Well, I thought I heard that the storm which turned into something
less than a hurricane over Florida...and I think Georgia, dumped lots
of rain and then headed out to sea, moving North about 100 miles off
the coast, where it is building steam again and looking toward New
York State and Massachusetts. I did notice that the US Open Tennis
Tournament had to reschedule many matches due to heavy rain, but that
seemed to be unrelated to the one off-shore.
Sorry to have even brought the subject up.
Besides, I'm usually talking without really listening. That's how I
come by some of my crazy posts.
I should be outside chopping at the brush that never gives in. But
it's sort of drippy, more of a mid Fall day than summer, and I even
have a fire going in the living room. Maybe I can sweet talk Cathy
into settling back and waste some time listening to one of the 87th
Precinct tales by Ed McBain, and get my brain off work or
politics...or hurricanes.
But first I need to call our client and tell her we won't be around
today. Her order is somewhere on the East Coast, waiting to be
shipped to us. And I need to find a good reliable Braille Writer
repair service. We have an old Braille Writer that needs a new part
in the back space mechanism, and then we'll give it to a client who
uses Braille but no longer has a means of writing.
Carl
On 9/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Another storm? Do you know something that I don't? I haven't lost my storm
phobia which I developed during Hurricane Sandy so I was really worried last
weekend. But the storm moved away from shore and Nassau County, aside from a
bit of wind, wasn't affected. I'll see if that book you mention Is on
Bookshare.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2016 1:39 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy]
No argument with what you say, Miriam. In fact, that is what I'm railing
against. Why is it that we Humans are more focused on the person's supposed
qualities and short comings, rather than on the underlying issues for which
they stand?
Anyway, I'm not fretting too much since I do the same thing very often.
Not seeing them, I still am taken more by Hillary's voice than by that smug,
self confident voice of Donald Trump. I voted in 2008 for Barak Obama, even
knowing that I would probably get just exactly what we got, because I
thought he had a far more listenable voice than George Bush, and a far more
intelligent voice than John McCain. But I've never kidded myself into
thinking I knew any of them.
In fact, as I've said before, even though they do not have my interests at
heart, I have great respect for the Clinton's ability to survive and prosper
in the sea of hatred that seems to flow around them. But that will not be
enough to sway my vote for Hillary Clinton.
Are you folks on the East Coast faced with another heavy storm?
Here's hoping your lights and power stay on. We are in a moderately cooling
period. Mid 60's to low 70's for a high, with drippy sky, and mid 50's at
night, except for 45 degrees night before last. I seem to be finally
mending, after bringing home whatever bug I picked up last May in Arizona.
Lots of congestion. For a while I thought I'd caught my sister's Mersa, but
then I always did lean toward every little sniffle being some exotic
disease.
What I am really avoiding is dealing with the fact that this body is
81 years old, and was not too well cared for in earlier years.
Still, I hold out hope that I will be around to welcome in 2035.
Cathy and I invited an old client of ours, and her daughter to have lunch at
our home. Edith just turned 103. She authored a novel that she published
after her 100th birthday. I think it is entitled, Branches and Twigs. Her
name is Edith Kapka. The Talking Book and Braille Library has not yet put
it on cartridge, but it's available on Amazon. Edith is from Hungary, and
her story is based on her experiences during the Second World War. She had
a dear friend who was Jewish. The story is based on the direction each was
taken by the times. While Cathy and I spend most of our waking time, and
all of our sleeping time together, she has not yet had the time to read me
the book. But one fine day...
Stay well,
Carl
On 9/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
The problem is that although you, and perhaps, many other people, feel
that all of these articles and news stories are distracting the public
from the real issues that our country has to face, the election is
first and foremost in the news and on the minds of people. So it does
matter how the news is covered and whether the shortcomings of the
presidential candidates are fairly reported. Of the people who vote,
most will choose one of the two major candidates. And the images of
the candidates that are projected, are more real to most voters than
the actual people running for office. I noticed in a novel I began
reading last night which has nothing to do with politics, that when
the author was describing one of the female characters, she mentioned
that she wore "a Hillary head band" which, I suppose was showing the
character's feminist leanings.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2016 10:32 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: James Jarvis; Matthew
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy]
All fun and games.
