“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 National Bitch Hunt Is Definitely On”: Why Hillary Clinton Drives Her Enemies Crazy
Same as it ever was. Once again, according to pundits on the influential Washington, D.C. cocktail party circuit, Hillary Clinton is in deep trouble. The National Bitch Hunt is definitely on. Surely you didn’t think we could have a female presidential candidate without one?
Rolling down the highway, listening to Diane Rehm’s NPR talk show last week, I wondered if I hadn’t driven into some kind of weird political time warp.
In a sense, I had.
“Someone said the other day that Washington may now have reached the state-of-the-art point of having a cover-up without a crime,” pronounced the Washington Post. By failing to come clean, Hillary had managed “to make it appear as if the Clintons had something to hide.”
“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating,” thundered the New York Times. Hillary’s actions, the newspaper continued, “are swiftly draining away public trust in [her] integrity.”
OK, I’m teasing. Both editorials appeared over 21 years ago, in January 1994. They expressed outrage at Hillary Clinton’s decision to turn over Whitewater documents to federal investigators rather than to the press, which had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since grown too familiar in American journalism. (Interested readers are referred to Joe Conason’s and my e-book The Hunting of Hillary, available from The National Memo.)
However, by failing to roll over and bare her throat, Hillary Clinton only “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”
Another joke. That last quote was actually The Atlantic’s Molly Ball on the Diane Rehm program just last Friday. It’s the same old song, except that Ball was complaining about Hillary’s turning her email server over to investigators looking into a dispute between the State Department and the CIA about which documents should have been classified, and when.
She should have turned the gadget over six months ago, Ball opined.
Ah, but to whom? There wasn’t a State Department vs. CIA dispute back then.
No cage filled with parrots could have recited the list of familiar anti-Hillary talking points more efficiently than Rehm’s guests.
The email flap, opined the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, that she’s not one of us.”
Most Americans, she added indignantly, “don’t have access to a private email server.”
Actually, most Americans don’t know what a server is, or why the hardware is supposed to matter. Then, too, most Americans have never been Secretary of State, aren’t married to a former president, and don’t enjoy Secret Service protection at home.
Stolberg saw a perception problem too. Nobody was rude enough to ask her about the perception caused by the Times’ public editor’s conclusion that her own newspaper appeared to have an axe to grind against the Clintons after it falsely reported that the emails were the object of a criminal investigation.
Stolberg also complained that both Clintons “play by a separate set of rules, [and] that the normal standards don’t apply.”
Which normal standards? According to, yes, the New York Times: “When [Clinton] took office in 2009…the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure…There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server; it does not appear to be an option anyone had thought about.”
So why are we talking about this at all? No Secretary of State previous to Clinton had a government email account.
Bottom line: when they start talking about narratives and perceptions, these would-be insiders, they’re talking about themselves.
But leave it to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who’s written about little else lately, to sum it all up with classic wifebeater logic. Hillary’s emails, he told NPR’s audience, “remind [voters] of the things they don’t like, the secretiveness, the paranoia, the sort of distrust….And then I also think it just feeds the perception that she is a candidate of the past. Do you really want to go back to this? Yes, the Clintons bring many good things. But they also bring this sort of baggage, this stuff that always follows them.”
See, if Hillary would just quit fighting for herself and her issues, they could quit ganging up on the bitch. Meanwhile, this has to be at least the fourth time the same crowd has predicted her imminent demise, if not indictment and conviction. All based upon partisan leaks (this Trey Gowdy joker is nothing compared to Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic prosecutors) and upon presumed evidence in documents nobody’s yet seen.
From the Rose Law Firm billing records to Benghazi, it’s the same old story. Because when the evidence finally emerges, it turns out that Hillary has been diligently coloring inside the lines all along.
