The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: drudge report
Wiki Fiction: Why Is Julian Assange Pushing Right-Wing Conspiracy Claims?

Wiki Fiction: Why Is Julian Assange Pushing Right-Wing Conspiracy Claims?

Among the most distasteful features of this election cycle is the adoption of right-wing propaganda themes — including moldy material from decades ago — by ostensibly progressive activists and publications. In their zeal to bring down Hillary Clinton, elements of the left have mimicked the right to promote “scandals” that were decisively disproved when Bill Clinton was president.

Despite the strenuous efforts of Nixon dirty trickster Roger J. Stone and his ilk, however, the attempted recycling of old garbage on behalf of Donald Trump has resulted only in a big dumpster fire (and a surge in book sales to the same rubes who bought all those similar volumes of bilge during the ‘90s).

Undiscouraged, these fanatical fabulists have come up with a new and wild accusation, blatantly echoing the discredited “Clinton death list” and the old Vince Foster mania. And now, to help promote their latest canard, they have acquired a prominent new ally.

From conspiracy websites to Fox News, wing-nut outlets have been spreading the insinuation that Seth Rich — a young Democratic National Committee employee shot during an apparent early morning street crime incident on July 10 in Washington, D.C. — may have been murdered for political reasons, with indignant fingers pointing at Hillary Clinton. Conspiracy websites suggested that he was an FBI informant or a potential witness against her in a (non-existent) criminal proceeding.

Those baseless speculations at first were quarantined within the right-wing fever swamps — along with birtherism and the notion that President Obama is an agent of ISIS — on sites like WorldNetDaily and the Drudge Report.

But in recent days, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has intervened to promote a more elaborate conspiracy. Offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of Rich’s killer, Assange clearly suggested that the young DNC staffer might have been the source of the hacked emails that embarrassed Democrats during their convention. (This suggestion also exculpated Russian intelligence of any responsibility for the DNC hack.) The pleas of Rich’s anguished family — who asked those “politicizing” his murder to desist — didn’t dissuade Assange. He wanted publicity for this sham and knew how to get it. Fox News has been running with the story ever since.

There is no evidence whatsoever, of course, that Rich’s tragic murder was anything other than the result of an attempted street robbery, still under investigation by the police — as various news outlets and fact-checking sites have explained in copious detail. But in the environment created by Trump and Stone, facts be damned. Smearing the Clintons is business as usual for right-wing media outlets, which exploited Foster’s tragic 1993 suicide in precisely the same way.

Yet Assange was long presumed to be different. He has been lionized by many on the left, and praised as well by news organizations and government reformers, as a force for public accuracy and penetrating journalism. Now he is encouraging conspiracy-mongers without regard to truth or decency. The pertinent question is why.

An Australian citizen, Assange has made no effort to conceal his animus against Clinton, which is hardly surprising. She has deplored Wikileaks’ releases of US diplomatic cables for harming American diplomacy and endangering Afghan citizens who opposed the Taliban, among other offenses. On the Wikileaks Twitter feed and in television interviews, he has branded her a warmonger and worse.

What is more curious, given Assange’s professed ideology, is his apparent alliance with Donald Trump — whose xenophobic, authoritarian, and racist tendencies might be expected to repel him. To be sure, Assange has disparaged Trump and Clinton both as “horrific,” in a deceptive gesture toward neutrality.

As The Intercept recently noted, the daily Wikileaks Twitter feed controlled by Assange reads “more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.” Like his longtime allies in the Kremlin, his attitude toward Trump seems far friendlier. And Roger Stone said this week that he and Assange have been in contact to discuss an “October Surprise” designed to damage the Clinton campaign.

The troubling truth is that Assange has trafficked before with nasty figures on the far right, especially in Europe and Australia. His attraction to those elements casts a different light on the current Trump tropism of Wikileaks. With his brazen attempt to manipulate an American presidential election, in tandem with the Russian oligarchy and the American right, he has drifted a long way from the progressive and transparent spirit in which Wikileaks first introduced itself to the world.

If Assange possesses relevant information about Clinton — or Trump — then he should release it immediately for proper reporting and verification. But if the Seth Rich hoax is how he now means improve democratic discourse, then his forthcoming “revelations” should be received with the utmost skepticism.

How George W. Bush Made It Possible for Donald Trump To Wreck the GOP

How George W. Bush Made It Possible for Donald Trump To Wreck the GOP

If the 2016 GOP primary is a long meltdown, Saturday night was when the core breached and the damage became catastrophic.

Sure, the damage that Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about Mexicans, Muslims, the disabled, women, and anyone who doesn’t call him a genius was probably already irreversible. But in that two-hour debate, the billion-dollar baby found the cracks in the Republican coalition and began fracking away.

“I will tell you. They lied,” said Trump when asked about George W. Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War, as Jeb Bush stood a few feet away. “And they said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.”

