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| Illustration by Alexander Hunter/ The Washington Times |
◼ Welcoming Hillary back to the race: Supporters need to sharpen self-delusion skills - By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr./Washington Times
These are what I have been calling for more than 20 years the media’s Episodic Apologists. Their professional lives have followed a well-worn arc since at least 1992, when the Clintons first emerged nationally — though the arc was there in Arkansas back in the 1980s.
At first, the Episodic Apologists are full of hope for the Clintons — they have such charisma, such political promise. Then, splat, they fall headlong into a scandal of their own making — Troopergate, Travelgate, Monicagate, Impeachment or Their Incomparable Exit from the White House.
All of a sudden, the Episodic Apologists fall into darkest despair. “How could they? They had it all,” and the Episodic Apologists’ funk continues....
And drip, drip, drip, another familiar process is auspicated. The Clintons’ tawdry past begins once again to haunt them. At first it was the lonely voice of Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican.
He noted the Democrats’ hypocrisy in charging the Republicans with a “war on women,” when the Democrats’ leading personality is Bill Clinton, the famed “sexual predator,” to say nothing of former Sen. John Edwards, former Rep. Anthony D. Weiner, and many more.
Then began the deluge. The Washington Free Beacon uncovered a mother lode of documents from Hillary’s White House years. Maintained by Hillary’s Arkansas friend, Diane Blair, who passed away in 2000, the documents include diary entries, letters and memos of conversations with Hillary from her embattled White House. They are candid....
◼ The Golden Egg - Matthew Continetti/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...
Among Clinton’s most loyal defenders there was a panicked rush for the exits, an eagerness to switch topics, to reach the next commercial break: Nothing to see here, time to move on, no one cares about Monica, Hillary is inevitable, etc., etc. This was the tone taken by our lady of the eye-roll, Andrea Mitchell, who said on Morning Joe that she had argued against NBC even mentioning the Free Beacon story, and who like many other pro-Clinton journalists said the story lacked “context.” What she meant was that our magazine-length article, heavily researched and polished, disclosed information to the public without having Mitchell there to explain why none of it mattered.
Mitchell was not alone: There were more than a few Democratic partisans who said publishing material related to the 1990s was an exercise in futility. Former Clinton employee Paul Begala tweeted, “The personal attacks on the Clintons will fail.” Columnist Margaret Carlson wrote that if it hadn’t been for Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s numbers “might not have risen enough for her to run for, and win, a Senate seat in New York.” Political commentator Craig Crawford told WTOP radio, “No one has ever defeated the Clintons with these kinds of charges.”
Is this really true? I seem to remember that the shadow of the Clinton scandals—described in the “Hillary Papers” as a “pattern of sleaze”—loomed over Al Gore’s candidacy in 2000; that George W. Bush made a vow during that campaign to restore “integrity” to the White House; that when Democratic mogul David Geffen threw his allegiance to Barack Obama in 2007, he told Maureen Dowd, “I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person.” The Clintons call to mind the old Faulkner line that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” They carry their baggage like Marley carries his chains. It weighs them down.
◼ The Drama of the Gifted Man-Child - Ed Driscoll/PjMedia
◼ Reliving History—and Learning From It - Peggy Noonan/Wall St. Journal
...Finally, the Blair papers are interesting, but don't expect much more. Word in Clintonland will have gone out: Ditch the papers. Have a bonfire. Or see that they're sealed until 2066.
