Remember how in 2000, Bush was the one that everyone wanted to have a beer with, and Al Gore was stiff and untrustworthy? While the consequences of Bush’s radical tax cuts for the rich were ignored, somehow Al Gore wanting to protect Social Security by putting it in a metaphorical “lockbox” was the butt of many jokes in the media.
Bush could do no wrong by the media, no matter how many times he couldn’t put enough words together to form a complete sentence describing his proposals, and Al Gore was the stiff intellectual because he actually described his proposals in detail.
Well, the same thing is now happening to Clinton. After months and months of the media playing along with the right wing propaganda machine and having lengthy debates with right wingers about if and when Clinton will be indicted, FBI director Comey said no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against Clinton. But what are the headlines in most of the major news outlets? Clinton was “Extremely Careless”!
Instead of talking about how absolutely wrong and dishonest the right wing has been, the media is going along once again with right wing talking points that Clinton lied about sending or receiving marked classified emails. Comey was very ambiguous as to whether Clinton participated in any of the email “chains” after the emails were marked classifed. Here’s what he said:
From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.
…
Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information
So does he mean a very small number out of the 110 out of the 30,000 emails? This could be 1 or 2 out of the 30,000. And how far did these email “chains” extend? Did someone in these “chains” mark these as classified after Secretary Clinton saw the email?
I actually heard some reporters on MSNBC claim Clinton lied about handling classified emails when she said she did not handle marked classified emails, even though the director never said Clinton handled the “very few” emails while they were marked classified.
So Clinton was going to be persecuted by the media no matter what the FBI director said.
Just as the media turned on Al Gore and made him out to be boring and stiff and too intellectual, they have now turned on Clinton and will emphasize how untrustworthy she is. They may not treat Trump as the guy you would want to have a beer with, but they have set their course for the campaign to make sure Clinton gets Gore’d.
The main stream media deserves as much of the blame for our declining democracy as the right wing propaganda machine.
The media owes Clinton a public apology for every time they interviewed a right winger about how Clinton would be indicted.
