Sunday, May 11, 2008


Bunker Hillary

I've tried not to go after Hillary Clinton too much, first because it would be tiresomely biased, and next because this isn't an anti-Clinton blog per se; in terms of political analysis, it's more an extended musing on whether or not I should move my family to Vancouver, Ireland, or Argentina. I do not wonder alone; last week, Lord Wife walked up to me out of the blue and said, "If he (John McCain) wins, we're leaving, right?" This would seem to be an extreme option, but it's only an inconvenient one requiring close attention to a barometer. At best, the US faces some daunting challenges over the next few years; metaphorically, there are hangovers, and there are liver diseases. This country faces both, and "moments of clarity" are shortly in order.

Deep-background articles like the one below by Michael Crowley, published in the wonkish New Republic last June, confirmed what vectors the country would steer for with the Clintons conning the helm again. It also explains much about reporters' motivations, first in handling that family with kid gloves, and now with dirks:
On June 1, The New York Times published a front-page article titled, ONE PLACE WHERE OBAMA GOES ELBOW TO ELBOW. The feature detailed Barack Obama's love for pickup basketball, his jersey-tugging style, even the time he hit a long game-winning shot after getting fouled.

The Obama camp clearly welcomed the humanizing glimpse at Obama's life; his rivals, probably not so much. In an ordinary campaign, that might have been it. But this is no ordinary campaign--not when Hillary Clinton is a candidate. And so, the Clinton team let Times reporter Patrick Healy, who covers the Hillary beat, know about their "annoyance" with the story, as Healy later put it.

If grumbling about a basketball story seems excessive, it's also typical of the Clinton media machine. Reporters who have covered the hyper-vigilant campaign say that no detail or editorial spin is too minor to draw a rebuke. Even seasoned political journalists describe reporting on Hillary as a torturous experience. Though few dare offer specifics for the record--"They're too smart," one furtively confides. "They'll figure out who I am"--privately, they recount excruciating battles to secure basic facts. Innocent queries are met with deep suspicion. Only surgically precise questioning yields relevant answers. Hillary's aides don't hesitate to use access as a blunt instrument, as when they killed off a negative GQ story on the campaign by threatening to stop cooperating with a separate Bill Clinton story the magazine had in the works. Reporters' jabs and errors are long remembered, and no hour is too odd for an angry phone call. Clinton aides are especially swift to bypass reporters and complain to top editors. "They're frightening!" says one reporter who has covered Clinton. "They don't see [reporting] as a healthy part of the process. They view this as a ruthless kill-or-be-killed game."

Despite all the grumbling, however, the press has showered Hillary with strikingly positive coverage. "It's one of the few times I've seen journalists respect someone for beating the hell out of them," says a veteran Democratic media operative. The media has paved a smooth road for signature campaign moments like Hillary's campaign launch and her health care plan rollout and has dutifully advanced campaign-promoted themes like Hillary's "experience" and expertise in military affairs. This is all the more striking in light of the press's past treatment of Clinton--particularly during her husband's White House years--including endless stories about her personal ethics, frostiness, and alleged Lady Macbeth persona.

It's enough to make you suspect that breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy. And, if that sounds familiar, it may be because the Clinton machine, say reporters and pro-Hillary Democrats, is emulating nothing less than the model of the Bush White House, which has treated the press with thinly veiled contempt and minimal cooperation.
Continue reading here.

3 comments:

Naj said...

"Hillary Clinton will drag her rival Barack Obama into the muddiest dirt, conceivable and inconceivable, (as editorials from the New York Times to the Boston Globe to the Financial Times have recognised and warned her of) if she has to. And if she is not to be the Democratic nominee, then she will make sure that the Republican presumptive nominee, Senator McCain, is the next president of the United States: this is how criminally driven she is to preside over the most deadly military machinery in human history.

She has flaunted her being a women (and career opportunists like the Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, or racist fools like Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro have gathered around her) the way O. J. Simpson flaunted his being black, and she intends to be the beneficiary of a sustained history of patriarchy and misogyny in the United States in the way that O. J. Simpson become a beneficiary of a history of bone-deep racism in the United States and got away with murder.

Clinton will do far more than that. She promises (without blinking an eye) "to totally obliterate" more than seventy million human beings -- women, men, young, old, infants and toddlers -- if she has to in order to be the new face of American imperialism. With that one phrase she puts on the record that behind her clean-cut hairdo and makeup lurks the criminal mind of a mass murderer. The key question in Pennsylvania was for Hillary Clinton to present herself as a national security president, and, as she has repeatedly said on her campaign trail, she and Senator McCain have a record on "national security" (a code-name for endorsing American global warmongering), while Senator Obama has no such record, and all he has is a speech he gave against the Iraq war.

If she has to equate Barack Obama with Osama bin Laden (and Wolf Blitzer of CNN, echoing the Islamophobic racism of the country, has already paved the way for her to do so), then she will. She will do ANYTHING (absolutely anything -- what can be worse than promising to blow more than seventy million human beings to smithereens?) to get to the Oval Office. In his absolutely worst moments of using scare tactics in both domestic and foreign affairs George W. Bush (or even Ronald Reagan before him) did not degenerate so low, to such pathological fear-mongering, as Hillary Clinton has in this campaign." from the link in earlier posts :) ... yes I am obsessing about this Thug of a woman! I prefer McCain over this monster; and if that means you will move to Vancouver, even so better! But with Hillary, one needs to move from earth!

MarcLord said...

Wow, you got on a roll there, Naj. Are you a professor or an educator? (No, really.) It must be very upsetting when someone talks about nuking one's country.

You're right, though. Vancouver isn't far enough away, even if we do like it there. ;-)

Naj said...

Hamid Dabashi is, in this instance.

I do educate, but not on politics actually! :)