is. A Republican will never get a vote from me. NEVAH!!!!!!!
#TeamGrimReaper
The defense will, of course, be that the But Her Emails obsession was part of the campaign coverage. Then they’ll go right back to talking about the possibility of Trump 2024 without it ever even occurring to them that the illegal destruction of documents could be a campaign issue.
yes, and it’s amazing the coverage the Trump doc story is generating considering the GOP presumptive nominee
The press has been wishy-washy in covering Trump's debts and the criminal investigations into the Trump Organization. That coverage seems to have fallen silent.
Too busy looking at that empty podium instead :/
I think there might be a heavy curtain of secrecy around the whole thing, but it's interesting that this curtain was drawn when Eric Trump became a person of interest. It made me realize one reason Trump has slithered away from accountability - because his kids and others have fallen on their swords for him.
We certainly have enough evidence in video to make a million campaign ads for Drump's lies and misdeeds. The real trick is to get them aired in all the right places to educate Americans.
Timing is the key. I hope when this is all over, Jaime Harrison is the greatest show runner in the biz. I'm talking Shondaland success. #midterms22
I find it too painful to discuss media treatment of Hillary Clinton but has anyone ever considered that the “But Her Emails” crowd is on the GOP payroll? Much like the legendary “it’s time for some traffic in Fort Lee,” maybe it’s time for the IRS’s forensic accounting unit to do some investigating …
that would explain a lot
Remember the whole "vast right-wing conspiracy" flap? Hillary was right - there *was* a vast right-wing conspiracy funded by Richard Mellon Scaife - but she was called delusional at the time.
Yes, but I am trying to block it. Hillary was right, is right, will always be right and had an election stolen from her. I'm mad at the world for that.
I don't know if I'll ever get over it. She has been right about everything, from vast right wing conspiracy to deplorables.
Same. I deeply resent that Hillary was not the first woman president.
So do I. And her treatment by the media and Sanders and company rankles me to this day.
After she became the nominee my dad went to Florida and saw about 100 people on the beach holding up signs that said they'd write in Sanders. He said that would just make it easier for Trump to win and they didn't listen. I will never understand how so many people don't get the "DANGER! DANGER!" in their brains when they see Trump that Hillary, Biden, and every non-Trump president in modern history doesn't have. I'm also thinking about how Bill Clinton wanted to push his similarities to JFK because he was young and hip but to me the most iconic part of JFK's image is the "what if/I coulda been a contender" which ended up fitting Bill's wife, Hillary, much better.
Hillary vs. the media was a sad microcosm of the way powerful white men in this country feel about women, especially independent minded, capable, smart women. They are like little boys so threatened. The MSM are already at it with Kamala Harris. They've already begun the negative story lines about her in case she becomes the younger candidate. It will be "But her emails II: the sequel".
"Emails - The Musical" will be performed every time time a Democratic woman runs for or appointed to a high office. New music added especially for Black women. I can see the trailer: "With Liberty And Jazz Hands For All!"
There's no doubt in my mind.
I concur. If the Corleone's had newspaper people on the payroll, surely the RNC does 😉
The RNC or worst. Of course RNC is associated with the absolute worst so that is redundant.
Merrick Garland doesn’t determine laws, he enforces them, we fervently hope. Anyone who can read can make an assessment about current laws. Ms Haberman and the entire NYT editorial staff had no problem accusing Secretary Clinton of all manner of crimes. Their credibility is non existent
As I see it, the most consequential tragedy of Merrick Garland's not being confirmed to the SCOTUS is that he would not be Attorney General today. Perhaps we would have an AG with more fire in his or her belly to realize that the clock is running out on our democracy.
I learned a long time ago that when things don't seem to make sense, it's time to step back and re-evaluate. WR suggested the possibility that some members of the media may have been bought off. It would be naive to believe that wasn't almost a given in this day and age. Another thing to consider is the likelihood that - like many politicians and public officials who tried to stand up to the Trump Mob - some media folks are just scared shitless of becoming a target of right-wing domestic terrorism. Many knowledgeable people have compared Trump to a Mafia crime boss who threatens and intimidates the people who refuse to do his bidding. So maybe the best explanation is the simplest one: plain, old-fashioned fear.
Has Trump ever done more than issue vague threats, though? The most I've seen him do is threaten to back candidates to primary the "RINOs" up for reelection who aren't kissing his ring.
It’s his followers who do the dirty work. R Congressmen are quitting because of overt threats to them and family. TFG fuels it. Remember Michael Cohen was his enforcer pre prison. Like thugs everywhere, I believe he has his ways.
