The Daily Beast’s Michelle Cottle seems to feel the need to do Hillary Clinton’s bidding as the former Secretary of State prepares for her eventual 2016 presidential run. In a January 15 piece, The Daily Beast contributor whines that “the Hillary-Haters’ Book Club Will Never Run Out of Things to Read.”
Cottle’s entire piece was nothing more than a dismissal of Clinton-era “scandals” as a political tactic by her adversaries. She pretended there weren't any that seriously attached to Hillary. Cottle opened by dismissing Benghazi as a “maybe-scandal” that is “being used as a springboard for launching back into a decades-long litany of Hillary controversies.”
Cottle objected to a soon-to-be released book on Ms. Clinton by Politico entitled “HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Rodham Clinton” as evidence of such “Hillary-haters.” She claimed that the book was merely a “flashback to the drama, pettiness, grudge holding, cronyism, and general ickiness that came to define the Clinton political brand and, along with scandals both real and manufactured, infected an entire nation with Clinton Fatigue.”
Cottle then doubled down in her defense of Clinton:
Of course, many of the Clinton “scandals” proved to be nothing more than the sort of partisan insanity now taken with a grain of salt. (Hillary and Bill had Vince Foster killed? And then Ron Brown? Really?) The stench of other controversies faded—or at least wound up clinging mostly to Bill (Pardongate, that whole zipper problem …) As for Hillary’s bad old rep as a paranoid, secretive, ends-justify-the-means Machiavelli, her image has mellowed as she has matured, and her people insist that she has learned much from her mistakes.
The Daily Beast writer never bothered to explain why Ms. Clinton, if she wants to be the next President of the United States, shouldn’t have to respond to any accusations against her, particularly those going to her temperament. [Do we really want a president who not only holds grudges but is alleged to keep a written enemies list?] Instead, the liberal writer dismissed any criticism of Ms. Clinton as “grudge holding” and “manufactured” by conservatives “for whom anecdotes like those in “Hillary’s Hit List” only fuel the angst and strengthen the conviction that a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the end of civilization as we know it.”
The former senior editor for the liberal New Republic magazine concluded her defense of Hillary as such:
Now, take all that raw material and toss it into today’s media superconductor. Stir in recent vulnerabilities like Benghazi, give the new Super PACs a few hundred million bucks to play with, then stand back and watch the anti-Hillary mushroom cloud blot out the sun. We’re talking here about the political equivalent of that asteroid that killed off all the dinosaurs. Only worse. With apologies to Bergen Evans: Hillary may be through with the past, but the past is not through with Hillary. And if conservatives have any say, it never will be.
Cottle was unwilling to admit that numerous questions still engulf Clinton’s legacy and rather than address them dismissed them as tired conservative attacks. As long as Hillary Clinton is in the public eye, liberals like Ms. Cottle will do everything they can to slam such controversies as coming from “Hillary-Haters” as they do anything they can to protect Clinton from her own troubling past.
