Stephen Colbert, perhaps the nation’s most skillful satirist of news as entertainment, is fed up with fake news – especially in the wake of the Pizzagate hoax that resulted in a shooting incident at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. He quotes Pope Francis comparing “media that…spread fake news to…people who have a morbid fascination with excrement.”
Noting that among the “uninformed gullible people” who appeared to be taken in by the Pizzagate hoax were Michael Flynn, the retired general nominated as Donald Trump’s national security adviser. That may not be the right job for “a guy who spreads this bullshit.”
Thanks to a Wikileaks email, conspiracy kooks like Alex Jones have come after Colbert as well. Gently but firmly, the Late Show host schools that fulminating impresario of idiocy. He concludes with a pointed message for Jones, Wikileaks, and all of the “subReddit sub-geniuses.”.
While many news organizations and websites checked the utterances of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in real time and after their final debate on Wednesday night — finding her more accurate than him by an order of magnitude — nobody checked moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News Channel.
Secretary Clinton, during your 2009 Senate confirmation hearing, you promised to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest with your dealing with the Clinton Foundation while you were Secretary of State. But emails show that donors got special access to you, those seeking grants for Haiti relief were considered separately from non-donors, and some of those donors got contracts – government contracts, taxpayer money. Can you really say that you kept your pledge to that Senate committee and why isn’t what happened and what went on between you and the Clinton Foundation, why isn’t what Mr. Trump calls “pay to play”?
Nearly everything the Fox anchor said in framing that question was wrong.
There is no evidence that Clinton Foundation donors “got special access” to her at the State Department, as the debunking of the Associated Press “big story” on that subject proved. Nor is there any evidence that “donors seeking grants for Haiti were considered separately from non-donors.? And his claim that “some of those donors got contracts – government contracts, taxpayer money” is likewise damning but incorrect.
To understand the context for Wallace’s false charge, it is useful to know what Bill Clinton was doing in Haiti both before and after the 2010 earthquake, a story I recount in Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton. The short version is that in 2009, the United Nations asked him to serve as the Secretary-General’s special envoy to Haiti, an exceptionally poor country that had already suffered gravely from devastating hurricanes.
Immediately after the January 2010 earthquake, Clinton agreed to take on another post as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, working with the Haitian government and international donors. (He did so against the advice of his top aides.) The Clinton Global Initiative was very active in Haiti by then as well.
So in the aftermath of the earthquake, it was not surprising that State Department officials who knew about his deep involvement in Haiti would pay close attention to his friends and associates, several of whom were already working on projects there. Those relationships are reflected in the emails that formed the basis of sensational false charges, spread by the Republican National Committee — and for Wallace’s question.
Contrary to the RNC press release, the notion that any Friend of Bill (or Hillary) got “taxpayer money” because they had donated to the Clinton Foundation is entirely untrue. When Mike Pence made the same accusations, using far more inflammatory language, both Politifact and Factcheck.org investigated the claims — and both found Pence’s assertions to be false.
The truth is simpler and somewhat more uplifting: Several Clinton friends, mentioned in State Department email traffic, participated robustly in the post-earthquake relief effort. Among them was Denis O’Brien, a billionaire telecom entrepreneur whose contributions included $10 million to rebuild the iconic Iron Market in Port-au-Prince; another was Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, an executive who spent an untold amount to help restore electric power to the beleaguered island. Neither of them received a dime in “taxpayer money” and to date there is no evidence that any other Clinton friend or donor did, either.
So contrary to Mike Pence, there was no “pay to play” in Haiti. For Pence to lie about the Clinton Foundation is unsurprising; this was not the first time and it probably won’t be the last. He and his sources at the RNC perpetrated a vile slur on decent people who sought to help relieve human suffering.
Now Pence is clearly deficient in both conscience and intelligence. (So is the RNC leadership.) But Wallace should know better and do better. He ought to correct himself and apologize.
Meanwhile, the efforts of the Clinton Foundation, its allies, and the Clinton Global Intitiative’s Haiti Action Network will continue. Because that’s what they do.
Late on the afternoon of September 21 — almost exactly eleven years after Bill Clinton inaugurated the annual Clinton Global Initiative conferences in New York City — the former president offered closing remarks there for the very last time. Having watched this innovative organization grow from a casual idea into a formidable entity credited for delivering quality health care, clean water, modern education, disaster relief, and other essential benefits to millions of people around the world, he told its members and supporters gathered in a midtown hotel ballroom that “CGI has worked out better than I ever dreamed.”
It was understandable and probably wise for Clinton to declare victory this year, after profoundly changing the mindset and practice of modern philanthropy. But even as John Lennon’s “Imagine” filled the room, it was impossible to ignore another aspect of CGI’s conclusion — the angry, exaggerated, and almost entirely inaccurate attacks on CGI from political adversaries of Bill and Hillary Clinton, bristling with accusations of “corruption” and favoritism.”
Such shrill assaults were never heard until Hillary Clinton became the favored candidate to succeed Barack Obama in the White House. Over the years since CGI began, in fact, its membership and operations were resolutely non-partisan, with the participation of many Republicans and independents who shared the desire to do some good in the world. Republican businessmen like John Chambers of Cisco Systems joined CGI, provided financial support, and undertook the “commitments to action” that were at the heart of its mission. Republican politicians like John McCain, Mitt Romney, and even Carly Fiorina came to the annual conference and offered high praise for its work.