This was like Code Pink in full anti-war fury, calling out a Bush brother to his face. Trump also praised Planned Parenthood, noting that abortions are only a tiny fraction of what it does, and rebuking Ted Cruz: “You are the single biggest liar, you’re probably worse than Jeb Bush.”

Then he mentioned the one indisputable fact you’re never, ever supposed to point out as a Republican: George W. Bush was president on 9/11.

The only way he could go any further would be to actually throw a shoe at a Bush.

The crowd booed him several times but the online poll at the Drudge Report — the sewer into which all that is conservative online drains and flows — showed this:

Screen Shot 2016-02-14 at 9.58.06 AMDr

 

“If [his debate performance] doesn’t backfire, then it will be official; nothing can stop him,” GOP strategist Curt Anderson said.

Um. Yeah.

The tribalism of the GOP — along with massive support from vested donors who depend on Republicans to make the richest ever richer — has kept the party together despite its undeniable failures. Trump is proving he can stomp on half the tribe and still win, violating the rule that you’re never supposed to mention Bush failures where you eat.

Republicans are finally figuring out that their party isn’t their party. Decades of identity politics built on resentment and loss have created a moveable beast ready to follow anyone fearless enough to savage their opponents and promise a restoration of lost status.

George W. Bush is a victim of this mob mentality because Jeb is calling on his brother for backup. But more than any living Republican, W. — or the machine around W. — figured out how to channel identity politics into political power.

One fortunate son paved the way for another.

Trumpism is all about braggadocio and the use of power for its own sake. W. Bushism proceeded with the same mentality, while adhering to the pre-Trump etiquette of only hinting his true intentions with heavily coded language.

With a veneer of respectability and a pseudo-aristocratic pedigree, Bush definitely differed from Trump in style. He wasn’t willing to swing wildly in public and he had an innate sense of legacy that drove him to woo the fastest growing group of new voters, Latinos, rather than using them as scapegoats for America’s ills.

Instead, Bush’s policies did the wild swinging for him — and the damage he did to America and the Republican Party is finally becoming clear with the emergence of Donald Trump.

Trump seems ahistorical with his disconnection from reality and his willingness to invent facts that serve his narrative, of an America in decline that only he can save. But his closest antecedent is the Bush/Cheney administration

From his campaign built on lying about who would benefit most from his tax cuts to claiming a mandate from an election he lost to passing those surplus-draining tax cuts, Bush’s willingness to ignore precedent and reality was evident long before the Iraq War.

While Bush deserves credit for visiting a mosque and calling for tolerance in the days after 9/11, his administration’s relentless drive for war in Iraq was only possible by exploiting America’s worst fears, creating a culture of endless war that has seen us bomb more than a half dozen Muslim countries since 2001.

With Republicans finally debating whether the Iraq War was an act of outright deception or just complete incompetence, the idea that the facts can be trimmed to fit a presidential agenda wasn’t just politics as usual for the Bush Administration. It was the result a philosophy that embraced the art of intentional deception — a right-wing response to a world without a countervailing superpower.

‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush aide later identified as Karl Rove told author Ron Suskind. “And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

For decades, the right has been building what historian Rick Perlstein calls “The Long Con.” But only during the Bush era did that confidence game become apocalyptic — just as the national unity that followed 9/11 was charred by the insanity of the Iraq War.

While most of America sees the Bush Administration as a failure, the party’s biggest donors experienced its massive transfer of the wealth and its regulatory elimination (which sped climate change and ushered in the Great Recession) as tremendous spoils of victory.

After decades of right-wing conspiring to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the high bench delivered Citizens United and the decimation of nearly all campaign finance laws. That decision encouraged Republican billionaires to step in and create their own shadow party. The party establishment was left powerless in the face of an actual billionaire donor stepping into the fray, ready to burn everything down — whenever it might suit his fancy.

From the increasing abandonment of reality during the Bush era, a straight line can be drawn to the complete denial of climate science, the absolute abandonment of normal political order to obstruct Barack Obama, and now, the rise of Trump.

The party has actively shrugged off the constraints of reality in the name of power. And today they confront a skillful, reckless interloper who is even better at that than they are.

Did Hillary Clinton Try To Silence Juanita Broaddrick? She Told NBC News That ‘Nobody’ Ever Did

Did Hillary Clinton Try To Silence Juanita Broaddrick? She Told NBC News That ‘Nobody’ Ever Did

As the presidential campaign unfolds, the Republican right and its assiduous enablers in the mainstream media seem determined to transform Hillary Clinton from a victim of her husband’s personal transgressions, whether real or alleged, into some kind of perpetrator.

Most such accusations against the former Secretary of State are vague at best; many are specious, fabricated political propaganda. But there is one highly specific claim against her lodged by Juanita Broaddrick, the Arkansas nursing home owner who has said that Bill Clinton raped her almost 40 years ago – and that Hillary Clinton sought to intimidate her against speaking out only weeks after that alleged assault.

