Tag: maureen dowd
Rehashing Clinton And Lewinsky — As If We Need To Do That Again

Rehashing Clinton And Lewinsky — As If We Need To Do That Again

Now that President Trump has brought us peace in our time, can we all get back to stoning Bill Clinton? Because no Christian doctrine is so universally ignored among the influential tribe of Pundit-Americans as Jesus’s admonition against sexual self-righteousness: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” (John 8:7)

Leading lives of spotless moral virtue, Washington journalists have long been of one mind about the Arkansas naughty boy. So everybody got a cheap thrill when Clinton responded peevishly to a series of barbed questions about Monica Lewinsky from the Today show’s Craig Melvin.

You know, Matt Lauer’s old show. The guy with the button on his desk keeping women locked inside his office.

Nobody at NBC knew a thing.

But there’s no statute of limitations where Clinton/Lewinsky are concerned. The former president’s one-time Oval Office squeeze definitely doesn’t think so. In yet another bid to keep her celebrity martyrdom alive, Lewinsky recently wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, again lamenting how the Big Creep done her wrong.

As indeed, he did.

But can nobody close to Monica persuade her that constantly picking at a 25 year-old wound can only prevent it from healing?

After decades of defiantly insisting that her relationship with Clinton was entirely consensual, indeed passionately desired, Lewinsky writes that her eyes have been opened by the #MeToo movement: “I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege.”

Look, there’s no point re-litigating all this at this late date. But if you google “presidential kneepads,” one of the first things that comes up is a Los Angeles Times interview with the former drama teacher with whom Lewinsky had a five-year affair before heading to the White House, intent upon seducing the president.

Yes, she was in her early twenties, a “near child” according to my friend, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist John Brummett. (In which case I married a near-child six months older than me, but never mind.) Monica’s White House adventures were very far from being her first rodeo, as we say out in the boondocks. Consent? She threw herself at him thong first.

Me, I couldn’t have gotten away fast enough. Drama queens put me off. That’s one reason I bought Clinton’s cover story for the longest time. That said, none of what eventually happened would have happened if Monica hadn’t betrayed him first. She violated Rule One of adulterous love affairs: She talked.

How could a man with even a fraction of Bill Clinton’s rumored experience not see that that coming? Lewinsky talked to damn near anybody who would listen, and particularly to her false friend Linda Tripp, who proceeded to destroy Monica’s life for political purposes.

Tripp and that great American Kenneth Starr, who may have failed to notice when the Baylor University football team went on a sexual assault binge, but who tried to pressure Lewinsky into saying Clinton urged her to obstruct justice. Courageously, she refused, possibly saving the Big Creep’s presidency after first helping him damn near destroy it.

But I digress. Back to last week. Appearing on Today to promote his book The President is Missing, co-written with best-selling novelist James Patterson, Clinton found himself asked no fewer than six times in a tightly-edited segment if he didn’t think he needed to apologize privately to Monica. Oddly, the segment aired with a 1998 clip of Clinton giving a shamefaced, lip-biting apology to pretty much everybody in the world, specifically including “Monica Lewinsky and her family.”

So it was hard to know what Melvin was driving at, apart from showcasing his ability to badger an ex-president. Anyway, just like that, the old gang got back together. A ritual stoning proceeded. Indignant scribes took turns lambasting Clinton for daring to imagine he could appear on national TV without groveling about his sexual sins.

The Washington Posts Dana Milbank and Glenn Kessler, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, and, of course, the inimitable Maureen Dowd emerged as Monica Lewinsky’s champions. It was generally agreed that Clinton had paid no price for his misdeeds, and had a lot of nerve “raging” at NBC’s Melvin. Watch the clip. Do you see rage? I see mainly petulance.

Dowd hit Clinton with the ultimate insult: “Trump-level narcissism and selfishness.” Having spent decades comparing Lewinsky to the predatory Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction, mocking her weight, and lampooning her intelligence, the venerable Times columnist suddenly emerged as her champion.

Of course Clinton was foolish not to anticipate Melvin’s questions.

But should he pick up the phone, have a heart to heart with Lewinsky, and tell NBC about it?

I surely wouldn’t. Would you?

Republicans Hate Hillary Clinton (Unless They Actually Know Her)

Republicans Hate Hillary Clinton (Unless They Actually Know Her)

Dating back to Hillary Clinton’s earliest days as First Lady, the frame imposed on her by mainstream and conservative media both has been “unlikable” — a description that has mystified many people who know her.

What this framing has proved is that she is disliked by a lot of journalists and columnists, most of whom don’t know Clinton, at powerful outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the broadcast networks and cable shows.  (A clinical example is Maureen Dowd of the Times op-ed page, whose crazed animus seems based on no personal knowledge whatsoever.) To those who are familiar with Clinton, in fact, she has always seemed considerably more agreeable than the vain, bitter, superficial journalists who whine incessantly about her. But hammered in over and over again for decades, the framing stuck.