I feel this is why Jan. 6, 2021 occured. He has his ways. He planned everything down to the minute, but might have gotten a bonus with those that went bonkers. I can picture him now sitting in front of a few TVs drooling and laughing while watching it unfold before his eyes while the rest of America was traumatized.
He didn't plan it. His Kraken Circle, including minions like Stone, Guliani, Eastman, etc did the planning and the dirty work. But he was informed and involved every single step of the way.
I find it interesting that you maybe think Drump didn't put in his 2 cents every chance he took. I just can't imagine that a man who said months before the election that if he lost, it would be voter fraud over and over again, and then refusing to concede based on this idea of voter fraud didn't do any planning for committing his own election fraud. I think his planning began well before the 2020 election, and he filled his network with people who had an opinion on how to overturn the election results.
Of course he would claim fraud. He said that about 2016 if he didn’t win. But he didn’t come up with any of the ideas besides ordering Barr to lock everyone up and to find evidence. All the legal maneuverings, the creation of “new electors”, contesting the state results and even the attack on the Capitol—they were his nutro circle determined to use every insane means to help keep him in power.
Well, there have been reports of Girth Vader getting confused over why the White House staffers were shocked while he was having a good time watching the violence on TV.
I read Eric's analysis and used the link to read the apologia in the WP. My reaction was that it was even worse than the manner in which Eric characterized it. I have now canceled WP along with my digital sub to NYT. This was a bridge too far.
it’s pretty bad, agreed
You can’t really blame them. After all Hillary is a lesbian who murdered her lover Vince Foster……
By the way I prefer the term “Buttery Mails” . It fits with how incredibly ridiculous this pseudo-scandal was.
Add in the "frzazzledrip" crap which my brainwashed relatives insist is true...
One of my husband’s family is convinced that the Clintons have had thirty or more people murdered. She is a graduate of a well regarded university and a successful business woman and a very nice person except when it comes to politics. It’s mind boggling.
So are my relatives. Oh and they believe the Q crap that Franklin Graham rescued "hundreds" of children from tunnels underneath the Clinton Foundation...
Our Failed Political Press ™ has worn out their thesauruses and flipped through their word-of-the-day calendars coming up with new ways to avoid saying “lie,” or “liar,” and now they are stretching for “steal,” and “thief.”
The thing is, just from the professional perspective —having read the generally accepted AP Style Guide and Chicago Manual of Style (and even the elegant Strunk & White)— is that journalists are supposed to write with simplicity and clarity.
They are not following their own style guides, so this goes not just way beyond editorial development discretion, this is well beyond subverting copy editing standards.
You cannot tell me that this doesn’t come from the top. It just must.
At the Times it absolutely does. Baquet has made that clear. No use of the word lie. Times' readers can make up their minds is the excuse.
Funny that. Axis Maggie tweeted that Clinton staffers lied about something something regarding Clinton Foundation.
That’s a tweet, not a new story. But no surprise she would use that word with the Clintons but never with Trump. She may as well be his PR person.
Correct. She tweeted that during the 2016 campaign. After which we heard the refrain "NYT doesn't use the word lie".
Dean Baquet somehow lost both his spine & balls to direct the NYT journalists to call Penis Pumpkinhead a liar.
Dolt 45 didn't deserve the deference that is usually given to current & former presidents.
He literally & figuratively took a massive sh*t at presidential norms.
Don't assume Dean has either a backbone or balls to begin with.
Has nothing to do with spine. It’s his outlook. It’s quite possible he’s (witting or not) one of the stealth operatives Safire gleefully warned would change the Times and journalism from the inside.
Ashley Parker is a joke. "Frenzied"? Then why did it take the National Archives several months (since summer of 2021) of "negotiations" with Trump before they were able to get the documnts returned? If it was just a packing and moving mistake, why weren't the papers returned right away?
She's as bad as Axis Maggie. Which makes her Axis Ashley.
Haha- YES!
"To date, the D.C. press has never acknowledged its sins of 2016; made no serious attempt to grapple with what went so wrong."
Absolutely correct. But they did "try" to grapple—their shallow analysis boiled down to one point: HRC ran a terrible campaign, which is why she lost!
Not to mention the "Hillary go away" theme after the election. Quite the difference with Trump's exit (or lack of one). MAGA Maggie and the rest of the media (with a few exceptions) are as hypocritical as the GOP, which is why they are a match made in hell.