In recent days Broaddrick — an avowed supporter of Donald Trump – has been attacking the Democratic presidential candidate on Breitbart.com and other right-wing media outlets. Last week she posted the claim that “Hillary tried to silence me” about the alleged rape on her Twitter account.

But as with all of Broaddrick’s sensational charges, it is hard to know what to believe about that accusation because she has also said — and perhaps sworn — precisely the opposite.

Of all the sex-based stories that have surfaced about Bill Clinton over the past 25 years, Broaddrick’s charge of a violent, felonious assault in the spring of 1978 was especially perplexing. In 1997, she gave a sworn statement to lawyers representing Paula Jones insisting that the incident never occurred. Several months later, in April 1998, under a grant of immunity from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, she insisted that it had indeed happened.

With all the resources at his disposal, including a corps of FBI agents and private investigators, Starr’s ultimate findings about the Broaddrick matter were “inconclusive.” He forwarded Broaddrick’s deposition under seal to Congress while impeachment proceedings were under way, in hopes of damaging Clinton, but he never sought to include this unambiguously impeachable offense in his official brief against the president.

Still, Starr’s apparent ambivalence didn’t dissuade Broaddrick from taking her story public. Nearly a year after she gave her testimony to the independent counsel, she appeared on NBC News Dateline for an interview with correspondent Lisa Myers.

On video, Broaddrick tearfully described her alleged encounter with Clinton, sought to explain why she had denied being raped for almost 20 years, and – in a moment that is now relevant again – affirmed that nobody had ever tried to intimidate her, when Myers asked why she had never publicly discussed the alleged incident.

From the Dateline transcript of February 24, 1999:

Lisa Myers: Did Bill Clinton or anyone near him ever threaten you, try to intimidate you, do anything to keep you silent?

Juanita Broaddrick: No.

Myers: This has been strictly your choice.

Broaddrick: Yes.

Several months later, in August 1999, Broaddrick told the Drudge Report about an encounter with Hillary Clinton at a Clinton campaign rally in her hometown, only weeks after the alleged rape. According to Broaddrick, Hillary came up to her, took her hand, and thanked her for “everything you do for Bill.” Hillary held on to her hand tightly, according to Broaddrick, and repeated the phrase, “everything you do for Bill.”

In 2003, around the time that Hillary Clinton’s memoir Living History was published, Broaddrick appeared on Fox News Channel with Sean Hannity to repeat that same story, with even more chilling overtones:

[Hillary] made her way just as quick as she could to me….I almost got nauseous when she came over to me. And she came over to me, took ahold of my hand and said “I’ve heard so much about you, I’ve been dying to meet you. I just want you to know how much that Bill and I appreciate what you do for him.” And I said thank you and started to walk away.

And this little soft-spoken – pardon me for the phrase, this dowdy woman, who seemed very unassertive – took ahold of my hand and squeezed it, and said, “Do you understand, everything that you do.”

With Hannity, Broaddrick added: “I could have passed out at that moment. And I got my hand from hers and I left…She held onto my hand and she said, do you understand? Everything that you do. And cold chills ran up my spine at that moment. That’s the first time I became afraid of that woman.”

Lisa Myers says that Broaddrick also told her about the Hillary encounter at the Clinton re-election event. But if so, that part of the interview never aired on NBC and Myers did not respond to an email inquiry about it.

Leaving aside the sinister spin, this anecdote raises a nagging journalistic question: Why did NBC air videotape of Broaddrick saying that neither Bill Clinton nor anybody “near him” – a phrase that clearly would have included his wife – had ever threatened, intimidated, or done anything to “silence” her, if she told them the opposite about Hillary Clinton?

A second nagging question is whether Broaddrick ever told Starr’s investigators about Hillary’s alleged attempt to intimidate her. Having received a grant of immunity against prosecution for perjury, did she tell them that Hillary – also a target of Starr’s investigation – had tried to “silence” her? Or did she tell the Office of Independent Counsel — as she later said on NBC — that nobody had ever done so?

The next person to interview her might ask.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens to her introduction at a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, United States, January 5, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young

How ‘The New York Times’ Bungled Its ‘Big’ Clinton Email Story

How ‘The New York Times’ Bungled Its ‘Big’ Clinton Email Story

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan seems surprised that the paper’s latest story on Hillary Clinton’s emails — sensational, wrong, leak based, and badly bungled — is now a significant journalistic debacle. Maybe she really is surprised, but there is in fact nothing startling about this embarrassing episode.

In a long post, headlined “A Clinton Story Fraught With Inaccuracies: How It Happened and What Next?” Sullivan criticizes the Times editors’ rush to print the July 23 story, which in its first iteration reported that Clinton is the subject of a “criminal referral” to the Justice Department by two inspectors general. In fact, the referral wasn’t “criminal,” the target isn’t Clinton, and the accusation that she emailed classified information is highly exaggerated.