But one thing should be cleared up. Neither Trump nor Clinton are
Leaders.
Period! End of subject.
What they are is reflectors.Or should that be, what they is are
reflectors...
But anyway, we're spending far too much time, energy and billionaires
dollars on talking about Clinton and Trump. Our Working Class
attention should be focused on what each of them embodies, not on who
they themselves are.
What does it matter how many hard working contractors Donald Trump
screwed out of their well deserved pay? What difference is there in
where Hillary Clinton sent her "secret" messages?
Trump represents a part of our American society that is plain and
simply ugly. Greed runs this segment of our America. Trump is merely
one of hundreds, no better, no worse. Vote for Trump and vote for
corruption, graft, greed and the end of what little freedom we have left.
Hillary Clinton reflects a different segment of our America. This is
the slick, smooth, double talking opportunists who will say anything
and promise the moon in order to clamber to the top of the heap. The
Clinton's are not the stars of this segment, but they certainly have
been successful. Despite constant attack, starting, in my memory,
with White Water, the effort to discredit and destroy them has been
unmerciful...and not very successful.
The Clinton dynasty appears to be headed for never before records, two
presidents from the same couple, and the first woman president, and
the first First Gentleman.
So never forget just how bright these two people are. They are not to
be mistaken for supporters of the Working Class, nor, for that matter
of any particular group whose name does not begin with Clinton. But
they are bright, and they are survivors.
Meanwhile, back with the Working Class. We are like a slow waking,
drugged giant beginning to stir after many years of semiconscious
lethargy. How much longer we will languish before we shake off the
effects of the poisons injected into our brains by the Corporate Mass
Media, one can only guess.
But it does look as if there is a glimmer of light on the distant
horizon, the beginning of a new dawn. What we do now in preparing to
meet this new day will depend upon how well we prepare for it. There
are fields to plow, seeds to plant and weeds to be pulled before we can
claim a better world.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/7/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The
Intercept_
Glenn _Greenwald
✉
⎕
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative
Reporting About Hillary Clinton Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald
Sep. 6 2016, 10:53 a.m.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something
that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the
Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president
from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias,
Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that
anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly
illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton
Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to
take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as
Hillary pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums
often received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as
a public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there
was absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband
did.
Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative
coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among
Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but
because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to
publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former
first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and
current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.
Krugman — in a tweet proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more
than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to
write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it
felt like a moral duty.”
As my colleague Zaid Jilani remarked: “I can imagine Paul Krugman
standing in front of the mirror saying, ‘This is *your Tahrir Square*
big guy.’” Nate Silver, early yesterday morning, even suggested that
Krugman’s Clinton-defending column was so edgy and threatening that
the New York Times — which published the column — was effectively
suppressing Krugman’s brave stance by refusing to promote it on
Twitter (the NYT tweeted Krugman’s column a few hours later, early in
the afternoon). Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus
far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats,
nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of
Hillary Clinton.
That’s because — in contrast to his actually brave, orthodoxy-defying
work in 2002 as one of the few media voices opposed to the invasion
of Iraq, for which he deserves eternal credit — Krugman here is doing
little more than echoing conventional media wisdom. That prominent
journalists are overwhelmingly opposed to Donald Trump is barely
debatable; their collective contempt for him is essentially out in
the open, which is where it should be. Contrary to Krugman’s
purported expectation, countless Clinton-supporting journalists
rushed to express praise for Krugman. Indeed, with very few exceptions,
U.S.
elites across the board — from both parties, spanning multiple
ideologies — are aligned with unprecedented unity against Donald
Trump. The last thing required to denounce him, or to defend Hillary
Clinton, is bravery.
That wasn’t true at first: For a long time, journalists refused to
take the dangers posed by Trump’s campaign seriously. In March 2016,
I wrote a column denouncing the U.S. media for venerating feigned
neutrality over its responsibility to sound the alarm about how
extremist and menacing Trump’s candidacy really is. But in the last
few months, Trump’s media portrayal has been overwhelmingly (and
justifiably) negative; his shady business scams have been endlessly
investigated and dissected (often on the front page of the NYT); he
and his surrogates are subjected to remarkably (and fairly) harsh
interviews; his pathological lying has been unequivocally chronicled
by numerous media outlets; and few journalists have suppressed their
horror at his most extremist policies. As BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara put it
last
month:
“My Twitter timeline is now just a continuous rolling denunciation of
Donald Trump.”
