NYT’s Frank Rich: The Clintons Kick Reporters Like Dogs

Well, sports fans, as the Clintons continue to disingenuously carp and whine that they're not being treated fairly by the media, more and more press members and outlets are striking back.

On Sunday, the New York Times columnist Frank Rich jumped on the anti-Clinton bandwagon actually opining that the resurrection of Bill could help the Republicans retain the White House in November.

In a piece deliciously titled "The Billary Road to Republican Victory," Rich strongly made the case that America isn't ready for the tag team of Bill and Hill (emphasis added throughout):

[T]he full-throttle emergence of Billary, the joint Clinton candidacy, is measured mainly within the narrow confines of the short-term horse race: Do Bill Clinton's red-faced eruptions and fact-challenged rants enhance or diminish his wife as a woman and a candidate?

Absent from this debate is any sober recognition that a Hillary Clinton nomination, if it happens, will send the Democrats into the general election with a new and huge peril that may well dwarf the current wars over race, gender and who said what about Ronald Reagan.

What has gone unspoken is this: Up until this moment, Hillary has successfully deflected rough questions about Bill by saying, "I'm running on my own" or, as she snapped at Barack Obama in the last debate, "Well, I'm here; he's not." This sleight of hand became officially inoperative once her husband became a co-candidate, even to the point of taking over entirely when she vacated South Carolina last week. With "two for the price of one" back as the unabashed modus operandi, both Clintons are in play.

Rich then categorized how despite highly-publicized claims to the contrary, the former first couple are doing everything in their power to prevent the release of White House records, correspondence between the pair, and donors lists that could shed light on what really happened in the Clinton administration:

At "Little Rock's Fort Knox," as the Clinton library has been nicknamed by frustrated researchers, it's not merely the heavy-hitting contributors who are under wraps. Even by the glacial processing standards of the National Archives, the Clintons' White House papers have emerged slowly, in part because Bill Clinton exercised his right to insist that all communications between him and his wife be "considered for withholding" until 2012.

When Mrs. Clinton was asked by Mr. Russert at an October debate if she would lift that restriction, she again escaped by passing the buck to her husband: "Well, that's not my decision to make." Well, if her candidacy is to be as completely vetted as she guarantees, the time for the other half of Billary to make that decision is here.

The credibility of a major Clinton campaign plank, health care, depends on it. In that same debate, Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Russert that "all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care" are "already available." As Michael Isikoff of Newsweek reported weeks later, this is a bit off; he found that 3,022,030 health care documents were still held hostage. Whatever the pace of the processing, the gatekeeper charged with approving each document's release is the longtime Clinton loyalist Bruce Lindsey.

Finally, as Rich, much as the Times editorial staff before him, made the case that the GOP's success rides on the shoulders of John McCain, he offered the following telling statement:

Since Mr. McCain doesn't kick reporters like dogs, as the Clintons do, he will no doubt continue to enjoy an advantage, however unfair, with the press pack on the Straight Talk Express.

Think McCain's typically favorable press has something to do with how he treats media members? Maybe more important, what does it say about Billary that with all their experience, they don't understand this simple tenet?