The Hillary Clinton machine hit it hard over the weekend, pushing the narrative that GOP hopeful Donald Trump has built his entire campaign on a foundation of lies. And of course the media took the bait.
While there are plenty of Trump tales worth examining, Clinton’s camp ought to be careful pointing out Trump’s untruths considering her penchant for twisting the truth to suit her needs.
Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri told reporters on a conference call last week that the Democratic campaign feared that Trump would have an “unfair advantage” in tonight’s debate if moderator Lester Holt doesn’t challenge the Republicans answers with vigor.
“This is the role of the moderator … to call out those lies, and do it in real time,” she said. “To not do that is to give Donald Trump a very unfair advantage. Any candidate who tells this many lies clearly can’t win the debate on the merits.
“His level of lying is unprecedented in American politics,” Palmieri continued.
Fortunately for Clinton, the mainstream media isn’t attempting to cloak its long tradition of serving as an arm of the political dinosaur’s public relations apparatus.
A Los Angeles Times headline Sunday parroted Palmieri’s assertion with little regard for objectivity, announcing: “Scope of Trump’s falsehoods unprecedented for a modern presidential candidate.”
Here’s a small sampling from the lengthy anti-Trump report:
Trump’s pattern of saying things that are provably false has no doubt contributed to his high unfavorable ratings. It also has forced journalists to grapple with how aggressive they should be in correcting candidates’ inaccurate statements, particularly in the presidential debates that start Monday.
At a time of deep public mistrust of the news media, the arbitration of statements of fact, long seen as one of reporters’ most basic duties, runs the risk of being perceived as partisan bias.
The author only briefly mentions Clinton’s strained relationship with the truth— which has been a key element of her political strategy since her days as first lady to an up-and-coming governor from Arkansas.
But while there’s plenty of specific criticism of Trump for statements that weren’t exactly true, the Clinton mention in the article assigns blame elsewhere.
Trump lied, the article asserts. But voters have a hard time trusting Clinton. And Republicans are using her scandals to portray the Democratic candidate as untrustworthy.
This is nothing new for Clinton. Long ago, she and her husband perfected the art of turning journalists into their personal stooges.
Before Bill Clinton was forced to admit that he lied about his White House sexcapades, his wife challenged reporters to dig up dirt on the people talking about the affair rather than working to check the veracity of the accusations against the president.
In 1998, journalist Matt Lauer said to Clinton on NBC’s Today Show: “You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here.”
Her response: “Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
That was around the same the Clintons’ favorite pet, then White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, was working overtime to bring mainstream and well-respected journalists on board with an actual conspiracy set up by the Clinton campaign. Blumenthal’s main job at the time was spreading super-secret insider tips to journalists that Monica Lewinsky was stalking the president.
It was, of course, a lie meant to portray Lewinsky as an unstable young woman who had thrown herself into the unwilling president’s lap.
Unfortunately for the Clinton spin machine, one of the leftist liberals they’d counted on to help them spread the untruth, Blumenthal’s good friend and British journalist Christopher Hitchens, declined the invitation to serve as a Clinton puppet.
Hitchens would even later go so far as testifying in Clinton’s impeachment trial about a lunch he shared with Blumenthal as the White House official implored him to put the Lewinsky lie in print for his legion of trusting readers.
Hitchens’ failure to play along with the Clintons ended up costing him friends and, if briefly, bringing all kinds of negative attention his way.
After testifying before Congress that Blumenthal had tried to conscript him has a Clinton propaganda stooge to spread the Lewinsky lie, Hitchens was ruthlessly mocked by his Washington insider colleagues.
The New York Time’s Maureen Dowd took to calling him “Christopher Snitchens.” Others went further, accusing him of being secretly gay, a Holocaust denier and criticizing him for leaving his first wife for American author Carol Blue.
Because Hitchens opened America’s eyes to the mainstreamers’ willingness to go along with whatever the Clintons wanted, they attacked him with the same sort of smear campaign they’d run on Lewinsky.
Hitchens later wrote that he decided to move out of step with the rest of Washington’s insiders because of something he recognized early of the Clinton dynamic:
I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety—these were symptoms of a psychopath. And it kept on getting worse and worse—but not for Clinton himself, who could usually find a way of sacrificing a subordinate and then biting his lip in the only gesture of contrition he had learned to master. (After reading the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick, I’ll never be able to think of his lip biting in the same way again. But no doubt Arthur Schlesinger will be on hand to assure us that all men lie about rape.)
As Hillary Clinton took the political spotlight and continued embodiment of everything Hitchens had loathed about her husband, the journalist became one of the leading critics of her mismanagement of the State Department.
Unfortunately, Hitchens died in 2011 at age 62 of pneumonia, a complication of the esophageal cancer he’d been diagnosed with a year earlier. Also unfortunately, Clinton still has her flunkies at The New York Times and other major media outlets— and they’re still being worked by Blumenthal.
This is becoming something of a refrain in ending pieces about the current iteration of Clinton for president but: The more things change…
The post Big media made a deal with the Clinton devil long ago appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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