29 The Abnormalization of Hillary Clinton
By September, 2016 it begun to dawn on the Washington Post: wouldn’t the nightmare scenario be that America elected a racist, xenophobe with deeply authoritarian tendencies like Trump who refused to release his tax returns because of how damning they were and and was colluding with Russia over a minor email scandal? Of course, the Post itself had been complicit in doing just that. While the analysis of the WaPo editorial team was spot on, by then the cows had left the barn-a minor email scandal had been weaponized to the level where Hitler himself could have been running against her and media would have responded like the SNL Erin Burnett: Ok, Hitler has done some terrible things with the whole Nazi dictatorship thing and rounding up the Jews into concentration camps and stuff, but what about your email, Secretary Clinton?
FN: See Chapter Cillizza
FN: For the most part the NYT was the more flagrant offender-with the Post coming along for the ride-with the notable exception of Chris Cillizza-no one Beltway journalist was more obsessed over the damn emails than him; thankfully he’s now left the Post so that it’s preferabilityh to the Times has even been further enhanced. For the most part if there’s a new big story I go to the Post not the Times-unless the Times itself broke the story. Other than that I mostly avoid Baquet and Friends these days-how else can you get through to them?
The trick with Trump and friends was always less about defending himself from legitimate accusations but to say ‘Whatabout Hillary’s server? What about the Clinton Foundation? What about Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones?’
Many rightfully worried and continue to worry about the normalization of Trump but the flip side of normalizing Trump on things that would have knocked a normal politician out of politics was the abnormalization of Hillary Clinton to use a great coinage of Jonathan Chait late in the campaign.
“In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters judged Donald Trump to be more honest than Hillary Clinton by a ten-point margin. It is a finding that boggles the mind. Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud.
“Clinton, as I have conceded, has done some bad things born of secrecy and paranoia. But those bad things have not merely tainted her image but defined it. The email story has utterly dominated the public’s impression of Clinton, who is the second-most-unpopular nominee of all time and whose shortcomings compare in the public mind with those of her grossly unqualified, authoritarian opponent. Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.
But this has always been the way Trump was able to normalize himself-by insisting that yeah, he may not be the greatest guy in the world but he admits it unlike those ‘establishment politicians’ who are just as bad but pretend otherwise. His strategy was never to rise to their level but drag them down to his.
“The news media’s obsession with the emails has, without necessarily intending to do so, conveyed the impression that Clinton committed not just run-of-the-mill political scandals but extraordinary offenses of a historic scale. Indeed, this is exactly what most Republicans, even staunch critics of Trump, believe — for all of Trump’s flaws, she too is disqualified. “He’s awful,” conservative columnist John Podhoretz tells the Huffington Post. “But so is she, and all these arguments about how he’s unprecedentedly awful fail to take account of the fact that the Democratic nominee for president was all but indicted by the director of the FBI. Which means she is too.”
The media gave this impression by how much they overcovered Emailgate and because they refused to ever draw distinctions between Trump’ s many felonies and a few possible misdemeanors on Clinton’s part-‘everything is equally wrong.’
Wether it’s the Holocaust or a private email server.
Of course, the latest bombshell-that Ivanka Trump regularly used private email for government business (Chapter A) just underscores that Emailgate was a phony issue from the beginning.
But this is a story that still cuts too close to the bone. It’s why the media has done all this wonderful investigative work into Russiagate but very little regarding Comeygate. Comeygate hits too close to home as it’s the media’s own absurd weaponization of this faux scandal that make Comey’s October 28, 2016 letter so potent. Even then had the media not done 100 front page stories on it the next two days afterwards the damage might have been contained. But the MSM, with the NYT’s leading the way, amplified it 1000 fold, Indeed, had the media not treated it as the Crime of the Century the Comey letter would have had all the impact of a cap gun rather than an atomic bomb.
The funny thing about the scandal surrounding Clinton’s private email account is that there was a similar scandal in the Bush administration. Dozens of White House staffers, including Karl Rove, improperly used email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee, which were supposed to be for political work only, for their official duties, thus evading public-records requirements. They then deleted some 22 million emails, thus systematically flouting the same public-records principle that Clinton evaded.
It should be funny, but the grotesque media double standard makes it no laughing matter at all. Indeed, it’s a good thing that Elijah Cummings and friends intend to investigate Ivanka’s emails. But she’s not the only offender-as we saw in Chapter B, many Trump senior aides have used private email. As for Ivanka, her and Jared Kushner share the Trump Organization server. Lock Them Up.
The media can dissemble as much as it likes-it will never live down its Emailgate shame.