“Media Playing The Role Of Enabler”: Out Of Touch Punditry Should Get A Grip — Hillary’s Email Is Non-Story
A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story.
In fact, no one outside the chattering class — and right-wing true believers — could give a rat’s rear about this story — and there is a good reason: there is no “there” there. If someone really thinks the great “email” story — or the Benghazi investigation — are going to sink her candidacy, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.
Of course, this is not the first time that the media — with an assist from right-wing political operatives — have laid into Hillary Clinton in an attempt to create a “scandal” where there was none.
Over the weekend, syndicated columnist Gene Lyons quoted a New York Times editorial as saying:
“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating.” It argued that these actions are “swiftly draining away public trust in (her) integrity.”
That editorial actually appeared in January 1994. The Times was expressing outrage at Hillary Clinton’s turning over Whitewater documents to federal instigators rather than the press, which, as Lyons pointed out, ” had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since become all too familiar in American journalism.”
Speaking on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, the Atlantic’s Molly Ball sounded the same notes 21 years later. The email issue “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”
The Times’ Sheryl Gay Solberg added that the email issue “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, and she’s not one of us.” Really?
What might really feed a negative narrative would be the New York Times’ own story several weeks ago that falsely accused Ms. Clinton of being under criminal investigation. Which she is not and never was. The Times public editor acknowledged that the story was false and that it fed another narrative: that the New York Times had an ax to grind against the Clintons.
Of course the bottom lines of this story are simple:
At the time Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State there was no prohibition against the Secretary of State having a private email server. In fact, no Secretary of State before Ms. Clinton had a government email account.
None of the emails on the Secretary’s personal account were classified at the time they were sent or received. That is not in dispute. There is an on-going controversy between various agencies of what ought to be classified in retrospect as the material is released to the public by the State Department, but that does not change the fact that none of it was classified at the time. In fact, one of the several emails at issue actually says the word “unclassified” in the upper left hand corner and can still be accessed by the general public on the State Department web site.
Finally, no one has ever pointed to an instance where the fact that something was on her server instead of a government server had any negative consequences whatsoever.
There is no issue here, period.
And as for the Benghazi “affair,” none of the many investigations that have already been completed concerning the events surrounding the death of the American Ambassador to Libya in the Benghazi attack has found a shred of evidence that that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong whatsoever leading up to or in response to that attack.
And frankly if you ask most people about the Benghazi affair they think you’re talking about something you rub on your muscles to reduce pain.
So now Congressman Trey Gowdy, who is the Chair of the Select Committee that was set up by the Republicans in the House to once again investigate this non-scandal, has decided to investigate the non-existent issue of the Clinton email server as well — even though he acknowledges that it has nothing to do with Benghazi.
Not withstanding the lack of substance to any of these issues, people like Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post proclaim that they could be a terrible weight on her candidacy.
Who exactly are these pundits talking to? Rarely have they been so out of touch with the real American electorate. The perceptions and narratives they are discussing are the perceptions and narratives of the insider pundit and political class — not normal voters.
And the same goes for often-unnamed Clinton backers that are wringing their hands that Clinton has not yet put the email issue behind her.
No one is handed the American presidency — and that is especially true of a candidates that are not incumbent Presidents.
Every candidate faces many challenges and hurdles to getting elected — and Hillary Clinton is no different. But the email-server issue is not one of them.
Clinton’s campaign completely recognizes that it must fight for every delegate in the primaries and every vote in the general election.
In the general election, she must motivate Democratic base voters to turn out in massive numbers. She must excite new voters — especially young people and women. And she must persuade undecided voters that she will fight effectively to actually change the rules of the political and economic game so that we have economic growth that benefits every American, not just Corporate CEO’s and Wall Street Banks.
These are her real challenges — and her campaign is focused like a laser on meeting those challenges.
It’s time for her supporters to focus on those challenges as well — and for the media to resist continuing to play its role as enabler of baseless right wing attacks like the great email and Benghazi “scandals” of 2015.