And the Clinton bashing continues. From yesterday's NY Post:
Most Democrats want Hillary Clinton investigated for any role in Russiagate scandal: poll
And here are the opening graphs:
"A surprisingly large share of Democrats wants to see Hillary Clinton investigated over her possible role in manufacturing dirt to try to tie Donald Trump to the Kremlin, a new poll shows.
The survey, conducted by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, polled 1,308 Americans about the mushrooming investigation by Special Counsel John Durham into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s alleged links to Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign."
And this.
"Meanwhile, the new poll found that Americans want greater scrutiny of the Biden family, too."
Add to that the NYT's Jeremy Peters who told Brian Stelter that Dems "don't appreciate the power of Fox News." Peters is a smart guy, but is so entrenched in the bubble of the RW—after all he covers them exclusively—that this statement is just ludicrous. Either we Dems are hysterical over a fake "vast right wing conspiracy" or we are clueless about the main driver of RW BS.
Oh, I think the press is blatantly jonesing for a Trump victory in 2024, and the erasure of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from politics, period.
Go back to 2000 when the press gladly lied any lie about Al Gore and endlessly kissed Dumbya's ass.
W gave them all fun nicknames and made them feel special! (I'm gagging.)
Giving people you deal with as professionals childish nicknames is actually an implicit sign of disrespect. Those journalists were too stupid to realize that even though Bush had made it clear he disliked mainstream national journalists and went around them as often as he could.
Oh, but Theodora it made them feel like they were cool in kids and part of his club! Who could resist that? PATHETIC.
Memories of how the Presstituties slammed Gore for serving sandwiches on his plane...But Dumbya served them lobster ravioli and white wine...
I had forgotten about that. They were bologna sandwiches if my memory is correct. I would bet if Gore had served them expensive meals on the plane they would have crucified him for wasting money.
Remember when Republicans and the media accused him of living in a luxurious hotel in DC when he was a kid? The truth was it was a normal apartment building and their apartment was so small Gore and his sister shared a room. It was later replaced by the luxury hotel. They had no problem with Bush growing up in luxury, at least after his early years when his family lived in a modest ranch house in Midland. It’s only Democrats who get berated for being successful because it’s “proof”they are phonies who don’t really care about those who are not well off.
I remember Margaret Carlson on The Capitol Gang whining about the baloney sandwiches Gore served and how she gushed about Dumbya serving lobster ravioli and white wine that was so "scrumptious"...Made me sick to my f'n stomach...
That's classic bullying behavior. Washington journos are the sycophants that hang out with the bully, helping him bully other people in the hopes that he will never train his guns on them.
For sure, I had a bullying boss who gave everyone nicknames out of malice.
The press lied about Gore supposedly lying. You can’t really blame them for trashing Gore. After he wasn’t as much fun to have a beer with as Dubya.
After every debate my husband and I—and the next day a few colleagues and I—would be dismayed that the pundits called them for W and slammed gore over every little thing. “The sighs.” “The eye rolls.” “He thinks he’s such a know it all.”
DITTO
Wait, what? What kind of polls were those? Did they just poll the conservatives in South Jersey to get those results. They are laughable, "a large share of Democrats..." No way.
I have no idea but they were eye rolling to me as well.
The Beltway buffoons have ignored the reality that if they didn't act like a bunch of crazy gold prospectors that viewed any negative Clinton story like it was paydirt, then maybe the rocky relationship with them wouldn't exist at all in the first place.
Holding the power to account is supposed to the job of the press. However, they seem to be more eager when a Democratic politician is under scrutiny compared to a Republican.
Obviously, a lot of us wonder if this double standard only exists because of the relentless attacks from the right-wing media machine that the mainstream media is "liberal", and are mouthpieces of the Democratic Party (totally untrue).
Hilary Clinton is just one of the many examples of this ugly double standard still plaguing the Beltway press and the whole American mainstream media establishment in general.
It's annoying that the right-wing media machine constantly abuses its right to free speech & expression to divide your country and hurt the quality of its journalism.
The Founders intent was that the press hold power to account. They couldn't imaging that almost 3 centuries later the press would become a billion dollar industry only interested in profit.
I have always thought it very disappointing that despite that clear intent Jefferson and Adams later used the free press to trash each other for political gain.
Two of the most prescient and terrifying films of the last twenty years have been dismissed as fun popcorn movies despite some truly chilling subtext:
- Tomorrow Never Dies, the James Bond outing where the Big Bad is a media mogul blatantly based on Rupert Murdoch who tries to start a war for ratings and market share.