In the current electoral context, it is hard to imagine Clinton being less likable than the juvenile bigot and prevaricating braggart Donald Trump (who used to praise her quite generously, by the way, until he decided to run for president and realized that she’s the devil).

But what I’ve found truly striking about the “unlikable Hillary” narrative is how often and how bluntly it is contradicted not only by Democrats and independents, but by Republicans, too, who actually know and like the former Secretary of State despite their profound disagreement with her political outlook. These Republicans, including many of her former Senate colleagues, admit that they like — or even “love” — Hillary despite her liberal voting record and Democratic loyalties.

So I wrote a guest column for Monday’s Daily News that noted how routinely she has earned the affections of Republicans and conservatives who served and worked with her — as Weekly Standard online editor Daniel Halper learned, to his apparent dismay and frustration:

…Halper was astounded to hear Hillary Clinton praised by one Republican after another on Capitol Hill while working on Clinton, Inc., a scathingly negative book he published in 2014. When he interviewed “Clinton’s biggest opponents within the Republican Party during her time as First Lady,” Halper recalled, “no matter how much they were coaxed, not one of them would say a negative thing about Hillary Clinton as a person.” Unwilling to believe his ears, Halper assumed that she had merely flattered them into extolling her.

But the positive view presented by her erstwhile critics was remarkably consistent, Halper admitted. Among those who got to know her best was Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who “developed a very friendly relationship” with Clinton on the Armed Services Committee. McCain’s political consultant Mike Murphy explained, “They get along. He respects her. She’s funny. She’s smart.” Former Arkansas Sen. Asa Hutchinson, who ran the Drug Enforcement Administration during the Bush years, said working with her was “always a joy.” Other Republicans described her as “highly regarded,” “engaged,” even mischievous, with a keen sense of humor.

There is much more at the link, notably the revealing remarks of conservative commentators Dick Morris and Michael Medved (who has known Clinton since law school and, I’m reliably told, may soon endorse her over Trump, whom he despises). The point is simple: Be skeptical of journalists who constantly disparage the personality of a public figure whom they scarcely know at all.

In 2016, Journalistic Fraud Still Looms Large

In 2016, Journalistic Fraud Still Looms Large

Alas, this is pretty much where I came in. Starting in 1994, when your humble, obedient servant was approached to contribute weekly political columns, I found the behavior of the national political press shocking and alarming.

Today, it’s even worse.

Even so, it’s not every day a TV talker apologizes for broadcasting a doctored video misrepresenting something Bill Clinton said about President Obama. So it’s definitely worth taking note.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did that the other night, at least temporarily persuading me that the network hasn’t yet gone full Fox News.

But first, some ancient history on a theme directly relevant to today’s Democratic primary campaign: Hillary the Big Liar.

See, by 1994 I’d been writing professionally for years, mainly as a literary journalist and monthly magazine reporter. The publications I’d written for employed assiduous fact-checkers. Opinions were expected, so long as they were grounded in fact. After all, what’s the point winning an argument if you’ve got to cheat to do it?

However, that’s not how Washington journalism works. One incident in particular astonished me.

In April 1994, Hillary Clinton had given a press conference about the make-believe Whitewater scandal. She answered every question the press threw at her for a couple of hours. The immediate effect was rather like last fall’s Benghazi hearings: her detailed answers calmed the storm. Having previously given sworn testimony to Treasury Department investigators probing Jim McDougal’s failed S & L, she was on solid ground.

Two years further on, ABC’s Nightline dug up a video clip of an answer she’d given about a specific issue and seamlessly deleted two sentences by substituting stock footage of journalists taking notes. Then they pretended she’d been asked a much broader question, and accused her of lying about the information they’d subtracted.

Specifically, Hillary acknowledged signing a letter “because I was what we called the billing attorney” for the Madison Guaranty account. Nightline charged her with concealing exactly that fact. Jeff Greenfield said no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself”—a contemptible insinuation.

Within days, the doctored quote was all over ABC News, CNN, the New York Times and everywhere else. Almost needless to say, Maureen Dowd ran with it. William Safire predicted her imminent criminal indictment.

In short, the theme of Hillary Clinton as epic liar began with an instance of barefaced journalistic fraud.

Everybody involved should have been run out of the profession. It wasn’t exactly an obscure mystery. Video of the press conference existed. The New York Times had printed the full transcript.

But there was no Internet. Beltway pundits covered for each other like crooked cops.

So anyway, last week Bill Clinton made a campaign appearance for his wife in Memphis. If you’d only seen it on MSNBC or read about it in the Washington Post, you’d think he made a political blunder, trashing President Obama as a weak leader.

On Chris Hayes’ program All In, the host chided the former President for going “a bit off message.”