But that was then — and now, with Hillary Clinton as the historic nominee of the Democratic Party, what Republicans once lauded as a font of good works is denounced as a sewer of venality. While scarcely a word of the criticism is true, that doesn’t matter as much as the opportunity to smear the Clintons for political advantage. The most illuminating example was a widely-publicized press release that falsely depicted a 2005 CGI “commitment” by Bahrain’s crown prince as a bribe to sway the Secretary of State in 2010. Like so many other slanders surrounding the Clintons’ philanthropy, that “exposé” from the right-wing claque called Judicial Watch was a clumsy fraud, yet damaged reputations anyway.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton are accustomed to such attacks after a quarter-century under the national spotlight. He has occasionally observed that “politics ain’t beanbag.” But the vicious attacks on the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative don’t only injure those two battle-hardened politicians. The collateral damage includes many decent, hardworking people who have toiled for years on foundation and CGI projects, including thousands of volunteers, whose pride in helping humanity has been turned to ashes by this sustained propaganda campaign.
Pouring abuse on people who do hard work to save lives is vile — and as James Carville said recently, “Somebody is going to hell for this.”
If there is a just God, Carville is surely right. While the liars and slanderers contemplate eternal damnation, the rest of the American people — and indeed, people around the world — ought to learn something about what the Clinton Foundation and in particular the Clinton Global Initiative have actually achieved during the past decade or so.
Much of the story is told, from the beginning, in my new book Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, in which I try to apportion credit to at least a few of the many people who have worked with him over the years. Two years ago, on CGI’s tenth anniversary, the data-processing giant Palantir released a study of its commitments that reached some startling conclusions — and that report is very much worth reading on the foundation website. That website provides detailed information on many of the individual commitments undertaken by the nonprofits, corporations, trade unions, and universities that have joined with CGI — such as Procter & Gamble’s massive project that has delivered billions of gallons of potable water to families in the developing world.
Not everything tried by CGI members has succeeded, as Clinton and his staff are quick to acknowledge. But as he said at the end, at least they got caught trying to improve the world. They deserve to be thanked and congratulated rather than shamed.
That is much more than anyone can say for their mean-spirited and mendacious critics.
For those with shorter attention spans, this brief video that preceded Clinton’s final CGI address is uplifting and instructive, if frankly promotional — and showcases a few of the individuals who nobly assisted in that organization’s work.
IMAGE: Former U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in New York, September 29, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were kind enough to host a discussion of my new book, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton. But as the discussion got a bit hot, among the subjects that came up was Joe’s “inventive” theory about the Algerian government’s donation to Haitian relief via the Clinton Foundation in 2010, which he elaborated during the publicity rollout for Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash. After I departed the set this morning, Scarborough continued to vent his displeasure with me. The following excerpt from pages 435-426 may suggest why he was so irritated that he would attack me when I was no longer present to defend myself and my work — and it certainly shows why his verbal indictment of the Clinton Foundation was so wrong:
Journalists who had paid only fleeting attention to the foundation’s work over more than a decade proclaimed their concern about its finances, transparency, and efficiency.
Commentators with very little knowledge of any of the foundation’s programs, still unable to distinguish the Clinton Global Initiative from the Clinton Health Access Initiative, confidently denounced the entire operation as dubious. Others glancingly recognized the good achieved by the foundation before moving on to denounce the Clintons’ “greed.” And media stars who had eagerly participated in Clinton Global Initiative events, broadcasting gushy interviews with Bill Clinton, suddenly voiced angry suspicions, unproven accusations, and inventive theories.
On April 27, for example, Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, held forth about a 2010 donation to the Clinton Foundation from the government of Algeria, which had been earmarked for Haiti relief. That donation mistakenly went unreported as a pass- through, because it never accrued to the foundation balance sheet.
But to Scarborough, who had conducted a very friendly interview with Clinton from a set at CGI in September 2010, the Algerian money smacked of corruption. He had a theory, too: Algeria’s government wanted to be taken off the State Department’s list of nations that support terrorism.
“I think it was Algeria, maybe, that had given a donation that went unreported at a time when they wanted to be taken off of the terror list in the State Department,” he mused. “They write the check, they get taken off the terror list. . . . At the same time, and then it goes un- reported by the Clinton Foundation. . . . Is there a quid pro quo there? I don’t know, that’s really hard to tell.” Scarborough continued in that vein for several minutes.
The facts were considerably less exciting. Algeria had never been on the State Department’s terror list, which only included four nations; in fact, the Algerian government routinely fought terrorists within its borders and had long been a valued ally of the United States against terrorist organizations operating in North Africa.
Not at all chastened by this blunder, however, Scarborough continued to savage the Clintons the following morning when he interviewed Peter Schweizer. Having once represented a Florida congressional district, Scarborough compared the Clintons unfavorably to several former congressional colleagues and a recent governor of Virginia who all had been convicted of bribery. The proven criminal behavior of the elected officials, he insisted, “pales in comparison to [what is in] this book.”
Much of the most damning material in Clinton Cash, however, turned out to be either factually inaccurate, melodramatically exaggerated, or both. Within weeks after publication, major media outlets reported significant errors discovered in its pages.
, in which I try to apportion credit to at least a few of the many people who have worked with him over the years. Two years ago, on CGI’s tenth anniversary, the data-processing giant Palantir 