On January 31, the New York Times published a front page story detailing Bill Clinton's role in setting up a $3.1 billion dollar uranium mining deal in Kazakhstan, and the subsequent $131.3 million dollar donation to Clinton's foundation by the Canadian businessman who benefited from the deal.
After I read the 2,000 word story, I posted comments on DailyKos to the effect that it was too bad John Edwards had dropped out, since, if he had simply waited 12 hours, he'd now be the only caucasian candidate left in the race. I assumed that the story would blow Hillary out, and that every media outlet from Drudge to Morning Joe would be talking about how Bill Clinton had taken a $130 million bribe to butter up the dictator of Kazakhstan.
I took it for granted that TPM Muckraker would run with the story big time. Talk about muck - what could be muckier than an ex-president using his prestige to play ball with one of the worst dictators in the world, just to help his friend get a $3 billion dollar uranium mine? And then receive a $130 million "donation" right afterwards?
Not only that, but the article stated that Clinton "vowed to continue to raise money for his foundation if Mrs. Clinton is elected president." Forget about the rake - that's the kind of muck you need a bull-dozer to move around. A muckraker's wet dream.
So I clicked over to TPM to see how they were covering it. There was no screaming headline, but there was a link, about halfway down the page, that summed up the story thusly: "NYT Pries into Bill's Foundation Again."
So the key part of the story, according to TPM, was that the New York Times was, once again, annoying the Clintons by asking questions about some of Bill's "charity work." I couldn't believe my eyes. What the hell was going on? Was TPM suddenly in the Clintons' pocket? I waited for the morning shows, to see how they covered it.
Nothing. Not a peep. More about Britney, more about the "snub," more about the Love-In of a debate the night before. But nothing about Bill Clinton receiving a $130 billion dollar "donation" for setting up a uranium mine deal. I thought the New York Times was still considered the newspaper of record. The leading news organization in America. A legitimate news source, at the very least! I thought the rest of the media still took its cues from whatever the NYT was running on its front page.
Well, not this time. Apparently this story is "too complicated" to have legs. Or it has names that no one can pronounce, like Nazarbayev (the dictator of Kazakhstan) and Dzhakishev (the head of Kazakhstan's uranium agency) - so the American public apparently doesn't have the attention span to comprehend it. Or maybe Kazakhstan is too far away and nobody knows where it is (although you'd think with the Borat connection, the scandal would at least have become fodder for Leno and Letterman). Or maybe a decision was made, at some level, that it was an unfair thing to discuss in an election season. Who knows why it wasn't picked up by the mainstream media. But TPM Muckraker? This is not a story for TPM Muckraker? What the fuck.
Can somebody explain this to me?