Hillary Clinton’s campaign has admitted to planting questions with audience members in Iowa and pointing out the plants to her (though it was also news to her, somehow). Rival candidate John Edwards pounced on the scandalette, saying the practice is “what George Bush does.”
Edwards — and the press which relayed his attack — have short memories.
Others may recall that in 1992, President-elect Clinton held an “economic summit” in Little Rock so stacked that even the New York Times noticed.ÂÂ
Perhaps they will remember the carefully orchestrated town halls both Clintons staged for their failed heathcare initiative in 1994.ÂÂ
Maybe they will remember that Pres. Clinton staged the first online “virtual town hall meeting,” with questions carefully screened to avoid “difficult” subjects like his impeachment.
In 1997 – reportedly at the urging of his aides – Pres. Clinton staged an attack on Dr. Abigail Thernstrom, an opponent of preferences based on race and sex who was invited to his televised ”town hall” meeting on racial preferences after it was criticized for excluding dissenters.ÂÂ
Ironically, Bill’s attack on Dr. Thernstrom was in the form of a “yes or no” question of the sort that he now decries as “cutesy” and as a form of “swift-boating” when directed to Hillary. The difference being that Hillary was asked a straightforward question about a plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, while Bill’s “yes or no” question assumed that all forms of affirmative action are the same in order to smear an opponent of some racial preferences.
Not that the media would say anything, even if they did remember. The press is scared of the Clintons. Which is why they get good press. Go figure.
Update: Allahpundit has more on the current plants at HotAir.
I might retract this tomorrow, because I am in a really bad mood right now, but then again, I might not.
The Clintons are fucking power-mad idiots.
Yeah. I know, I know.
Don’t beat around the bush, Tom (no pun intended).
. Why don’t I just come out and say what I mean?
I think this says less about the Clintons than it does about the media, and the Left in general.
There goes my chance to lower the discourse. Or maybe not.
Hillary does seem pretty dumb — smart people seldom lose their shit hard enough to start screaming in front of an audience about how the Jews fucked ’em over — but Bill strikes me as intelligent, albeit in a way that only makes him good at doing crossword puzzles and bagging giggly fat ‘tard-eyed sluts.
The staging is so bad that even the Huffington Post noticed it, citing an example from 1999. The comments are a hoot to read, too, with the HP being accused of fronting for conservatives!
Not that it will surprise anyone, but this was not mentioned on the national news, at least not that I noticed. In fact, I will predict that it will not ever be mentioned. If it is mentioned, it will be in a dismissive manner, and will be used to show that President Bush is doing something bad.
The arrogance and short-sightedness of the press corps will, in retrospect, be seen as one of the most important factors in the Fall of the West.
Unless we solve the problem.
Maybe I’m just grumpy. Or maybe I’m right.
Merovign – I agree, in part. I think that currently, the press willfully abdicates their role for political expediency, and this has an overall even more damaging effect on our system. There is no longer a serious opposition party. The Dems and Leftists no longer have to sell their ideas to the people, no longer have to have serious solutions to serious problems, and in general, get to be as short bus stupid as they want to be. As a result, the Republicans had to do very little to maintain their support amongst their own party, and given the lack of competition, became complacent. It is importatnt for our system to have at the very least, two viable and serious parties. As is, there is only one, and in the long run, this does not bode well.
“Maybe I’m just grumpy. Or maybe I’m right.”
Or, maybe you are both. That’s my vote.
The left plays to ignorance (and illegal votes), but the scariest part is that they come so close to winning with “gimme- illiteracy”.
Suck it up people. Ignorance is the wave of the future, and it does not bode well for any kind of educated voter.
How did I ever get to this point? My life has been wonderful (well, mostly, anyway). The Democrat leaders would have been laughed off the stage fifty years ago. Edwards, Obama, Hillary, etc, would never have gotten off the runway
The Lost Dog – We got to this point, in my pet theory, when 50%+1 of the people no longer pay income taxes. When a majority of the people figured out that they could approve programs that somebody else was going to pay for, it all started going downhill. Even Republicans can no longer be counted on to be responsible stewards of our tax dollars. I attribute this, directly, to the majority being able to take from the minority, at will.
