Saturday: When Hillary met Sally

We have never understood the irrational hatred of the press towards Hillary Clinton.  We know why the Republicans couldn’t stand her husband, Bill.  It was because he was actually the one in charge during the nineties and they never accepted him as legitimate.  Besides they were on a roll with Movement Conservatism.  Yeah, all that hard work was paying off, once they made up their minds to fight their exile into the wilderness after Barry Goldwater’s defeat. That never explained viciousness of the media towards Hillary though.

As far as we have been able to trace, the nastiness started in earnest just after the Clintons arrived in Washington and Sally Quinn attempted to pull Hillary into her social circle.  But it seems like Sally was playing quite a different career game than Hillary.  I imagine it was a little like what happened on Mad Men between Peggy, the newly promoted junior copywriter from the steno pool, and Joan, the office manager who saw her job as a route to domestic bliss in the suburbs with a man she snagged from one of the corner offices:

And then Hillary proceeded to dismiss the White House travel office staff who was collaborating with the media for sweet travel deals and gossip.  We think that was approximately the time the $%@# hit the fan.  Oh, sure, the Republicans gave both Clintons a colonoscopy with 8 years of investigations.  It was relentless and brutal- and categorized in minute and embarrasing detail on the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.  Seven years of the worst president in history, a president the media helped to put in power, was not enough to curb the media’s enthusiasm for trashing Hillary.  When the primary season started, they picked up right where they left off.  Hillary was the media’s favorite punching bag.  She almost won too.  It drove them NUTS.

We’ve known for more than a year now that the media has a sycophantic hard-on for Obama.  So, it came as a shock yesterday when Paul Krugman, who is generally well liked in PUMA circles, wrote the following in his blog, The Conscience of a Liberal:

The crisis isn’t the only scary thing going on. Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

The good thing is that Krugman acknowledges the irrationality of the attacks on the Clintons.  What he *doesn’t* acknowledge is that much of it comes from his neighbors at the NY Times, not the Wall Street Journal.  Did Krugman read any of the stuff from Frank Rich during the primaries?  And does anyone know what bug Maureen Dowd has up her ass about Hillary? (BTW, Maureen, we still aren’t voting for him and we don’t really care what you think.)

We’ve often heard it said that Hillary’s campaign was nasty towards reporters. But I used to sit in on those conference calls between the media and Howard Wolfson.  I often came away impressed with Wolfson’s comparative composure.  The venom that flowed from the likes of Andrea Mitchell was astonishing in its sarcasm and sheer unmistakable contempt for anything Hillary said or did or planned.  After 15 years of this stuff, I wouldn’t have liked the media much either.

Paul has been hanging out with his buds at the NYTimes too long.  He has started to believe what ever new fantasy they are promoting these days.  This new meme about voters longing for Ronald Reagan is pretty stupid.  I don’t doubt that some of McCain’s fans are waxing nostalgic for the Great Communicator but I suspect the real source of their discontent is similar to ours on the left who can’t stand Obama.  It’s like we didn’t have any choice in the matter.  The media did the picking of our nominee this year.  The voters were superfluous.  We on the Democratic side were steamrolled if we wanted Hillary Clinton.  We’ve been told that neither our opposition or our votes are legitimate.  Both the DNC and the media had a hand in stripping us of our ability to affect the election.  But our resistance to Obama is not about Hillary anymore.  It’s about preserving our right to self determination.

Now, Republican voters are getting a taste of that same media fueled Obama juggernaut.  Those of us on the left who experienced the “Hillary can’t win, it’s mathematically impossible” haka that began in February recognize the “It’s over.  Obama won!” haka of October.  But Republican voters have yet to connect this meme with the intense psychological warfare that David Axelrod is throwing at them with the media’s help.  And Krugman is completely wrong when he connects the agitiation of the anti-Obama voters with Reagan.  I survived the Reagan years as a college student.  There is nothing about Reagan that I liked, admired or wish to have again.  I loathed the guy.  In fact, I really wish both McCain and Palin would drop the lavish praise of Reagan.  Whenever he is mentioned, I lose whatever tepid warmth I have for the Republican ticket.

Today we see a new media frenzy over Sarah Palin’s Troopergate problem.  I guess I’ve been watching the Hillary vs Sally problem long enough to know that it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and no one but the media and the cognitively dissonant in the Obamasphere will care.  So, she tried to get her brother in law fired after he did some things that would get most people fired.  So she went about it the wrong way.  The way the media is behaving, you’d think the only reason she ran for governor was so she could use the full force of her office to torment and harrass this one man.  It reminds me of the massive amount of ink that was wasted on Hillary’s missing billing records and the federal case that was made out of that.  Or the unintentional exaggeration she made of one of her Bosnia trips.  Or her firing of the White House travel office.  Who frickin’ cares?

They all pale in comparison to Obama’s campaign staff intimidating and threatening delegates at the convention and invalidating the primary election results in 57 states.  It can’t hold a candle to the manipulation of the primary results by the DNC on Obama’s behalf that he accepted without protest.  It doesn’t come close to the fraud, verbal and physical bullying that happened during the caucuses.  It’s not nearly as enraging to voters as the Obama surrogates who accuse us of racism while they undermine us with sexism. The media barely covered any of this so we’ve had to document the atrocities on our own.  Obama may be their darling, but he isn’t ours

What I can’t understand is how it is that Krugman, the Princeton economics professor with the massive brain that crunches data without effort, can’t understand what’s really going on with voters at McCain rallies who resent the media’s interference with their ability to make a decision and have it count.

Go figure.