Over the 25 years Hillary Clinton has spent in the national spotlight, she’s been smeared and stereotyped, the subject of dozens of over-hyped or downright fictional stories and books alleging, among other things, that she is a lesbian, a Black Widow killer who offed Vincent Foster then led an unprecedented coverup, a pathological liar, a real estate swindler, a Commie, a harridan. Every aspect of her personal life has been ransacked; there’s no part of her 5-foot-7-inch body that hasn’t come under microscopic scrutiny, from her ankles to her neckline to her myopic blue eyes—not to mention the ever-changing parade of hairstyles that friends say reflects creative restlessness and enemies read as a symbol of somebody who doesn’t stand for anything.
OK, had they not used the word “alleging,” most of that paragraph would have been something eerily similar to what I would write about her. Anyone who uses the word “harridan” is just trying to justify some college debt, however.
The descent into “I Can’t Believe This Isn’t Parody Land” is remarkably quick in this piece, even for Politico.
Forget all that troubled history, and a Clinton run for president in 2016 seems like a no-brainer, an inevitable next step after the redemption of her past few years as a well-regarded, if not quite historic, secretary of state. But remember the record, and you’ll understand why Clinton, although rested, rich and seemingly ready, has yet to commit to a presidential race (people around her insist it’s not greater than a 50-50 proposition), even as she’s an overwhelming favorite.
If Clinton says yes, she’ll have access to a bottomless pool of Democratic political talent and cash to match all those hyperbolic pronouncements about her inevitability. If she doesn’t run, the single biggest factor holding her back will be the media, according to an informal survey of three dozen friends, allies and former aides interviewed for this article. As much as anything else, her ambivalence about the race, they told us, reflects her distaste for and apprehension of a rapacious, shallow and sometimes outright sexist national political press corps acting as enablers for her enemies on the right.
Get it? THE VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY IS STILL ALIVE AND KEEPING HER DOWN!
And it’s got friends in the media.
Also, this nothing but beer, chocolate and french fries diet will lower your cholesterol and get you in the best shape of your life.
As the weekend is almost here, I really don’t have time to think about all of the things that the media has given Hillary a free pass on over the years; that’s a job that would go faster if Vince Foster were here to refresh my memory.
But I can recall the biggest one off the top of my head. I’ll explain on the next page.
The media has been instrumental in creating the Myth Of The Feminist Icon that propels Hillary along.
She rode her husband’s coattails into office the first time after trading the humiliation of herself and her only child for some political capital. From that, the media spun a tale out of whole cloth that she is still cashing in.
Rough on her? They made her.
What’s happening here is that the ground rules for the 2016 presidential coverage are being established.
We have already been told that her age is off-limits, even though it was a perfectly acceptable issue when Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and John McCain were seeking the presidency. So if it gets mentioned now, is that sexist or ageist? SO. MANY. ISTS. Clarifying: don’t be a misogynist but make special rules for the girl.
Here is the money line of insanity from the article:
For much of her career, she has remained publicly unwilling (and, former advisers say, at times even privately incapable) of differentiating between malicious, coordinated political attacks and the legitimate scouring of her record undertaken by responsible reporters.
Portraying Mrs. Clinton as the victim of “coordinated political attacks” almost provides legal grounds for institutionalization, but following it up with the suggestion that there has been anything close to a “legitimate scouring of her record” seals the deal. That we are reading this on a day that it became even more apparent she lied about Benghazi and has gotten media cover for it for-DUDE-two years makes it kind of sickening.
This doesn’t look like the result of an informal survey of her friends — it looks like it was written directly by them.
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