Politico badly wants to waste your time
December 17, 2009 3:36 pm ET by Jamison Foser
You'd think Politico would have something more important to splash across their front page than a write up of some new book nobody cares about. But no:
Now, first of all: by "Monica's back," you might assume Politico means Lewinsky has written a book, or launched a speaking tour or something. No. Politico means that several months ago, Lewinsky gave a written comment to the author of a book that is coming out soon. Uh ... a little less "newsy" when you put it that way, isn't it?
Next, you may wonder how something can be the "first definitive history." How can there be more than one definitive history?
But then, if you're silly enough to read the article -- as, unfortunately, I was -- you see junk like this:
Confirmation of a long-rumored romantic affair between Clinton and McDougal, an Arkansas woman who spent 18 months in jail for refusing to answer questions from Starr's prosecutors before a grand jury, and later received a presidential pardon from Clinton. Gormley writes he is now certain "some intimate involvement did occur," though he will not say precisely how he knows it to be true.
Uh, Politico? That's totally not what the word "confirmation" means.
It gets dumber from there, with Politico breathlessly revealing that Robert Ray wanted to indict Bill Clinton (we already knew that) and that Ken Starr's office prepared a draft indictment of Hillary Clinton (knew that, too) and ... Well, who cares, really?
If the article has any redeeming feature, it is this:
Clinton retorts: "They were disgraced and he [Hyde] knows it. They ran a partisan hit job run by a bitter right-winger, Henry Hyde, who turned out to be a hypocrite on the personal issues....Yeah I will always have a asterisk after my name but I hope I'll have two asterisks: one is 'They impeached him," and the other is 'He stood up to them and beat them and he beat them like a yard dog.'"
The "them" in question has, of course, has always included the media that fanned the flames of impeachment. And they're still not over it.
Compare the wall-to-wall coverage of this sex scandal to the relative indifference shown by the Press toward the much more serious scandals of the Bush Administration, then tell me again about "Liberal Media Bias".
Ya know, Obama & Dems dumb, elitist and in disarray. Repubs are smart and populist ...
uh, Wait a minute, I think those are one and the same.
Hmm, well, I'd say that Clinton got attacked a lot, but that, after the beating (A buddy of mine put it "like a red-headed stepchild") he often came out looking better than his opponents did. Both sides came out bruised and bloody, but the other guy usually looked worse than Clinton did.