Democrats typically argue that almost all of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mistakes have been molehills that Republicans have done their best to make into mountains. Salon’s Heather Digby Parton thinks that the GOP has been aided in that regard by the mainstream media.
“One of the major effects of the patented ‘Clinton Scandal’ that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats,” wrote Parton in a Monday piece. “They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about ‘what it all means’ while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision.”
Apropos of the uproar over Hillary’s private e-mail server, which she dismissed as “all smoke, no fire,” Parton alleged that “the political press is, as usual, helping to do [Republicans’] dirty work for them” and described reporters as “Ahab’s [sic] obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of pulitzers [sic] dancing in their heads.”
From Parton’s article (bolding added):
[T]he press can pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand…
And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different (aka “he said/she said), so who’s really to say what’s true and what isn’t?...
This is where we are with Clinton’s email pseudo-scandal…
…[N]one of the emails that have been flagged were classified when she handled them. Various departments are looking at them now and reportedly deciding that maybe they should have been. That’s really it…
As for whether she should have had a separate email server…It was obviously considered an innocuous procedure at the time, but if Clinton had been clairvoyant…she would have seen into the future, known that congressional Republicans would hold nine separate investigations into a bogus scandal called “Benghazi,” and would have seen that they would throw everything at the wall — and the one thing that would stick was her use of a private email server. It’s fair to assume that, had she known all that, she would have done something differently to avoid the “appearance” of wrongdoing.
But what’s important to note in all this that nothing that happened on that email server appears to have been corrupt, unethical, illegal or dangerous. It’s all smoke, no fire…
One of the major effects of the patented “Clinton Scandal” that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats…They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about “what it all means” while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision...
…[T]here are millions of Democrats who also really don’t like the idea that Republicans are manipulating the system to choose their own rival and neither do they care for the media deciding who should be running on a Democratic ticket. And that’s very much what’s going on here. The Benghazi investigations are a joke, but they are providing the GOP with a excuse to go nosing around in Clinton’s business in a way that gives them access to information they can dribble out over time to create the atmosphere I describe. The political press is, as usual, helping to do their dirty work for them. They are Ahab’s obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of pulitzers dancing in their heads.
