The top story on the left side of the Sunday Washington Post is tough on Hillary....sort of. Post reporter Karen Tumulty suggests that if Hillary Clinton hadn't been so allergic to transparency, maybe the "vast right-wing conspiracy" would have never become such a malignant force. (She failed to ponder the other side: the Clintons were so corrupt -- and they knew it -- that the only option was to delay and deny and lie, delay and deny and lie, as they did in the Lewinsky scandal/impeachment.)
To Tumulty: the right wing is uniquely vehement and extreme:
Through it all, Hillary Clinton has remained a target for a particularly intense kind of vehemence.
“Over time, some on the far right have made her into a -boogiewoman to instill fear and raise money,” said John Weaver, a GOP strategist . “Is she the devil incarnate? No. These critics can’t even explain why they hate her. It’s unhealthy for our politics.”
Tumulty explains why conservatives oppose her. She feels the rules don't apply to her. Perennial loser John Weaver (McCain 2000, 2008; Kasich, 2016) called George W. Bush "far right," so that explains where he stands.
Tumulty may not know it, but she's singing a golden oldie. See The Washington Post of May 22, 1994, another front page story by reporter Ann Devroy: "Bill Clinton's enemies are making their hatred clear, with a burning intensity and in some cases with an organized passion." The headline was "On Talk Shows and in Angry Mail, 'Visceral Reaction' to President Seems Unusually Intense."
Liberal reporters can't see that perhaps their attachment to Democratic standard-bearers is also "unusually intense."
Sunday's headline was "Clinton's taste for secrecy built 'conspiracy': Her aversion to transparency and close play on ethical lines make it easier for enemies." Are Hillary's "ethical lines" really a "close play"?
Tumulty kept coming back to the "preposterous" scandal claims against the Clintons and Barack Obama:
So Hillary Clinton had it right when she made her famous declaration that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was out to get her and her husband. The opposition was and is passionate. It is well financed. It sees dark — sometimes preposterous — motives in nearly everything the Clintons do.
By the time Barack Obama took office, what she had called a conspiracy had grown into a permanent institution. On an ideological and political level, it fought Obama’s expansive view of government through legislation, lawsuits and grass-roots movements such as the tea party. In its darker corners, it spread sinister rumors about his patriotism, his religious beliefs and even his citizenship...
Whether that was the calculation or not, his opponents were constantly attacking. They went far beyond raising questions of government impropriety. Right-wing talk radio and the new medium of the Internet, which brought in fresh players, including the Drudge Report, spread fantastic theories tying the Clintons to everything from drug-running to murder.
So was the Post implying that the Left never applied a wacko conspiracy theory to Reagan or to the Bushes or to Nixon? Did they forget "classics" like J.H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son, written by a felon to claim George W. Bush was covering up a cocaine arrest? That made 60 Minutes, despite a wacky and felonious author.
Tumulty also negotiated around the idea that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" arose in reaction to what liberals did to Nixon in Watergate with their special prosecutors and journalistic takedowns. Or at least that it could be described as a "vast left-wing conspiracy." She noted Watergate, but couldn't quite elaborate on Woodward and Bernstein chipping away at Tricky Dick:
Meanwhile, news organizations had become more skeptical of government and less willing to take officials at their word.
When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived in the White House, scalp-hunting had already become part of Washington’s political culture.
The "scandal industry" and the "scalp-hunting" charge both can be just as efficiently applied to The Washington Post.