That American journalists have dispensed with muted tones and fake
neutrality when reporting on Trump is a positive development. He and
his rhetoric pose genuine threats, and the U.S. media would be
irresponsible if it failed to make that clear. But aggressive
investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic
partisans whose voice is dominant in U.S. media discourse. They also
want a cessation of any news coverage that reflects negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Most, of course, won’t say this explicitly (though
some do), but — as the wildly adored Krugman column from yesterday
reflects — they will just reflexively dismiss any such coverage as
illegitimate and invalid.
It should be the opposite of surprising, or revealing, that pundits
loyally devoted to a particular candidate dislike all reporting that
reflects negatively on that candidate. There is probably no more
die-hard Clinton loyalist in the U.S. media than Paul Krugman. He has
used his column for years to defend her and attack any of her critics.
Indeed, in 2008, he was the first to observe that — in his words —
“the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of
personality,” comparing the adulation Clinton’s 2008 primary opponent
was receiving to the swooning over George W. Bush’s flight suit. He
spent the 2016 primary maligning Sanders supporters as unstable,
unserious losers (the straight, white, male columnist also regularly
referred to them — including female and LGBT Sanders supporters — as
“bros”). And now he’s assigned himself the role as Arbiter of Proper
Journalism, and — along with virtually all other Clinton-supporting
pundits and journalists — has oh-so-surprisingly ruled that all
journalism that reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton is
unsubstantiated, biased, and deceitful.
The absolute last metric journalists should use for determining what
to cover is the reaction of pundits who, like Krugman and plenty of
others, are singularly devoted to the election of one of the
candidates. Of course Hillary Clinton’s die-hard loyalists in the
media will dislike, and find invalid, any suggestion that she engaged
in any sort of questionable conduct. Their self-assigned role is to
defend her from all criticisms. They view themselves more as campaign
operatives than journalists: Their principal, overriding goal is to
ensure that Clinton wins the election. They will obviously hate
anything — particularly negative reporting about her — that conflicts
with that goal. They will jettison even their core stated beliefs —
such as the view that big-money donations corrupt politicians — in
order to fulfill that goal.
But it would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order if the
billions of dollars received by the Clintons — both personally and
though their various entities — were not rigorously scrutinized and
exposed in detail by reporters. That’s exactly what they ought to be
doing. The fact that quid pro quos cannot be definitively proven does
not remotely negate the urgency of this journalism. That’s because
quid pro quos by their nature elude such proof (can anyone prove that
Republicans steadfastly support Israel and low taxes because of the
millions they get from Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, or that
the Florida attorney general decided not to prosecute Trump because
his foundation and his daughter donated to her?).
Beyond quid quo pros, the Clintons’ constant, pioneering merger of
massive private wealth and political power and influence is itself
highly problematic. Nobody forced them to take millions of dollars
from the Saudis and Goldman Sachs tycoons and corporations with
vested interests in the State Department; having chosen to do so with
great personal benefit, they are now confronting the consequences in
how the public views such behavior.
That Donald Trump is an uber-nationalist, bigotry-exploiting
demagogue and unstable extremist does not remotely entitle Hillary
Clinton to waltz into the Oval Office free of aggressive journalistic
scrutiny.
Nor does Trump’s extremism constitute a defense to anything that
she’s done. It is absolutely true that Trump has at least as many
troublesome financial transactions and entangling relationships as
the Clintons do: These donations to the Florida attorney general are
among the most corrupt-appearing transactions yet documented. Even
worse, Trump has shielded himself from much needed scrutiny by
inexcusably refusing to release his tax returns, while much of the
reporting about the Clintons is possible only because they have
released theirs. All of that is important and should be highlighted.
But none of it suggests that anything other than a bright
journalistic light is appropriate for examining the Clintons’
conduct. Yet there are prominent pundits and journalists who
literally denounce every critical report about Clinton as unfair and
deceitful, and band together to malign the reporters who scrutinize the
Clintons’
financial transactions. Those prominent voices combine with the
million-dollar online army that supreme sleaze merchant David Brock
has assembled to attack Clinton critics; as the Los Angeles Times
reported in May: “Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new
frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired
by some of the internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a
Super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1
million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering
messages about the Democratic front-runner.”
All of this means that any journalists reporting negatively on
Clinton are instantly and widely bombarded with criticisms denouncing
their work as illegitimate, as they’ve started noting:
Or just look at the outrage directed last night at New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman — who has written story after story
investigating Donald Trump — for the crime of innocuously noting a
Washington Post story about Bill Clinton’s multimillion-dollar payday
for a largely no-show job from a for-profit college:
It’s very common for political factions to believe that they’re
persecuted and victimized. Even with the overwhelming bulk of the
national media so openly aligned against Trump — with an endless
array of investigative stories showing Trump to be an unscrupulous
con artist and pathological liar — Clinton supporters seem to
genuinely believe that the media is actually biased against their
candidate.
The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such
as Vox, and the Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and
the columnists and editorialists of the New York Times and the
Washington Post, and most major New York-based weekly magazines —
have been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally
see anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their
faux objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants
that; and I hope this candor continues past the November election —
but the everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is
just a joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse,
and it’s a big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.
That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting
Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret
communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly
does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and
transgressions as equivalent: Nothing in the campaign compares to
Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his
attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging
narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a
virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the
White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media
— including those who regard themselves as journalists — will
continue to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively
on her, but that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained
aggression.
Contact the author:
Glenn Greenwald✉glenn.greenwald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@ggreenwald
˅ ⎕ 291 Comments
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Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Hold Dueling Rallies — But Trump
Gets Most of the TV Coverage Zaid Jilani
Zaid Jilani
Sep. 6 2016, 7:14 p.m.
Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton held rallies at nearly the same time
on Tuesday, with Trump doing an event in Virginia and Clinton holding
one in Florida.
Trump, in a national-security focused Q&A with former Defense
Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn, described the Iran-Iraq war
in flippant terms, saying that the two countries would “fight fight
fight. And then Saddam Hussein would do the gas. And somebody else
would do something else. And they’d rest.”
Clinton, on the other hand, focused her remarks on issues like
college affordability and small businesses.
Fox, CNN, and MSNBC responded by giving almost all of their attention
to Trump.
The networks started carrying Trump’s remarks at around 2:15 p.m. ET.
When Clinton started speaking at around 2:30, the networks relegated
her to a small, muted stream in the lower right-hand corner (MSNBC
briefly put both up side by side as they offered commentary):
“Let’s listen to just a little bit of this, to get the flavor of it,”
Fox anchor Martha MacCallum said when turning to the feed of Trump’s
remarks.
Fox then stayed with Trump for 23 minutes, before switching to
Clinton at
2:41 and carrying her uninterrupted for six minutes.
MSNBC carried Trump even longer, star ≡
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Glenn _Greenwald
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t
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291
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative
Reporting About Hillary Clinton /staff/glenn-greenwald/Glenn
Greenwald /staff/glenn-greenwald//staff/glenn-greenwald/
/staff/glenn-greenwald/
Sep. 6 2016, 10:53 a.m.
In his New York Times column yesterday, Paul Krugman did something
that he made clear he regarded as quite brave: He defended the
Democratic Party presidential nominee and likely next U.S. president
from journalistic investigations. Complaining about media bias,
Krugman claimed that journalists are driven by “the presumption that
anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly
illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton
Foundation.” While generously acknowledging that it was legitimate to
take a look at the billions of dollars raised by the Clintons as
Hillary pursued increasing levels of political power — vast sums
often received from the very parties most vested in her decisions as
a public official — it is now “very clear,” he proclaimed, that there
was absolutely nothing improper about any of what she or her husband
did.
Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative
coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among
Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but
because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to
publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former
first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and
current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.
Krugman — in a tweet proclamation that has now been re-tweeted more
than 10,000 times — heralded himself this way: “I was reluctant to
write today’s column because I knew journos would hate it. But it
felt like a moral duty.”
As my colleague Zaid Jilani remarked: “I can imagine Paul Krugman
standing in front of the mirror saying, ‘This is *your Tahrir Square*
big guy.’” Nate Silver, early yesterday morning, even suggested that
Krugman’s Clinton-defending column was so edgy and threatening that
the New York Times — which published the column — was effectively
suppressing Krugman’s brave stance by refusing to promote it on
Twitter (the NYT tweeted Krugman’s column a few hours later, early in
the afternoon). Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus
far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats,
nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of
Hillary Clinton.
That’s because — in contrast to his actually brave, orthodoxy-defying
work in 2002 as one of the few media voices opposed to the invasion
of Iraq, for which he deserves eternal credit — Krugman here is doing
little more than echoing conventional media wisdom. That prominent
journalists are overwhelmingly opposed to Donald Trump is barely
debatable; their collective contempt for him is essentially out in
the open, which is where it should be. Contrary to Krugman’s
purported expectation, countless Clinton-supporting journalists
rushed to express praise for Krugman. Indeed, with very few exceptions,
U.S.
elites across the board — from both parties, spanning multiple
ideologies — are aligned with unprecedented unity against Donald
Trump. The last thing required to denounce him, or to defend Hillary
Clinton, is bravery.
That wasn’t true at first: For a long time, journalists refused to
take the dangers posed by Trump’s campaign seriously. In March 2016,
I wrote a column denouncing the U.S. media for venerating feigned
neutrality over its responsibility to sound the alarm about how
extremist and menacing Trump’s candidacy really is. But in the last
few months, Trump’s media portrayal has been overwhelmingly (and
justifiably) negative; his shady business scams have been endlessly
investigated and dissected (often on the front page of the NYT); he
and his surrogates are subjected to remarkably (and fairly) harsh
interviews; his pathological lying has been unequivocally chronicled
by numerous media outlets; and few journalists have suppressed their
horror at his most extremist policies. As BuzzFeed’s Tom Gara put it
last
month:
“My Twitter timeline is now just a continuous rolling denunciation of
Donald Trump.”
That American journalists have dispensed with muted tones and fake
neutrality when reporting on Trump is a positive development. He and
his rhetoric pose genuine threats, and the U.S. media would be
irresponsible if it failed to make that clear. But aggressive
investigative journalism against Trump is not enough for Democratic
partisans whose voice is dominant in U.S. media discourse. They also
want a cessation of any news coverage that reflects negatively on
Hillary Clinton. Most, of course, won’t say this explicitly (though
some do), but — as the wildly adored Krugman column from yesterday
reflects — they will just reflexively dismiss any such coverage as
illegitimate and invalid.
It should be the opposite of surprising, or revealing, that pundits
loyally devoted to a particular candidate dislike all reporting that
reflects negatively on that candidate. There is probably no more
die-hard Clinton loyalist in the U.S. media than Paul Krugman. He has
used his column for years to defend her and attack any of her critics.
Indeed, in 2008, he was the first to observe that — in his words —
“the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of
personality,” comparing the adulation Clinton’s 2008 primary opponent
was receiving to the swooning over George W. Bush’s flight suit. He
spent the 2016 primary maligning Sanders supporters as unstable,
unserious losers (the straight, white, male columnist also regularly
referred to them — including female and LGBT Sanders supporters — as
“bros”). And now he’s assigned himself the role as Arbiter of Proper
Journalism, and — along with virtually all other Clinton-supporting
pundits and journalists — has oh-so-surprisingly ruled that all
journalism that reflects poorly on Hillary Clinton is
unsubstantiated, biased, and deceitful.
The absolute last metric journalists should use for determining what
to cover is the reaction of pundits who, like Krugman and plenty of
others, are singularly devoted to the election of one of the
candidates. Of course Hillary Clinton’s die-hard loyalists in the
media will dislike, and find invalid, any suggestion that she engaged
in any sort of questionable conduct. Their self-assigned role is to
defend her from all criticisms. They view themselves more as campaign
operatives than journalists: Their principal, overriding goal is to
ensure that Clinton wins the election. They will obviously hate
anything — particularly negative reporting about her — that conflicts
with that goal. They will jettison even their core stated beliefs —
such as the view that big-money donations corrupt politicians — in
order to fulfill that goal.
