The WaPo Wants Everyone To Stop Discussing Hillary’s Email Scandals, Now
ZeroHedge.com
Earlier this week we reported that in the latest gasp of outrage by the mainstream media, and the Clinton campaign, numerous pundits unloaded on several traditional media outlets for daring to cover Hillary’s infamous multiple coughing fits. The primary target of the anger was NBC which “faced harsh criticism” forposting a 91-word report, which had no opinion or commentary aside from reporting the facts of what happened to Hillary.
Ironically, and exposing the media’s own hypocrisy and bias, some commentators such as the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza asked if we can “just stop talking about Hillary’s health now“, a few years after he had no problemstalking about John McCain’s health.
The anger culminated with a WaPo editorial by the same Cillizza, who concluded that “the questions about Hillary Clinton’s health are absurd“:
The article was heavy on the usual mainstream media rhetorical fallback devices, accusing anyone who is curious about Hillary’s health as being a conspiracy theorist, to wit:
Beyond the Clinton conspiracy theorists who believe she had something to do with Vince Foster’s death and that she was secretly responsible for everything from Y2K to the SpaceX explosion last week, it’s hard to plausibly insist, based on the available data, that Clinton is ill. Aside from the doctor’s note, she keeps a very rigorous schedule for a 68-year-old — traveling all over the country to raise money and campaign. (For the past month, she’s done a lot more raising money than campaigning.)
Cillizza went so far as “telling” what Trump “should not” do, because supposedly the WaPo is an objective arbiter in the matter:
What Trump cannot — or, at least, should not — do is continue to engage with these wacky theories that emerge out of the fever swamps on the very fringe of the conservative movement. Every single person who believes in the Clinton health conspiracy is already for Trump. What he needs to do is find ways to reach voters who have doubts about him but may carry even graver doubts about Clinton’s ability to do the job in an honest and transparent way… Every second he or his surrogates spend talking about Clinton’s health is a lost moment for his campaign. And with 63 days left until the election, he simply can’t afford that.
But most apropos, Cillizza also said that
“Clinton’s botched handling of her private email server, the questions raised by the Clinton Foundation’s foreign donors — these are ripe issues for Trump to make a case against Clinton.“
Sure enough, just days later, Trump – and more to the chagrin of the “unbiased media”, Matt Lauer did just that, leading to another furious response, which went so far as hinting Lauer himself was a member of the notorious “alt right”, a term that has come to encompass a group which is the subject of all mainstream witch hunts, and who refuse to adhere to the carefully scripted narrative by the likes of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.
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So fast forward to last night, when a WaPo editorial has once again decided to opine on what is and isn’t admissible discussion topics: this time focusing on “Hillary’s email story” saying this it is “out of control.”
Here are some highlights:
JUDGING BY the amount of time NBC’s Matt Lauer spent pressing Hillary Clinton on her emails during Wednesday’s national security presidential forum, one would think that her homebrew server was one of the most important issues facing the country this election. It is not. There are a thousand other substantive issues — from China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea to National Security Agency intelligence-gathering to military spending — that would have revealed more about what the candidates know and how they would govern. Instead, these did not even get mentioned in the first of 5½ precious prime-time hours the two candidates will share before Election Day, while emails took up a third of Ms. Clinton’s time.
Sadly, Mr. Lauer’s widely panned handling of the candidate forum was not an aberration. Judging by polls showing that voters trust Mr. Trump more than Ms. Clinton, as well as other evidence, it reflects a common shorthand for this election articulated by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick last week: “You have Donald Trump, who’s openly racist,” he said. Then, of Ms. Clinton: “I mean, we have a presidential candidate who’s deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate. That doesn’t make sense to me, because if that was any other person, you’d be in prison.”
To be sure, it’s not just Kaepernick: as we reported yesterday, a Navy vet, Lt. John Lester, made the exact same point during the “Commander in Chief” forum:
As a Naval flight officer I held the top secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearance. And that provided me access with materials and information highly sensitive to our war fighting capabilities. Had I communicated this information not following the prescribed protocols I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself who are and were trusted with America’s most sensitive information to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security.
This however was missing from the WaPo piece, which instead ploughed on with one after another strawman:
Ms. Clinton’s emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person’s would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently. Ironically, even as the email issue consumed so much precious airtime, several pieces of news reported Wednesday should have taken some steam out of the story. First is a memo FBI Director James B. Comey sent to his staff explaining that the decision not to recommend charging Ms. Clinton was “not a cliff-hanger” and that people “chest-beating” and second-guessing the FBI do not know what they are talking about. Anyone who claims that Ms. Clinton should be in prison accuses, without evidence, the FBI of corruption or flagrant incompetence.
Valid point: many have indeed accused the FBI of corruption and flagrant incompetence, however since the FBI is ultimately dominated by the DOJ, the same DOJ whose current head got her first job thanks to a 1999 appointment by, drumroll, Bill Clinton, a head who several months ago infamously met with the same Clinton for an hour long private conversation on board a plane, there is little hope of ever figuring out just how much corruption was involved in the FBI’s decision.
That, too, is irrelevant to the “editorial board”, which instead decided to focus on the Colin Powell email, which is a logical reaction, with the tiny footnote that Powell is not running for president having engaged in potentially criminal behavior: Hillary is.
Second is the emergence of an email exchange between Ms. Clinton and former secretary of state Colin Powell in which he explained that he used a private computer and bypassed State Department servers while he ran the agency, even when communicating with foreign leaders and top officials. Mr. Powell attempted last month to distance himself from Ms. Clinton’s practices, which is one of the many factors that made the email story look worse. Now, it seems, Mr. Powell engaged in similar behavior.
Which brings us to the WaPo’s advice to everyone: focus on everything else but her email server, please.
Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.
But… but.. just four days ago WaPo’s Cillizza said explicitly that “Clinton’s botched handling of her private email server, the questions raised by the Clinton Foundation’s foreign donors — these are ripe issues for Trump to make a case against Clinton.”
It seems he forgot to add that these are “ripe issues” as long as they are not used to make a “case” against Clinton.
The WaPo concludes in typical fashion – one abused by entities such as the Fed for nearly a decade – with a strawman conclusion and a disproof of a counterfactual “what if”
Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal.There is no equivalence between Ms. Clinton’s wrongs and Mr. Trump’s manifest unfitness for office.
To summarize: Trump is a “dangerous man” because, and this is true, his speech can and often does devolve to deranged ramblings, incoherent anecdotes and largely innocuous gibberish which from a man who has never polished his teleprompted appearances in public is to be expected. What Trump has never done is threaten US security, never engaged in allegedly criminal charity fraud, never had a probe into alleged corruption and transparency quashed by the FBI, and whose incompetence never led to the deaths of American public servants abroad. Hillary did, and it was far greater than a “minor email scandal.”
As for Trump’s “manifest unfitness for office”, perhaps there should have been a disclaimer here. After all as we previously reported, the biggest threat to Jeff Bezos, and Amazon, is one: “President Trump.” Bezos, who is also the owner of the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, we await for the WaPo to tell the public which Hillary “stories” are not “out of control” and have the WaPo’s permission to be discussed.