Sullivan explains all those details quite adequately, if far too late. As she ruefully notes, it isn’t possible to put a story like that “back in the bottle” once it has begun to circulate “through the entire news system.” Not only was the original story unfair, she adds, but the editors’ subsequent failure to correct its mistakes in a timely and transparent manner made the resulting “mess” much worse, “damaging…the Times’ reputation for accuracy.”

Yet while hyping her exhaustive examination of this giant flub, Sullivan lets the Times editors and reporters off a bit too easily, allowing them to blame their anonymous sources and even to claim that the errors “may have been unavoidable.” What she fails to do, as usual, is to examine the deeper bias infecting Times coverage of Hillary and Bill Clinton — a problem that in various manifestations dates back well over two decades.

(For historical context, amusing background, and contemporary commentary on this issue, don’t miss our new e-book, The Hunting Of Hillary – available free of charge, for a limited time.)

In the paper’s ongoing coverage of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email practices as Secretary of State – and a related investigation by the House Select Committee on Benghazi – the pattern of slanted coverage deserves closer scrutiny by the paper’s editors, including Sullivan.

Those “anonymous sources” Sullivan briefly deplores are lurking among the members and staff of that committee’s Republican majority – a fact she teases when noting that initial “tips” about the non-existent criminal referral came from “Capitol Hill.” For reasons best known to reporter Michael S. Schmidt and his editors, committee chairman Trey Gowdy and his fellow “tipsters” get special treatment in the Times, while their Democratic critics are mostly ignored.

It is a pattern wearily familiar to anyone who observed Kenneth Starr’s taxpayer-financed inquisition against the Clintons. Starr always got sweet treatment from the reporters who relied upon leaks from him — and his politicized, drawn-out investigations of non-existent “crimes” provides a precise analogy to Gowdy’s phony, wholly partisan Benghazi probe.

After Sidney Blumenthal gave a deposition to the Benghazi committee behind closed doors, he emerged to deliver a public statement, which the Times barely mentioned (unlike many other news outlets). Was that because he criticized “reckless” repetition of inaccurate leaks from the committee, a remark clearly aimed at the Times?

The paper went on to report further leaks from Gowdy’s committee about Blumenthal’s testimony, without response from his attorney James Cole (although Schmidt didn’t hesitate to troll Cole on the eve of Blumenthal’s appearance on Capitol Hill). Nor did the paper report that Cole sent several letters to Gowdy, demanding that the committee release Blumenthal’s testimony in full, rather than leaking it in piecemeal drips designed to defame both Blumenthal and Clinton.

Similarly, the Times has given short shrift to statements from Democrats on the Benghazi committee, notably its ranking minority member Elijah Cummings, Jr. and Adam Schiff – both of whom have challenged Gowdy to release Blumenthal’s testimony and stop the majority’s pernicious, unethical leaking. The chief beneficiary of those leaks are Schmidt and the Times, whose editors haven’t hesitated to celebrate its Clinton coverage, despite a deepening credibility gap.

That editorial braggadocio erupted two months ago when Sullivan asked Carolyn Ryan, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, whose personal hostility to Clinton is widely known in the capital, to respond to reader concerns about the paper’s campaign reporting.

“We’ve had extraordinary and world-beating coverage,” said Ryan — who went on to highlight “praise” that she boasted the Times has earned this year from the likes of Matt Drudge, proprietor of the Drudge Report. Yes, the Drudge Report. Is a blurb on Drudge the standard by which we are now to judge the New York Times? Somewhere the paper’s late, great journalists are whirling in their graves at warp speed.

P.S. Even when the Times publishes a story that is entirely fair to Clinton – as it surely does, of course – the subtext can indicate inherent bias. To take a recent example, in a valuable July 25 article exposing the myriad ways that presidential candidates game the federal campaign finance disclosure system – which they evidently do by assigning expenses illegitimately to gubernatorial and other political committees – the Times noted, many paragraphs down, that one candidate has adopted a “conservative” approach to these practices. In other words, said presidential candidate didn’t cheat like so many of the others (who happen to be Republicans).

That honest politician, who spent her own money and didn’t game the system, was Hillary Clinton. Now given the negative impression of her so often emphasized by Times correspondents and columnists, the fact that the paper’s reporters could find no violation of federal spending rules by her campaign may have merited more than two short paragraphs buried in a lengthy article.

Still further down, the same story describes some of Jeb Bush’s various campaign finance scams and prevarications, noting that his conduct has provoked the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that monitors campaign finance ethics, to file complaints against him with the Justice Department. Don’t wait for any headlines about that “referral” in the paper of record.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States, July 17, 2015. REUTERS/Jim Young