By: Robert Creamer, Political Organizer, Strategist, Author; Partner Democracy Partners; The Blog, The Huffington Post, August
“The Hillary Doubters Are Wrong”: Yes, She’s Vulnerable, But She’s Still The Heavy Favorite
When it comes to Hillary Clinton and her place in the presidential primary, the political media needs to start being able to hold two ideas in mind at once. The first, and most familiar to anyone who has followed this campaign, is that Clinton is vulnerable.
Her email—and use of a private server—has grown from a scandal to a fiasco. The FBI has stepped in with an investigation to see if Clinton’s system was compromised by foreign hackers, and to see if she knowingly passed classified information—including “top secret” intelligence—through her server. Clinton is also due to face a House select committee for a public hearing on the 2012 attack on an American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Maybe she’ll perform well and avoid missteps. But she might stumble, exposing herself and her campaign to more attacks and scrutiny.
There have also been challenges on key policy questions. To the most vocal progressive activists, Clinton still needs to account for her role in the Bill Clinton White House on issues like mass incarceration, police militarization, and the drug war. As first lady, for example, she pushed the “three strikes” provision of the 1994 crime bill and supported greater prison time for offenders. “There is something wrong when a crime bill takes six years to work its way through Congress and the average criminal serves only four,” she said at the time. The same is true for her positions in the Senate, where she voted in favor of federal police funding that flowed to SWAT teams and other vectors for militarization. There’s also her economic record: As a senator from New York, she backed a 2001 bill that would become the much loathed (among liberals) 2005 bankruptcy law. And she still hasn’t acknowledged or apologized for the racially tinged rhetoric used by her campaign in the most heated moments of her 2008 race against Barack Obama.
But, again, this isn’t the whole story. There’s still that other idea about Clinton to keep in mind, even as we consider her problems and weaknesses: Clinton is winning the Democratic presidential primary, and it’s not even close.
Despite the reporting around it—which has treated her as a losing candidate—the latest Quinnipiac poll shows Clinton with a wide lead over her opponents. She wins 45 percent of the Democratic Party, to 22 percent for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and 18 percent for Vice President Joe Biden. Aggregate polls show a similar picture; in the Huffington Post Pollster average, Clinton holds 48.9 percent of the primary vote, compared with 22.5 percent for Sanders and 12.5 percent for Biden. There’s no contest.
There’s an easy and obvious rejoinder: What about 2008? Wasn’t Clinton winning at this point in that primary; wasn’t she “inevitable”? And look what happened: She lost to a popular upstart with the public behind him.
This sounds persuasive, but it doesn’t fit the facts. As writer Harry Enten notes for FiveThirtyEight, Clinton was much weaker in the previous primary than she is now. “Back in 2008,” he writes, “she was trailing in early Iowa polls. She earned only a third of the vote in early New Hampshire polls and was below 40 percent nationally.” Now, by contrast, she’s well ahead in national polls, well ahead in Iowa, and only somewhat behind in New Hampshire.
Moreover, because primaries aren’t popularity contests, the most important measure of success is party support. Barack Obama wasn’t an upstart; behind his run was the party machinery, or at least the part that didn’t want Clinton. Today, where do Democratic fundraisers stand? What do Democratic interests groups think? How will Democratic lawmakers act?
On each score, Clinton isn’t just winning—she dominates. Most fundraisers are in her corner; it’s why Biden will have a hard time raising money if he decides to run. Interest groups are still quiet, but Democratic lawmakers are overwhelmingly pro-Hillary. Clinton has more than 100 endorsements from sitting Democrats, including seven governors and 29 senators. Biden, who doesn’t appear to have decided whether to run yet, has two. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has one. Bernie Sanders has none. This is unprecedented. Not only is Clinton ahead of her previous endorsement total, according to analysis by FiveThirtyEight, but she’s racked up more endorsements of significance at this stage of the race than any nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate, ever. At this point in 1999, for instance, Al Gore had two-thirds as many endorsement points (a measure that weights senators and governors more than House representatives) as Clinton does now; at this point in 2003, John Kerry had less than one-tenth Clinton’s current support; at this point in 2007, Obama had less than one-sixth. The closest analogue to Clinton isn’t anyone in the Democratic Party—it’s George W. Bush, who had much greater endorsement support than Clinton at this stage of the 2000 Republican presidential primary and ultimately won easily, despite an early challenge from John McCain.
