The Golden Egg

“The Hillary Papers and the Death of the Mainstream Media,” are explored by Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon:

When the Free Beacon published “The Hillary Papers” last Sunday night, we knew the story would have to cross a high bar. The piece was scrupulously fact-checked. All of the documents we cited were loaded onto the Internet. Every effort was made to present as straightforwardly as possible the contents of the papers, which show Hillary Clinton as hardheaded, calculating, and, yes, ruthless. (Re-read the part where she axes a Supreme Court appointment out of spite.)

What I did not expect was that the media would undergo such a tortured and dramatic breakdown, would struggle so laboriously to acknowledge the scoop while schizophrenically downplaying its importance. That a conservative online newspaper could have understood the significance of the archive, and actually examined its public contents, seemed too much an embarrassment for the staffs of the major newspapers and networks and magazines to bear. By being the first to report on the papers, the Free Beacon exposed the inanity and irrelevance of the mainstream media. We beat them. And they are sore losers.

Read the whole thing.

And note that Charlie Cook of the establishment liberal National Journal is asking simultaneously, “Is Hillary Clinton Too Old to Run?” As in 2007, the MSM appear to be begging for reasons for Hillary not to run, and/or for a viable alternative candidate, in large part because of the enormous paper trail — and loathsome practices — of her and her husband.

Speaking of Bill, back in 2006, the Washington Post reported him saying:

[Clinton] said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies — and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.

But Bill miscalculated slightly: while the media are very much are de facto allies — they’re allies of the Democrat party; they’re not necessarily loyal to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Early the following year, Joe Biden looked at then-rookie Senator Barack Obama’s nascent presidential campaign and infamously muttered, “you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” When you translate Biden’s weird and condescending middle-aged hipster patois back into English, what he was implying by the word “clean” is that Obama had little of an obvious paper trail that could serve to trip him up in the same fashion as Hillary, Kerry, and well, Biden himself. (At least, that’s how it seemed at the time, especially given a lazy old media, who as de facto Democrat allies would know not to dig into Obama’s convoluted past.)

Who will be that candidate for the Democrats next year?