Monday’s troubles for Anthony Weiner are good for John McCain. Or wait, that’s the press wisdom of 2008. The press wisdom of 2016? Everything, everything, everything is bad for Hillary Clinton.
Why is an over-hyped underwear photo from the estranged and soon to be divorced husband of one of Hillary’s aides critically awful for Hillary Clinton? Because it is. Because you’re being told it is.
See? Just look at that cloud. Or listen to the oh-so-respectable Andrea Mitchell both imparting this wisdom on Today, and encouraging people with absolutely no involvement and no knowledge of the incident to discuss details of Huma Abedin’s personal life. Speculate a little, please. Make it up if you must.
This is bad for Hillary because someone talking about how Hillary’s longtime friend and assistant is having difficulties in her personal life, might just remind people of how twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton also had problems with her husband being an idiot. And you know, people just don’t know that story. It’s completely slipped their minds. Absolutely never gets brought up.
It’s bad for Hillary, because the media is ceaselessly repeating Donald Trump’s utterly inane and evidence free connect-the-dots message warning that Hillary might have started a game of telephone in which government secrets which ended up in Weiner’s all-too-absent pants. Even though the idea is patently ridiculous, that’s not enough to keep it from being bad for Hillary.
It’s bad for Hillary, because it’s something that happened. Somewhere in the world. And it can be vaguely connected to her by drawing fewer lines than required to connect Mother Teresa and Genghis Khan. But hey, it would be bad for Hillary, even if you couldn’t.
It’s bad for Hillary because the media has decided to interpret everything that happens, from the personal life of an ex-congressman to the shocking discovery that the Clintons are responsible for providing medicine for over half the people getting treatment for AIDS on the whole planet—as bad for Hillary.
Give it a week. There’ll be a “-gate” on this thing yet.
Meanwhile, the media will not bother to speculate on whether Trump’s self-serving message might not serve to remind people that Trump himself is a serial philanderer. And of course, the concern over personal assistants won’t be enough to jog the press’s already foggy memory of how Trump’s just-departed campaign manager, Paul Manafort, went out the door with, not clouds, but a whole squall line of connections to Russia in general and Vladimir Putin in particular. It won’t be enough to make them look into things that are bad for Donald. Because that would distract from the big story here, which is: everything is bad from Hillary. Film at 11.
Why is everything bad for Hillary? Because everything fits the media narrative. If you’ve pre-determined that Hillary is corrupt, then every action she or anyone related to her takes can be treated as suspect. If your story is people-just-haven’t-heard-enough-about-her-terrible-past, then anything that happens is a chance to remind them.
Everything, good or bad, is scandal fodder if your watermark for scandal is “she’s still breathing.”