Of course, life is arbitrary, and Hillary’s campaign could still fall apart. It’s not hard to imagine how it might happen: The FBI investigation could lead to indictments, ending Clinton’s campaign with a court appearance. Or, she could refuse to answer any questions on her previous positions and open space for a challenger.
Then again, neither email nor crime is an impossible albatross; other candidates have had worse. George H.W. Bush had to deal with fallout from Iran-Contra, while Al Gore had Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the background. Both won their respective nominations with little difficulty. Sure, Clinton could lose. But it’s hardly a live possibility.
By: Jamelle Bouie, Slate, August 27, 2015
“Watching The Second Amendment In Action”: Setting Gun Violence Apart From Other Public Health Risks
Like many of you, no doubt, I watched the studio-produced live video of two local television journalists being murdered in Virginia yesterday pretty soon after it happened. I might have also looked at the vastly more graphic killer-generated cellphone video of the event, but chose not to. Most media outlets soon stopped posting or linking to either video before long. At TNR, Jeet Heer explains why: there was no doubt who the perp was, and thus no real reason to distribute the video.
But also at TNR, Brian Beutler thinks otherwise:
The line between informing the public and macabre gratuitousness is murky, and staying on the right side of it requires great discretion and judgment. But rather than cleanse newscasts and websites of the on-air killing, producers and editors should make it easily available to their viewers and readers, because our society unfortunately needs vivid reminders of the awesome, life-stopping power of firearms.
In an abstract sense, everyone knows guns are deadly, in the same way everyone knows cigarettes are deadly. But our political culture—the conservative faction of it, at least—sanitizes the way guns end life in a way that sets gun violence apart from other public health risks….
When a bullet pierces human flesh, that body becomes extremely ill right away, no less than when a body flies through a windshield or experiences a severe electric shock. But where government actively regulates cars and construction sites—indeed is applauded for doing so—it simultaneously takes steps to abstract guns from the harm they cause, and silence public officials who refuse to play along. Last year, dozens of senators opposed President Barack Obama’s Surgeon General nominee, Dr. Vivek Murthy, on the grounds that he described gun violence as a public health issue and, in his private capacity, had supported efforts to further regulate firearms.
Murthy was eventually confirmed, but barely, and only because Democrats had disarmed the filibuster as a means of blocking executive branch nominees.
What Beutler doesn’t mention here is that he was a gunshot victim not long ago; his was the body that became “extremely ill right away,” and he might well have died. He wrote about the incident at Salon back in 2013, mainly to rebut the idea that gun violence justified racial profiling. But his descriptions of the shock he went into and his gradual horrifying realization after surgery of the damage wrought by three bullets was unforgettable.
So this is one person who has experienced the downside of the Second Amendment rights that make America a uniquely gun-toting country and wants the rest of us to get at least a small glimpse of it as well, instead of treating the shooting of human beings with guns as an abstraction or glorifying it as the essence of liberty.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 27, 2015
“The Real Muslim American Threat? It’s Against Us”: We’ve Reached An Ugly Place In America With Anti-Muslim Sentiment
There’s a growing threat in America involving Muslims. The FBI has even recently issued a warning to alert local law enforcement about it. But our politicians and media continue to ignore it.
The threat I’m speaking of is not “radical Islam,” as the right loves to call it. Rather I’m talking about the threat of “radical Americans” who are plotting to kill Muslim Americans and to stoke the flames of hate versus Muslims in hopes that others will be inspired to do just that.
Now some may be asking “What threat against Muslim Americans?” I can fully understand that reaction, given how little our media cover plots to kill Muslims. It appears to many in the media, Muslim lives simply don’t matter.
