In a contest for the most consistent media fool of the year, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin would be an early favorite to take the top prize for 2015.
This year, Halperin has already had at least three instances of outrageous hackery. As will be seen, for sheer hypocrisy, his most recent is arguably his worst.
Last month Halperin intensely and antagonistically tested GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz about his Cuban bona fides, and offered only a limp, "sorry if you were offended" apology after the ensuing firestorm.
Previously, in an April tweet, as storm clouds began to form around Hillary Clinton's conduct while at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, he pleaded for journalists to be "responsible (and) take a deep breath & separate the real, important & interesting from the feeding frenzy." In other words, "leave the poor woman alone."
Those two incidents were bad enough. But on Saturday afternoon, Halperin comically tried to accuse those on the right outraged over the New York Times's pathetically biased writeup about Mr. and Mrs. Marco Rubio's traffic tickets of having a double standard (HT Twitchy):
The far better question is: "If the New York Times had info about 17 traffic tickets incurred by the Clintons and only four of them spread over an 18-year period going back to 1997 were Hillary's, would it have even bothered running a story? We know that the answer is "no."
But if the Times did run such a story, and gave the impression in its headline and first 2-1/2 paragraphs that the Clintons had equally heavy lead foots "we" on the center-right would naturally say that the reporting was awful. Who on this planet wouldn't?
So Mark Halperin doesn't have any kind of point. It's incredible that he thinks he does. It's equally incredible that this is coming from a guy who essentially pleaded with everyone to slow down in going after genuinely troubling stories about the Clintons.
After the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol adroitly observed out that it's highly likely that neither of the Clintons have driven a car in decades, Halperin snootily responded,
Don't they do hypotheticals at Harvard? You know full well the answer to my question, methinks.
Well, Mark, obviously you don't.
The best tweeted reaction to Halperin's haughtiness were these:
- "@MarkHalperin trying REAL HARD for that press secretary job eh? #GoodDog."
- "Clintons have been in real scandals and media (yourself included) has treated tickets as > (greater) story than those."
- "Most of the infractions were from the candidate's wife; do we get a fresh look at what Bill has been up to?"
The logic of the last response is, excuse the expression, unimpeachable.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
