Reading the Sean Wilentz Rolling Stone piece this morning, this paragraph just below stood out. I am also tired of explaining to friends, Bernie supporters, Clinton supporters, libertarians and other unwashed masses of Hillary haters, that “No, she isn’t dishonest. That’s the NYT and Fox News you’ve been reading.
Rolling Stone, though, does a nice job of tracing the roots of that to Bill Clinton’s terms of office and attacks by the New York Times. Full confession: I am a charter subscriber to the Rolling Stone (it came free one day in the mail) and now pay the Gray Lady to read online.
The administration also persevered despite baseless vitriolic attacks on First Lady Hillary Clinton. A chief source of the character assassination, interestingly, was The New York Times, which legitimized the caricature of Clinton in the political mainstream, distant from the fever swamps of the right and left. William Safire, the former Nixon propagandist, filled his Times columns with anti-Hillary calumny, most notably in a column in 1996, when, with no apparent evidence, he blasted her over the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, calling her "a congenital liar" who "had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends."
Under editorial-page editor Howell Raines, the Times became something of a whipping post for the Clintons. Maureen Dowd outdid herself and everyone else on Hillary (as she continues to do today), writing scores of columns attacking the Clintons as a couple – "like a virus or an alien that needs a host body to survive" – and Hillary above all, as a power-hungry cynic and a betrayer of feminism who with her husband had "chosen tactics over truth with such consistency that it's impossible to accept anything they say." Thus was established the abiding myth of Hillary Clinton as a deceitful harridan, a fiction that seems to have become hard-wired in our politics despite all the evidence to the contrary, including the recent report by the distinguished and authoritative fact-checking project PolitiFact that Clinton was the most truthful candidate, Democratic or Republican, in the 2016 primary season. (my emphasis)
And from the Gray Lady herself, excerpted from the purple prose of a Safire Column from 1996.
Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady -- a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation -- is a congenital liar.
Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.
…
Her closest friends and aides, under oath, have been blatantly disremembering this likely obstruction of justice, and may have to pay for supporting Hillary's lie with jail terms.
Again, the lying was not irrational. Investigators believe that damning records from the Rose Law Firm, wrongfully kept in Vincent Foster's White House office, were spirited out in the dead of night and hidden from the law for two years -- in Hillary's closet, in Web Hubbell's basement before his felony conviction, in the President's secretary's personal files -- before some were forced out last week.
...
Therefore, ask not "Why didn't she just come clean at the beginning?" She had good reasons to lie; she is in the longtime habit of lying; and she has never been called to account for lying herself or in suborning lying in her aides and friends….
Web Hubbell, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Rose Law Firm and the entire, sad litany of the ever-morphing Ken Starr investigation. The now disgraced Starr would later be investigated for the sexual abuse scandal at Baylor University, would write what Salon called the $70 Million Dollar Bag of Garbage taking longer than Bill Clinton’s time in the oval office, and not over until 2001. Net result, zip except to Bill Clinton’s legacy and to Hillary Clinton’s political future.
Rolling Stone wants you to know that these attacks are “baseless” even though the full op-ed piece is littered with charges.
Maureen Dowd, on the other hand, seems to have a serious hate-on for the Clintons. Here’s Media Matters take.
A Media Matters analysis of Dowd’s columns found that 72 percent of her work between November 1993 and June 2014 included negative tropes against the Clintons, including regularly portraying Hillary Clinton as an unlikeable, power-hungry phony. In the year following, all 17 of Dowd’s columns with significant mentions of Clinton were negative. Dowd regularly relies on sexist tropes to describe Clinton, including that she is a “granny” who “can’t figure out how to campaign as a woman” and suggesting she “should have run as a man” during the 2016 election. Hypocritically, Dowd has also accused her of “cry[ing] sexism too often.”
And Norm Ornstein on Dowd.
It’s been suggested on Quora that Dowd is doing this simply making a name for herself as a contrarian. But 21 years? Isn’t that is pushing it? Suffice it to say that Dowd was and is continuing the false meme of dishonesty associated with anyone in Washington named Clinton.
Fox News, it goes hardly without saying, has been relentless in its pursuit of every thread whether that thread has any root in reality or not. Citing, for example the ever-reliable Drudge Report that a series of falls over the last 7 years was indication of...wait for it…drug problems!
From Crooks and Liars
Fox 'News' Crack Doctor Diagnoses Hillary Clinton's Imaginary 'Illness'. Crooks and Liars’ Karoli Kuns drolly comments
“This is your daily reminder of the Fox Effect. It begins on the wingnut sites and social media, when someone dredges up something from the past and makes it look terrible, makes a lot of noise about it, and advances it up the food chain to that bastion of objectivity, Fox News.”
Across this sea of troubles, Hillary Clinton seems to riding serenely over the waves to victory, in spite of Dowd, Safire and Fox News.