So let me bring you up to speed on what is going in the world of “radical Americans.” Just last Friday, Glendon Scott Crawford was convicted in federal court of trying to develop a “weapon of mass destruction” to kill Muslims in his upstate New York community near Saratoga Springs. Scott, an industrial mechanic at General Electric, was constructing a “death X-ray machine” to kill Muslims because he viewed them as the “enemies of Israel,” per the indictment.
Just so it’s clear, no one has claimed that Crawford was mentally ill. He was simply a man who so despised Muslims that he wanted to use his electrical skills to kill them with radiation. He had even successfully tested, with FBI undercover agents, the remote trigger for the device. Thankfully, he will be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Do I even have to say how much media coverage we would’ve seen if a Muslim in America had been arrested plotting to use a weapon of mass destruction against Christians?
But Crawford is far from alone. A few months ago I wrote about Robert Doggart, a Tennessee Christian minister who had planned to travel to upstate New York with other men to wage, in essence, a holy war against Muslims. His plot included using assault rifles, explosives, and even a machete to cut the Muslims “to shreds.”
Doggart had also communicated with sympathetic members of militias in other Southern states. Doggart, who was arrested by the FBI days before he was planning to head to New York for reconnaissance, has been charged with solicitation to commit a civil rights violation and is facing up to 10 years in prison.
And it gets worse from there. In fact, the threat against Muslim Americans by radical Americans has escalated to the point that the FBI recently issued an alert titled “Militia Extremists Expand Target Sets To Include Muslims.” (PDF) This FBI warning notes that based on the evidence collected, it has “high confidence” that “domestic extremists” are planning violence against Muslim Americans.
The concern has reached the point to where the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) put out a press release just last week warning Muslims Americans to be especially vigilant. As CAIR noted, FBI sources indicated that militia groups have been conducting surveillance of Muslims in “diverse locations including Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Montana, New York, North and South Carolina, Utah, and Texas.”
Astoundingly, we have even seen others—all white men in the South—trying to stoke more hate against Muslims by literally fabricating terror plots and claiming it was the work of Muslims. In July, Brett Downing, a National Guard member in Georgia, claimed that he found a note on his car windshield that read: “Dear American soldier, death to you coward women child killer and all the American military. Mohammad will show no mercy on you attacks will come full force death is to come to you.”
As would be expected, this letter caused people in the community to become fearful of Muslims. However, it turned out that Downing wrote the letter himself and has now been charged with filing a false report.
And just a week ago, Jason Paul Smith, a West Virginia man, was arrested for claiming he was going to blow up the Statue of Liberty. However, when Smith called in the bomb threat, he identified himself as an ISIS terrorist named “Abdul Yasin.” (Smith is not Muslim.)
Yet these two are nothing when compared to Michael Sibley, a Georgia man and self-described “patriot” who planted a bomb in a park near his house a few months ago. In the backpack with the bomb, Sibley placed a Quran and other items he thought a Muslim would carry in the hopes of convincing the authorities that a Muslim had carried out the plot. Why? Well, he believes that “no one was paying attention to what was going on the world.”
We have alarmingly reached an ugly place in America with anti-Muslim sentiment. And while Donald Trump has not targeted Muslims with his rhetoric (at least not yet), his fear mongering will no doubt embolden others to spew hate versus various minority groups, including Muslims. And worse, this type of divisive language can inspire violence as we saw last week in Boston when two men attacked a Latino homeless man. After the assault, one of the attackers told the police: “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”
Interestingly one of the two Boston attackers had also been convicted of a hate crime for assaulting a Muslim man shortly after 9/11. Thus again proving that bigots tend to hate more than just one minority group.
I would predict we will see even more plots to kill Muslims in America or at least attempts to gin up the hate toward the Muslim community. This, of course, makes ISIS ecstatic because the terror group would use any attacks on American Muslims as proof that the West hates Islam and that Muslims should join them.
I wish I could be more optimistic, but I’m a realist. My only hope is that our media starts covering these terror plots to make it clear that the threat of “radical Americans” is very real.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, August 27, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 