As NewsBuster John Stephenson reported Monday, a Politico column by Ben Smith revealed that the Clinton campaign apparently forced GQ magazine to not publish a negative piece about Hillary if they wanted future access to Bill.
As a result, Slate's Mickey Kaus asked Tuesday, "Is the GQ Man a Wuss?"
Kaus marvelously began (h/t Glenn Reynolds):
First rule of Today's GQ Man: Be a wuss! Josh Green is an excellent magazine writer, so his piece on Hillary campaign infighting is unlikely to have been killed by GQ magazine because it was bad. That leaves Politico reporter Ben Smith's explanation--that it was spiked by GQ's editor Jim Nelson because of pressure from the Clinton camp, in the form of threatened denial of access to Bill Clinton for an upcoming GQ cover story.
This led Kaus to ask another important question (emphasis added):
[I]s GQ not only spiking the piece but refusing to let Green place it elsewhere? That would be full-service journalism for the Clintons.
Frankly, this is indeed the scary part about this matter. After all, if the Clintons can use future access to Bill as leverage over media's reporting of Hill, we might as well just give them both the keys to the White House now, assuming they returned them in January 2001.