I think that anyone receiving income from the government should forfeit any right to have a voice in how that money is spent. In any other profession, such a situation (having welfare recipients get to decide how much those welfare payments will be, or Congress getting to vote on their own pay raises) would be called a Conflict of Interest.
In politics, it’s called “Business as Usual”.
Why in hell do we tolerate behavior from politicians that would get your standard corporate suit thirty years in a minimum security prison?
Side-ish issue: the hostility of the “discourse” comes from a few facts.
1) The Democrats don’t have to explain their ideas because the MSM is on their side and carries their water.
2) The Republicans don’t bother to explain their ideas because the MSM is against them, cuts them off and lies about them.
3) The worst complication (because it’s “organic” to the situation) is Rational Ignorance – people can’t be aware of everything, and shouldn’t, and they know it. People have their own lives to take care of (unless they’re research junkies like me) and they can’t bone up on every issue.
The result of the three is that the MSM and politicians (particularly the left because they have the opportunity) take advantage of the lack of information by basically lying their asses off and getting away with it because those who check the facts can’t get the word out.
A recognized honest broker of the facts (note not truth) could become something that dulls the effect of the “ignorance attack.”
The MSM tried to be that, or tried to appear as that, at one point. Whatever the goal, the effect has been the opposite.
Someone walks into the world an innocent, who can they trust? In practice, they either trust who their friends or family trusts, pick the one that seems the most reasonable (or at least the most like what they already believe), or just throw up their arms and stop caring.
People who take the time to do the research end up commenting on blogs (I flatter myself to think), everyone else who has too much of a life to do the research has to take one of the other alternatives.
And it makes sense for them to do so.
And it’s killing us.
See, I am grumpy. :)
I have a gift for killing plants.
To JD’s point that this says more about the media and the Left generally:
We have heard for years about the oppressive McChimpler and Darth Cheney stonewalling the media and crushing dissent, all while the media leaks the existence of top-secret programs that have saved lives, with no demonstrable injury to anyone’s civil rights.
OTOH, the Clintons aren’t even in the White House and are able to intimidate Vanity Fair and others out of running negative press about HRC’s campaign. The media belives the Clintons will be at least as hostile to them as the Bushies, but give them good press for it. Indeed, they see the Clinton approach as an emulation of Bush and a defense against “swift-boating,” completely ignoring that the Clintons were pioneers of the Potemkin town hall, hired Pellicano to dig dirt on opponents’ personal lives, listened in on tapes of the private phone calls of critics, etc.
Dan, I wanted to say that I personally really appreciate your sharing that with us.
I know it must not have been easy.
It also occurs to me to point out that the MSM’s malfeasance isn’t 100% malum in se. A lot of it is just prejudice, which is another word for bad assumptions. Assumptions like “Republicans believe in judgement, so it’s okay to judge them, Democrats reject judgement, so they are exempt from judgement.”
That’s the more straightforward version of the rationale behind “exposes” on Republican fuckups and ignoring Democrat grand mal fuckups.
I could go on and on. I do, in fact.
And you know all those Listening Tours that Hillary has? They just pull those people at random right off the street. Nothing the least bit contrived about them, nosirree.
JD et al.
Politics and politicians are not accountable to market forces and hence they can “buy” themselves the luxury of being asshats a little longer than the rest of us.
The MSM are for-profit entities, accountable to market diktat and as a result there is a silver lining. The traditional media is a dying business, recently The Houston Chronicle just laid off 50+ sales folks and shut down their Dallas and West Coast Bureaus as circulation, ad sales and revenue drop. This is the only main-stream fish-wrap in the 4th largest city in the country.
So as the MSM makes themselves more irrelevant, perhaps we have hope that market forces will kill them faster than they can hang around to kill the rest of us.
If we could force congress to pay for itself, perhaps things would be better.
Great roundup. I think the Clintons are not aware of the virtual paper trail they’ve left behind them.