The Washington Post published a gooey valentine to Hillary friend (and ally in ridiculous spin) Diane Blair on the front of Wednesday’s Style section. To Clinton-scandal buffs – of whom there are obviously none at the Post – Blair was the wife of corporate lawyer Jim Blair, the fixer who so helpfully assisted the sitting governor’s wife in amassing a $100,000 killing in the commodities market in one year (starting with just a $1,000 investment in 1979).
But the Post couldn’t possibly explain that, especially when the story was assigned to a “National Politics Intern” that just graduated from Yale. The headline was “The Confidante: In journal entries and letters, Diane Blair championed and consoled her misunderstood friend, Hillary Clinton.”
By the third paragraph, Post intern Isaac Stanley-Becker was gushing over Hillary with sickening caged-canary analogies:
In her tribute to Clinton in the 1995 Annual Survey of American Law, Blair portrayed her friend as a female crusader, setting an example at great personal cost.
“When I was a schoolchild I was both fascinated and horrified by stories of the canaries who were carried down into the mines as early warning systems for the miners; if poisonous gases started seeping into the mine-shafts, the canaries would quickly expire, thereby giving warning to the men in the mines. I wonder now whether Hillary is playing the risky part of national canary for the women of America,” Blair wrote.
Clinton wrote back to Blair in the summer of 1995, calling her a “fellow canary.”
“We flap our little wings harder and harder, while chirping as loudly as our voices permit about what’s happening around us,” she said. “Sometimes we even are heard outside our cages!”
Most of this marshmallow copy appeared on the front page. To see how the conservative media reported on the Blair papers, start with the Washington Free Beacon.
Stanley-Becker explained that Blair’s papers, archived at the University of Arkansas, display how Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Blair conspired in “an elaborate attempt to negate years of bad publicity,” as if the national media in the Clinton years were all arrayed against her, instead of celebrating her. “In Blair, Clinton found a collaborator who shared her belief that women remained constricted, if not literally caged, in American politics.”
This was the only generic mention of any financial scandal (and notice, no mention of “commodities” or “cattle futures.”)
In the spring of 1994, Hillary Clinton was pondering how she would be remembered.
The administration had been besieged by troubles. The death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster, Hillary’s friend and Little Rock law partner, had been devastating. An independent counsel was probing the Cintons’ investments, subjecting the couple to unrelenting scrutiny.
Clinton asked Blair to reconstruct her “first hellacious year” in the White House. Blair’s account, which she called “Hillyear,” is a dizzying report on a woman pushed close to the brink, juggling family responsibilities with high-level political battles.
There was one connection of Jim Blair and Tyson chicken: “Hillary taught at the law school and met Jim Blair, then the outside counsel to Tyson Foods and a onetime professor. They played tennis and had lunch, and as Jim and Diane became involved, the two couples double-dated.”
Feminists could be disgusted by Hillary blaming herself for Monica Lewinsky. (And by the way, the Post never found the space to mention Hillary told Blair that Lewinsky was a "narcissistic Loony Toon.")
Blair said that Clinton partly blamed herself: “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realize the price he was paying.”
She wouldn’t leave him, Blair wrote, partly “because she’s stubborn; partly her upbringing; partly her pride . . . she really is okay.” [The bolded part was plucked out and emphasized under pictures of the Clintons and Blairs.]
Part of Hillary Clinton’s frustration was that the White House was not hitting back hard enough at detractors, Blair said....
She refused to tolerate incompetence or dissimulation. She was “dumbfounded,” Blair wrote, “by people who look her in the eye and lie to her.”
Month after month, Clinton was “in despair,” her friend wrote, that nobody in the White House was “tough and mean enough.”
A reader could tell the Post wasn’t completely buying into the notion of a Hillary-hating press in the 1990s. Their online headline is “From press paranoia to affairs: A Hillary confidante’s letters reveal a window into her friend’s life.”
But it’s truly bizarre from the perspective of those of us who saw all the gushy interviews Hillary had with Dan Rather and Jane Pauley and Katie Couric and Larry King, and so on, and so on. Hillary honestly felt that she and Blair needed to construct an “oral history” inside the White House because the first draft of history was so full of misinformation.
Clinton told her there was hardly a news story “that she couldn’t totally refute,” Blair wrote. Her concern was “How does one arrive at the truth?”
You certainly don’t arrive at truth by letting the Clintons control the narrative and write the history!