MSNBC aired this video clip:

“BILL CLINTON: She’s always making something good happen. She’s the best change maker I’ve ever known. A lot of people say, ‘Oh well, you don’t understand. It’s different now. It’s rigged.’ Yeah, it’s rigged—because you don’t have a president who is a change maker.”

Full stop.

Ouch! To the Washington Post’s Abby Phillips, “it sounded like he was agreeing with one of [Bernie] Sanders’s central arguments about income inequality—but blaming the sitting president for it.”

Older and thinner, Mr. Yesterday was clearly losing it.

Except he wasn’t. The real villain was, once again, creative video editing. Tommy Christopher at Mediaite.com restored the full context.

So here’s what Bill Clinton actually said about President Obama:

“Yeah, it’s rigged—because you don’t have a president who is a change maker with a Congress who will work with him. But the president has done a better job than he has gotten credit for. And don’t you forget it!
(APPLAUSE)
Don’t you forget it! Don’t you forget it!
(LOUDER APPLAUSE)
Don’t you forget it. Let me just tell you. I’ve been there, and we shared the same gift. We only had a Democratic Congress for two years. And then we lost it.
There’s some of the loudest voices in our party say—it’s unbelievable—say, ‘Well the only reason we had it for two years is that President Obama wasn’t liberal enough!’
Is there one soul in this crowd that believes that?”

Judging by the crowd response, there was not.

Mediaite.com’s Christopher put it succinctly: “This is an edit so egregious, it rivals the worst in dishonest political ads, and surpasses them.”

Greatly to his credit (and my surprise), Chris Hayes subsequently rebroadcast Clinton’s remarks in full. “We shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted.

No, they certainly should not.

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrives with her daughter Chelsea Clinton and her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, to speak to supporters at her final 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary night rally in Hooksett, New Hampshire February 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Maureen Dowd’s Decades-Long Campaign Against Hillary Clinton Gets Even Nastier

Maureen Dowd’s Decades-Long Campaign Against Hillary Clinton Gets Even Nastier

Maureen Dowd rang in 2016 with yet another scathing column about Hillary Clinton. It’s the latest in a long line of critical pieces aimed at the Democratic frontrunner by the New York Times columnist, whose vitriol for Clinton has only increased in the last year-and-a-half, according to a new study from Media Matters for America. The politically progressive media watchdog group said that Dowd’s tone had become solely critical towards Clinton since a similar study it completed last year.

The study was performed as a follow up to its 2014 study, which concluded that nearly 75 percent of the columns Dowd wrote about Clinton had a negative opinion of her. The study involved analysis of 195 columns that contained significant mentions of Clinton over a 23-year period. The 17 columns that Dowd has written about Clinton since that study have been all entirely negative.

In her latest column, ‘Leo, Hillary and Their Bears,’ Dowd tied in pop culture with her criticism of Clinton, who was described as akin to Hugh Glass, the 1820s-era frontiersman protagonist of Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie, The Revenant. She wrote, “And finally, of course, there’s the politician most like Glass in her willingness to crawl through glass, flip her positions and persona, and even bear up under a mauling by a merciless, manic bear to reach that goal most yearned for. In Hillary Clinton’s grimly relentless trudge toward the White House, the part of the bear is played by Donald Trump.”

If Trump is Clinton’s indomitable enemy, lobbing lewd ad hominem attacks at her, it seems he has a comrade-in-arms in Dowd, who shares his pastime of discussing “the Clintons’ tangled conjugal life.” Dowd wrote that Trump started targeting her personal life because he can’t emasculate a woman quite as easily as he has emasculated his male rivals in the Republican race (although that wouldn’t stop him from insulting Carly Fiorina’s appearance).

Dowd’s latest stab at Clinton, likening her to a DiCaprio character, is nothing new really. In the past, she has compared Clinton to Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen: “Those close to them think that the queen of Hillaryland and the Snow Queen from Disney’s Frozen have special magical powers, but worry about whether they can control those powers, show their humanity and stir real warmth in the public heart,” she wrote in June 2014.

The columnist’s plainly personal attacks are never particularly subtle. She has insinuated that Clinton is something of a vampire, writing in 2004 that “nothing but a wooden stake would stop” Clinton’s plans for a presidential run in 2008. Dowd claimed that the former secretary of state’s Machiavellian tendencies even go all the way back to her commencement speech at Wellesley University in 1969. When Clinton was in the Senate, Dowd described her as “a manly girl” who “has been so cautious and opportunistic about weighing in on everything from Schiavo to Alito and Iraq.”

The accusation that Clinton has been overly cautious or inconsistent on a multitude of topics, flip-flopping according to what is expedient, is not an unfounded one. But any criticism along these lines loses much of it authority when its wedded to needlessly spiteful, personal attacks.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addresses supporters at the Electric Park Ballroom in Waterloo, Iowa January 11, 2016. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein