HRC GROUP POST - The wonderful Gene Lyons gives his opinion

[OKNancy]

http://www.timesreporter.com/article/20150823/OPINION/150829769/2011/OPINION

osted Aug. 23, 2015 at 12:00 PM

Same as it ever was. Once again, according to pundits on the influential Washington, D.C. cocktail-party circuit, Hillary Clinton is in deep trouble. The National Witch Hunt is definitely on.
Surely you didn’t think we could have a woman presidential candidate without one?
Rolling down the highway, listening to Diane Rehm’s NPR talk show last week, I wondered if I hadn’t driven into some kind of weird political time warp.

In a sense, I had.

“Someone said the other day that Washington may now have reached the state-of-the-art point of having a cover-up without a crime,” pronounced the Washington Post. By failing to come clean, Hillary had managed “to make it appear as if the Clintons had something to hide.”

“These clumsy efforts at suppression are feckless and self-defeating,” thundered The New York Times. Hillary’s actions, the newspaper continued, “are swiftly draining away public trust in (her) integrity.”

OK, I’m teasing. Both editorials appeared 21 years ago, in January 1994. They expressed outrage at Hillary Clinton’s turning over Whitewater documents to federal investigators rather than the press, which had conjured a make-believe scandal out of bogus reporting of a kind that’s since grown all too familiar in American journalism. (Interested readers are referred to Joe Conason’s and my e-book “The Hunting of Hillary,” available through Nationalmemo.com.)

However, by failing to roll over and bare her throat, Hillary Clinton only “continued to contribute to the perception that she has something to hide.”



Please go to link and read the rest.

[shenmue]

1. Yeah!

[mcar]

2. Lyons is excellent, as always

I wish you would post this in GD:p but understand why you may not want to.

[Iliyah]

3. The extent the GOP hate machine will go. Unfortunately the far left has joined the circling

fire squad. Nevertheless, HRC is returning fire and hitting her targets!

WHOA

[shenmue]

8. Yes!

[DURHAM D]

4. Great article. Thanks for posting.

Two of the quotes -

No cage filled with parrots could have recited the list of familiar anti-Hillary talking points more efficiently than Rehm’s guests.

See, if Hillary would just quit fighting for herself and her issues, they could quit ganging up on her.

jftr - I hate Chris Sleeza

[lewebley3]

5. I think when Hillary gets cleared again: The New york times should be denounced as a rag

[Gothmog]

6. Thanks for posting

I enjoyed that editorial

[kristopher]

7. I'm not backing Hilary for the primary but...

I hope you don't mind if I share my experience of that time.

I'd been out of the country more or less continually for over 8 years when I when I moved back in 1995. I had never been very political - participating in the process for me was a shallow experience at best, and many times I barely paid any attention to what was happening until election day. In my defense, I was working 60-80 hours a week and had also become disconnected from events due to the prolonged absence. But no two ways about it, I now know that no excuses I can offer are acceptable and none justify the fact that I didn't take this fundamental civic responsibility seriously. I am now ashamed of the fact that I was unarguably a classic low information voter.

That is the way it was until I started seeing the treatment the Clintons were receiving during the impeachment. I was appalled at the baseless, obviously politically motivated attacks that were filling the news on a daily basis. The behavior and thinking behind the behavior of the GOP literally sickened me and turned me into a very engaged political participant.

I was particularly repulsed by the (new to me) right wing radio version of reality where the bounds of common decency were not only ignored by ridiculed in order to legitimize their disgusting attacks on the First Lady of the United State.

The episode made me a lifelong opponent of the GOP and left me with the belief that a strategy of unfairly attacking political opponents by anyone may seem effective in the short term. However, the long term consequences are inevitably not acceptable.