And that’s because she’s smarter and tougher than her enemies — the very qualities that drive them crazy.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, August 19, 2015
“Let’s Not Get Carried Away Here”: Get Ready For The Raw Lunacy Of The Media’s 2016 Debate Coverage
If you live in Washington, where herds of journalists and pundits lope across the landscape in search of political events to opine on, you’ve probably noticed a tingling in the air. Yes, Thursday night is the first primary debate of the 2016 election, when the answers to so many burning questions will come into focus.
So I want to plead with my fellow denizens of the media: Let’s not get carried away here.
I say that not because I don’t think this debate will matter, but because I fear it might matter too much. If history is any guide, a relatively small number of political junkies will actually watch the thing — after all, who in their right mind tunes into a primary debate 15 months before the election? The potential problem isn’t in what happens during the debate, but what happens after.
This debate has been the source of even more speculation than the first of previous elections, for one important reason: Not everyone gets to come. The Republican field currently contains a remarkable 17 contenders (more actually, if you count some people you’ve never heard of and who haven’t held elected office before but have declared themselves candidates). Since a debate with that many participants would barely give each of them a time to talk, Fox News decided to limit the number to 10.
By my count, there have been approximately three zillion articles and TV news stories on the question of which candidates will make the cut. And the presumption is always that if they don’t make it into that debate, then they’ll be forever consigned to second-tier status, ignored by the media as their campaigns sink even lower than they already are.
Which might well be true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s a product of choices that we in the media will make about who we pay attention to. There’s no law that says we have to ignore somebody because they didn’t appear in that first debate. (Fox will be airing a kind of consolation debate with the other seven, which is being referred to as the “kids’ table.” Unless one of them strips naked and performs a sword-swallowing act, don’t expect reporters to care much about what goes on there.)
Let’s look at the candidates who didn’t make the top-10 cutoff: Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore. One sitting governor, one sitting senator, three former governors, one former senator, and a former corporate CEO. As a liberal, the thought of any of them becoming president might fill me with dread, but you can’t say they’re not a serious group. Nor can you say they’re any less qualified than the ones who did make the top 10. Is Perry, who was governor of the country’s second-largest state for 14 years, less of a real candidate than Ben Carson, a retired doctor who has never held public office? Is Jindal, who has been an executive branch official, a member of Congress, and a governor, less of a genuine contender than Mike Huckabee, who spends most of his time these days hawking biblical cancer cures?
Choosing the candidates who will be on the stage may have been a problem with no good solution, because any means of deciding between the guy at number 10 and the guy at number 11 would seem unfair. But that’s exactly why reporters shouldn’t assign any meaning at all to the lineup of this debate.
And they ought to take as measured an approach as possible to what actually occurs during the debate itself. Debate coverage is seldom all that enlightening, and it usually has the function of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Journalists pick out one or two key moments (a screw-up, a particularly creative zinger) and say, “This is what will have an impact.” Then they proceed to replay and repeat those moments over and over, to the point where they’re all anyone remembers — and for most people, they’re all anyone ever saw. Then they say, “Candidate Smith couldn’t escape his debate gaffe when he picked his nose on camera” — and of course he couldn’t escape it, because you kept talking about it.
So by all means, let’s report on this debate, as we will on the others that will be coming up later. Let’s analyze what happened there, and try to determine what was interesting or revealing or edifying — I certainly will. But let’s try to keep it in perspective. There’s lots of time left, many other debates to come, and plenty of opportunities for these many candidates to rise and fall — so long as we let them.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, August 6, 2015
“Hillary Clinton Has Only One Real Opponent”: You Guessed It, That Leaves The News Media
In a sane world, the 2016 presidential election campaign would begin about this time next year. However, the political infotainment wing of our esteemed national news media seems intent upon starting the contest ever earlier — whether voters like it or not. TV ratings and enhanced career opportunities depend upon it.
Unfortunately, Dan Merica, a CNN producer who followed Hillary Clinton to South Carolina, appears to have mislaid the script. Instead of shouting rude questions, Merica sought out an ordinary voter Clinton had chatted up in a bake shop. What had they talked about?
