"MSNBC can't spell," joked a tipster on Saturday morning. There is was, posted since Friday afternoon at 3:42 -- a story headlined "The Monica Lewsinksy jokes are back." [They fixed it quickly after we posted our report.]
One could be making a pun, since President Clinton "finished in the sink." But there's no indication of a joke in the story. MSNBC reporter Jane C. Timm is deadly serious about this terrible trend of "bullying" Lewinsky with jokes about her fiasco of an affair with Bill Clinton.
Jane C. Timm actually boasts on her LinkedIn profile: " I cut my teeth in the industry working as researcher at the [far-left] Village Voice for investigative reporter Wayne Barrett and later as a national politics fact checker at Rolling Stone." A fact-checker at Rolling Stone would face a very serious problem, indeed, after their fraudulent campus-rape story...but maybe she could have fixed her own headine here.
Timm began:
Monica Lewinsky is about to become a punchline and political ammo — again.
The onetime White House intern’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton got the former president impeached by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and made her the butt of every tawdry joke for a decade. Lewinsky now advocates against the kind of bullying she endured, and works hard to stay out of the press outside of that work.
But with a woman whose marriage was intimately examined on the House floor in the late ’90s leading the Democratic Party race, and a Republican front-runner who champions gendered attacks and for whom nothing — not even whose wife is hotter — off limits, the Lewinsky scandal is back in the headlines.
RELATED: Monica Lewinsky in new, revealing interview: ‘The shame sticks to you like tar’
“I think when Donald Trump debates Hillary Clinton she’s going to go down like Monica Lewinsky,” Chair of Florida’s Broward County GOP Executive Committee Bob Sutton told The Washington Post in an article published Wednesday, prompting outrage.
He later apologized, but he’s far from the first. Last weekend Bernie Sanders surrogate Rosario Dawson invoked Lewinsky — and her activism against bullying — to attack Clinton, forcing Sanders to deflect questions about whether or not references to Lewinsky are fair game on the campaign trail.
Trump made it quite clear early on in his bid that this would be an inevitable part of the race.
NBC and MSNBC have very partisan reactions about what should be off limits. Lewinsky's name must never be invoked against the Clintons....but hey, it's fair game to call Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the flesh."
Dear Jane: a "fact checker" shouldn't be so loose with the hyperbole as to claim Lewinsky was "the butt of every tawdry joke for a decade." If you're going to write for leftist sites like MSNBC, the least you can do is acknowledge the Clintons are at the front of the line for treating the "narcisisstic loony toon" in a tawdry fashion....which is why Rosario Dawson feels justified throwing the issue at the Clintons (despite your less-than-feminist outrage).
PS: This is how MSNBC's goof came up on Google:
[Hat tip: Wallace Colton]
