Two days before Christmas, Politico’s Maggie Haberman baked up a gooey marshmallow piece about Chelsea Clinton, lamenting that as Hillary steps away from government service, “the nation will have to go cold turkey from two-plus decades of a Clinton speaking out on the issues of the day. Or maybe not.”
Two days after Christmas, Haberman picked up the hack work where she left off with an anti-conservative "news" article headlined “When will the right start hating Hillary Clinton again?” (The snarky answer: it stopped?) Haberman began with another gush:
Her poll numbers are staggering. Fellow Democrats fear her. So do some Republicans. The main question now is, when will the right start hating Hillary Clinton again and kick a “Stop HRC” movement into high gear?
...The anti-Hillary Clinton industrial-entertainment complex, a source of income and headlines for conservatives over much of the past two decades, has been dormant while she’s been at the State Department. There has been no Clinton in elected office, a constant in American political life since the 1990s, for four years. The secretary of State has generally become an apolitical and deeply popular figure — and Republican nominee Mitt Romney spent much of 2012 lionizing the Clinton legacy.
Some Republicans believe it’s only a matter of time before she appears in more direct-mail appeals....Still, absent a clear point of attack against her — a policy position she’s staking out, or a candidate she endorses — it’s not clear whether the anti-Hillary cottage industry will ever exist the same way it once did.
As usual, the liberal media sets the table, and then expects everyone to eat off of it. The media wanted Hillary to be an utterly uncontroversial Secretary of State, acquiring only more political power and gravitas. Haberman, like the others, portray it as politically stupid to focus on Hillary's "fading" failure in Benghazi. None of them ever cared about the sprawling conflict of interest of the Secretary of State having an ex-president husband with a "global initiative" soaking up donations from foreign countries and lobbying interests.
Haberman lines up a pile of conservatives and Republicans to endorse her thesis that the passion against Hillary will never be the same, and even if it did, that it would be stupid. This is how she ended the article:
Mike McKeon, a Republican strategist and longtime adviser to former New York Gov. George Pataki who witnessed her 2000 campaign up close, said that she’s still catnip for parts of the conservative base.
“It’s a reflex they can’t ignore, not a voluntary act,” he said. “I am really not trying to be snarky. But Hillary still drives that kind of reaction, and the more she moves away from foreign affairs and does things like [support] gay marriage, the more they will not be able to resist.”
One Republican strategist, speaking of the Hillary-hating industry, was more blunt: “If she works in the mail and on the phones with small donors, she’ll get hit. We’ll look stupid. But when did that ever stop us?”
This is why Politico is a liberal joke. Haberman’s boss, John F. Harris, is an original Clinton Media Lapdog. Haberman’s panting right next to him on the porch – if the Clinton Library had a porch.
[Hat tip: Sir Loin of Beef]