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where a cabal of former Nazis and conservative white rich boys has been gaming the system since the 1940's to end democracy. Cripes, they even cast Robert Redford (who played Bob Woodward AND was the visual reference for Captain America in the 1970's and 1980's) as the villain!
Interesting!
A reminder of the ballad of Sally Quinn. In the 1990s, she wrote a piece in The Post about how the Clintons were just so gauche, as far as the DC establishment was concerned. She quoted a by-then senile onetime capable political reporter, David Broder, saying, "They trashed the place, and it's not their place." And two decades before, she wrote almost the same story about the Carters.
But the Reagans? Lovely people. The Bushes? Establishment. As for Orange Hitler, he was good copy or clickbait. That's all that mattered to these enemies of the people.
Indeed, it's the one thing he got right, but in reverse. They ARE the enemies of the people, but not in the way he thinks.
She and I went to the same college (Smith), albeit decades apart. I've already vowed that if I ever run into her at a Reunion I'm going to call her out on her abominable treatment of the Clintons, and the dire consequences for the country and the planet. If she doesn't like it, big whoop - it's well past time someone told her to her face.
It would be nice if it sank in. But I'm reminded of an old Hollywood Squares line.
Q: Barbra Streisand says, "I am not a star."
A: Mel Brooks: "A star, no. A Jewish planet, yes."
I already do! :)
What I still can’t figure out is why so much ink was wasted on what turned out to be a non story. How many angles can one come up with to write about a server kept at home? There was no there there, yet Cillizza found a way to write 50+ pieces about WHAT exactly? How many times can you frame the same story w/no changes even as the facts changed? Eric, another column by you exposing the hypocrisy of today’s msm. We all know what/who TFG is, an amoral, corrupt malignant narcissist but he’s treated as an amusing lark by the press. Clinton was treated like a harridan. For sure, fairness by the press, and some perspective in their writing could have resulted in the election of President HRC.
Actually Cillizza didn’t even understand the basics about issue that made him so. When Powell said he had never used his personal email account for classified communications Cillizza took that to mean that Powell had had a separate state.gov email account for that. Anyone who knew the basics about the issue would have known that state.gov was not a secure server and that it was never supposed to be used for classified communications. (Cillizza had to have known that state.gov had been hacked more than once.)
As Powell later explained there is a completely separate system he used for classified communications which requires sending and receiving messages from inside a SCIF — a “sensitive compartmented information facility”.
This article explains that and other things Cillizza got wrong about he email “scandal”
What really got to me was that Powell openly said he not kept his Sec State emails so had never turned any over as required by our FOIA law. He actually seemed proud of it to me. This is how he dismissed the issue of not turning over any emails on ABC’s This Week:
“I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files”
No one in the media cared that Powell had openly admitted breaking the law.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/colin-powell-hillary-clinton-email-state-department-115870
Double standards much?
Of course not! After all Powell is a Republican who is above the law. Which is why the Presstitutes always loved to kiss his ass.
Remember when the press wrote endlessly about Colin Powell's use of a private email server when he was Secretary of State?
I don't, either.
But I remember how the press praised Powell for just eating cheeseburgers for lunch...compared to Madeline Albright having such obscene dishes as chicken marsala...
Meanwhile the right wingnut "press" is today ballyhooing that trump claims Hillary hacked his servers and that it's "bigger than Watergate, and "Treason". In the interest of bothsidesism how long before that "trump says" item hits the beltway front page?
It's being driven by Durham (also from that Post story):
"As part of the probe involving Sussmann, Durham said in a legal filing Friday that he discovered Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid a Web firm to “infiltrate’’ servers at Trump Towers and the White House to try to tie Trump to Russia."
What if Durham's "discovery" turned out to be less malicious than what was claimed in his legal filing?
Will the Beltway buffoons ignore the dud, or will they exaggerate/distort the story to pander to the right-wing conspiracy nuts & the GOP assholes?
Also, would it be hypocritical of him to announce this, but ignore the possibility that the Trump campaign also hired another Web firm to "infiltrate" the servers at Hillary Clinton's campaign office?
More likely Durham’s “discovery” will turn out to be a bald-faced lie. The media likely will ignore that fact.
The fact that it was in a filing on Friday tells me something is not quite right with it. If it were really "big news" it would have been released earlier in the week with more fanfare.
I’m guessing Durham still needs to investigate this “discovery” further to gather any evidence it actually happened, or it’s a potential dead end.
It’s all bullpucky for Mango Mussolini. Lots of gold explainers out there.
Saw Durham's "allegation" being reported by John King on his "CNN Inside Politics" show.
Any guesses how long this will last on the weekly political news cycle?