But it would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order if the
billions of dollars received by the Clintons — both personally and
though their various entities — were not rigorously scrutinized and
exposed in detail by reporters. That’s exactly what they ought to be
doing. The fact that quid pro quos cannot be definitively proven does
not remotely negate the urgency of this journalism. That’s because
quid pro quos by their nature elude such proof (can anyone prove that
Republicans steadfastly support Israel and low taxes because of the
millions they get from Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, or that
the Florida attorney general decided not to prosecute Trump because
his foundation and his daughter donated to her?).
Beyond quid quo pros, the Clintons’ constant, pioneering merger of
massive private wealth and political power and influence is itself
highly problematic. Nobody forced them to take millions of dollars
from the Saudis and Goldman Sachs tycoons and corporations with
vested interests in the State Department; having chosen to do so with
great personal benefit, they are now confronting the consequences in
how the public views such behavior.
That Donald Trump is an uber-nationalist, bigotry-exploiting
demagogue and unstable extremist does not remotely entitle Hillary
Clinton to waltz into the Oval Office free of aggressive journalistic
scrutiny.
Nor does Trump’s extremism constitute a defense to anything that
she’s done. It is absolutely true that Trump has at least as many
troublesome financial transactions and entangling relationships as
the Clintons do: These donations to the Florida attorney general are
among the most corrupt-appearing transactions yet documented. Even
worse, Trump has shielded himself from much needed scrutiny by
inexcusably refusing to release his tax returns, while much of the
reporting about the Clintons is possible only because they have
released theirs. All of that is important and should be highlighted.
But none of it suggests that anything other than a bright
journalistic light is appropriate for examining the Clintons’
conduct. Yet there are prominent pundits and journalists who
literally denounce every critical report about Clinton as unfair and
deceitful, and band together to malign the reporters who scrutinize the
Clintons’
financial transactions. Those prominent voices combine with the
million-dollar online army that supreme sleaze merchant David Brock
has assembled to attack Clinton critics; as the Los Angeles Times
reported in May: “Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new
frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired
by some of the internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a
Super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1
million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering
messages about the Democratic front-runner.”
All of this means that any journalists reporting negatively on
Clinton are instantly and widely bombarded with criticisms denouncing
their work as illegitimate, as they’ve started noting:
Or just look at the outrage directed last night at New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman — who has written story after story
investigating Donald Trump — for the crime of innocuously noting a
Washington Post story about Bill Clinton’s multimillion-dollar payday
for a largely no-show job from a for-profit college:
It’s very common for political factions to believe that they’re
persecuted and victimized. Even with the overwhelming bulk of the
national media so openly aligned against Trump — with an endless
array of investigative stories showing Trump to be an unscrupulous
con artist and pathological liar — Clinton supporters seem to
genuinely believe that the media is actually biased against their
candidate.
The reality is that large, pro-Clinton liberal media platforms — such
as Vox, and the Huffington Post, and prime-time MSNBC programs, and
the columnists and editorialists of the New York Times and the
Washington Post, and most major New York-based weekly magazines —
have been openly campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I don’t personally
see anything wrong with that — I’m glad when journalists shed their
faux objectivity; I believe the danger of Trump’s candidacy warrants
that; and I hope this candor continues past the November election —
but the everyone-is-against-us self-pity from Clinton partisans is
just a joke. They are the dominant voices in elite media discourse,
and it’s a big reason why Clinton is highly likely to win.
That’s all the more reason why journalists should be subjecting
Clinton’s financial relationships, associations, and secret
communications to as much scrutiny as Donald Trump’s. That certainly
does not mean that journalists should treat their various sins and
transgressions as equivalent: Nothing in the campaign compares to
Trump’s deport-11-million-people or ban-all-Muslim policies, or his
attacks on a judge for his Mexican ethnicity, etc. But this emerging
narrative that Clinton should not only enjoy the support of a
virtually united elite class but also a scrutiny-free march into the
White House is itself quite dangerous. Clinton partisans in the media
— including those who regard themselves as journalists — will
continue to reflexively attack all reporting that reflects negatively
on her, but that reporting should nonetheless continue with unrestrained
aggression.
