Our celebrity press corps spends most of the summer roasting Hillary for doing what Colin Powell did with regard to Department of State email usage. Meanwhile Carly Fiorina's old company actually broke the flipping law on her watch and elicits bupkis from these same press people.
As summer shades into fall, Ron Fournier, John McCain's de facto 2008 press agent, is feverishly trying to revive the E-Ghazi FauxGate! His other buddy Karl Rove must be so pleased.
What, you didn't know how tight AP bigwig Ron Fournier is with the upper echelon of the GOP? Not surprising; it's not a subject you'll find talked about in most mainstream press outlets. Follow me below the orange cartouche for more.
Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, writing in July of 2008 when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, noted that the House Oversight Committee had uncovered and made public some evidence of the interesting ties between Team Bush and the AP's DC bureau chief:
Last week, we learned that while investigators for the House Oversight Committee were looking into the 2004 death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former NFL player whose story was promoted by the White House before it was revealed that he had been killed by friendly fire, they discovered that top political aide Karl Rove had exchanged emails with the Associated Press' Ron Fournier on the day the news of Tillman's death broke.
In one email, Rove asked, "How does our country continue to produce men and women like this?" Fournier responded: "The Lord creates men and women like this all over the world. But only the great and free countries allow them to flourish. Keep up the fight."
That sign-off, which seemed to indicate an allegiance between the two men, raised hackles all over the Internet. That kind of correspondence ("Keep up the fight") between a reporter and a partisan White House aide during a campaign year lands way outside the boundaries of acceptable newsroom practices.
But Fournier, now the wire service's D.C. bureau chief, shrugged off the embarrassing revelation, conceding only: "I regret the breezy nature of the correspondence."
Of course, Fournier wasn't simply being breezy. "Have a great weekend" -- that's "breezy."
Instead, Fournier was declaring sides. That was the implication of Fournier's note: "Karl, you might think the media are liberal, but you can trust me. And give me access and return my emails. Because I'm on your side."
With the waning of the Bush Years, Fournier, faithful movement Republican that he is,
transferred his loyalties to John McCain, writing favorable untruths about McCain while bashing all the Democrats in the race:
In fact, one of the few times that Fournier dedicated a column to the Republican primary battle was following the Michigan contest, which McCain lost to Mitt Romney. The win presented Romney with his one brief window of opportunity to knock McCain from his front-runner perch. Fournier unleashed a wild column targeting Romney and practically threw his body in front of McCain to protect his beloved candidate.
"Mitt Romney's victory in Michigan was a defeat for authenticity in politics," Fournier complained in the opening line -- and it went downhill from there. "The former Massachusetts governor pandered to voters, distorted his opponents' record and continued to show why he's the most malleable -- and least credible -- major presidential candidate," Fournier wrote, in a column that quite literally could have been written by the McCain campaign. "The man who spoke hard truths to Michigan lost."
Then again, the AP and McCain seem to enjoy a special bond. Remember when McCain and Obama appeared separately before AP editors for Q&A sessions in April? Contrasting the two events, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote: "The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist." (An AP questioner that day mistakenly referred to the Al Qaeda mastermind as "Obama bin Laden.")
During McCain's Q&A with Fournier, AP colleague Liz Sidoti welcomed the candidate effusively and even dropped a McCain catchphrase:
We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we've decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride. We even brought you your favorite treat.
McCain cooed, "Oh, yes, with sprinkles!"
It was Sidoti who, weeks later, filed an Obama hit piece about the candidate's decision to forgo public financing for his campaign. It was a piece "filled with errors of fact and judgment," as blogger Steve Benen wrote at The Carpetbagger Report
Also note that during the AP lovefest that day, Fournier again and again prodded the Republican to tag as Obama as elitist. ("You served with him for a couple of years. Did you ever see elitist behavior from him?") This, after Fournier had already written that Obama was "bordering on arrogance" and that "both Obama and his wife, Michelle, ooze a sense of entitlement." He also assured readers, "Privately, aides and associates of Obama tell stories about a boss who can be aloof and ungracious" [emphasis added].
Again, I simply cannot find any evidence that Fournier has ever written about McCain in the way he has when he personally attacked Clinton and Obama this year.
[...]
Contrast that effusive praise for McCain with Fournier's drumbeat of attacks this year on Democrats. His name-calling during the primaries was relentless. He dubbed Clinton "Slick Hillary" and claimed she might pay a price for her "selfishness" during the campaign. She was showing "desperation," wallowed in "self-pity" and "utter self-absorption." She had "more baggage than Samsonite."
Meanwhile, her husband was "long-winded, misleading and self-absorbed." Fournier's obsessive and often baseless Clinton-bashing became so pronounced that even one conservative blogger suggested he lay off.
Worse, the Dem-bashing was often based on little more than Fournier's fervent imagination. In the piece in which he dubbed Clinton "Slick Hillary," one example he presented as evidence was the fact that when asked in June 2007 whether she would appoint a union leader to be secretary of labor, she dodged the question. Of course, as The Daily Howler pointed out, that's what all candidates do. Who's going to commit to a specific cabinet appointment 17 months before Election Day?
But for Fournier, Clinton's ordinary response somehow confirmed her "mastery in the political arts of ducking and dodging," which prompted him to call her nasty names in a piece that was echoed on Meet the Press.
Oh, and this was great. Warning Clinton during the primaries about the dangers of having a candidate's character questioned by the press, Fournier noted that Al Gore got unfairly tagged during the 2000 presidential campaign for having claimed to have invented the Internet. Fournier patiently set the record straight, noting that Gore "never said he invented the Internet," that "his mistake was to place himself more centrally than warranted at the creation of the technology," and that "such nuance was lost on people who voted against him in 2000."
Silly voters. But how on earth did they come to the false conclusion that Gore ever claimed to have invented the Internet? Answer: By reading Ron Fournier.
In a way, Hillary should see Ron Fournier's unending and mendacious attacks on her as a confirmation of her strength. As
Julia at FDL said back in March of 2008, he goes most strongly after the Democratic candidate he thinks is the one most likely to beat his favored Republican candidate.