As it happened, they had discussed Corinthians 13: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”
A Baptist minister, Rev. Frederick Donnie Hunt had been sitting in a Columbia, South Carolina bakery reading his Bible when Clinton stopped by. “I was impressed and glad that she knew the Scripture that I was reading and studying…,” Hunt said. “It impressed me that someone running for president has that background. It is important to me that we have a president that has some belief.”
Rev. Hunt, who voted for Obama in 2008, now plans to support Clinton. “God bless you,” he told the candidate as she got up to leave.
Make of it what you will. But if you’re like me, you learned something interesting from the CNN story. Too many like it, however, and Merica’s career in Washington could be endangered.
According to a recent “political memo” by Jason Horowitz in The New York Times, Clinton’s Democratic rivals have no realistic chance. “That leaves the news media,” he opines, “as her only real opponent so far on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination.”
Well, it does have the virtue of honesty.
To be fair, Horowitz’s point is that the press clique has grown so hostile that “it makes all the political sense in the world for Mrs. Clinton to ignore them.”
He describes scenes in which reporters, bored and angered by Clinton’s strategy of traveling around and talking with nobodies like Rev. Hunt, have treated her rare press availabilities as virtual bear-baiting exercises, shouting questions of the when-did-you-stop-looting-your-foundation? kind, questions she “obfuscated…with ease,” according to Horowitz.
He provides no examples though. Readers have to take his word for it. In this carnival-like atmosphere, he adds, “it is not clear what Mrs. Clinton gains politically from playing the freak.”
Yowza!
Prompted by reader outrage, Times public editor Margaret Sullivan expressed chagrin at her newspaper’s “sometimes-fawning, sometimes-derisive tone in stories about Mrs. Clinton,” particularly that last “startling line.”
Times editors were characteristically dismissive, arguing readers had misunderstood the author’s meaning — as if it were a T.S. Eliot poem rather than a newspaper story. Believe me, I’ve been there. No matter how dead to rights you’ve got them, they’re The New York Times, and you’re not. It’s like arguing with a bishop.
A reader comment by Paul Goode of Richmond put everything in perspective: “It’s never a good strategy to patronize readers. And don’t make it worse by peddling self-interest as a profile in courage. The Horowitz piece was not only invidious; it was a not-so-veiled threat about what Ms. Clinton can expect if she doesn’t get in line.”
“Can expect”? How Clinton handles the never-ending barrage of gossip and contumely directed against her and Bill Clinton by the Washington media clique could decide the 2016 election. The Times itself, Bob Somerby notes, has all but openly declared war, and The Washington Post isn’t far behind.
Last Sunday the Times printed a 2,200-word opus by Deborah Sontag about Bill Clinton’s appearance at a fundraiser for Czech model Petra Němcová’s Happy Hearts Fund; the piece must have set a world record for fact-free insinuation.
A one-time Sports Illustrated cover girl, Němcová started her charity, which supports Third World kindergartens, after a near-death experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Clinton spoke at Němcová’s event in exchange for a $500,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation, which was to be spent on a joint project building schools in Haiti.
Since Němcová doubtless looks a lot better in a bathing suit than anybody in the Times’ Washington bureau, you can probably guess what the insinuations were. Sontag even found a Columbia professor who pronounced the event “distasteful,” without saying why.
Forgetting about Ronald Reagan’s $2 million speaking fees, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus (a Hillary Clinton fan, she claims) nevertheless uses the Yiddish word chazer to describe her. “It means ‘pig,’” she explains, “but has a specific connotation of piggishness and gluttony. This is a chronic affliction of the Clintons.”
This is what Clinton is up against. Her opponents could call for abolishing Social Security and appointing Jim Bob Duggar to the Supreme Court, and the character assassination would never end. Everybody knows the script: “Hillary’s what my sainted mother would have called a false article, insincere, untrustworthy, out for herself and nobody else. She thinks she’s better than you.”
Anyway, people always say they hate this stuff, but then they pass it on.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 3, 2014
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