Among the Hillary Haters Can a new, professionalized generation of scandalmongers uncover more dirt
Last edited Wed Feb 18, 2015, 02:16 PM - Edit history (1)
Can a new, professionalized generation of scandalmongers uncover more dirt .
<When Tyrrell writes about Hillary Clinton, he adopts a tone of hostility one might use for an ex-wife. He once ran into Bill and Hillary at a restaurant, for example, and as he recounts it, she “glared at me like a viper about to strike a rodent.” The portrait Tyrrell paints of “the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock” is a little too personal. In his 2004 book, Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, he describes her when she first arrived in Arkansas as having “baggy” clothes and eyebrows so “thick,” they “would have collected coal dust in a Welsh mining village.” He claims that Hillary hurled “tirades and flying objects” at “Bill’s defenseless skull,” and that when they lived in the governor’s mansion, the household cook declared, “The devil’s in that woman.”>
<Tyrrell is well aware that, in anticipation of Hillary’s presumed 2016 candidacy, a new generation of journalists is trolling the archives in Little Rock and discovering new tidbits. Last year, for example, The Washington Free Beacon, a scoop-driven conservative online newspaper, uncovered an old journal that had belonged to Hillary Clinton’s close friend Diane Blair, who died in 2000. In it, Blair recounted Hillary’s having told her that for Bill, sex with the “narcissistic loony tune” Monica Lewinsky had no “real meaning,” and that a psychologist had explained that the reason he cheated was because he had been torn between two mother figures as a child>.
<Tyrrell knows that these new, younger reporters and investigators understand the insatiable appetite for Clinton gossip, and have a sense of what makes a good story. He also recognizes that they have some skills he lacks, such as pushing an item out on social media to help it go viral. Theoretically, he should be able to slip into a comfortable retirement knowing that Clinton disdain has landed in fresh, capable hands. But he can’t, because he also knows that this new generation sorely lacks “a sense of history,” a true grasp of how the Clintons fit into the whole Baby Boomer nightmare of “sexual peccadilloes, lack of regard for the truth, and inability to heroically stand up for anything.”>
<If she runs for president in 2016—as all evidence suggests she will—Hillary Clinton will face something more like a vast right-wing conglomerate. This time around, the groups will be well funded, solidly professional, and thoroughly integrated into the party establishment. America Rising, which employs more than 50 people, is a new opposition-research group that’s preparing a Clinton strategy for the Republicans far in advance of the campaign. It sends “trackers” with portable video cameras to all her events, in hopes of catching a gaffe, and uses polling and focus-group research to determine ways to define her before she has a chance, once again, to define herself. The Free Beacon has its own research division and a “war room” for what it calls “combat journalism”—most of it, recently, directed at Clinton. The small but busy Stop Hillary PAC is putting together a “grass-roots coalition” that aims (as its name suggests) to ensure “Hillary Clinton never becomes president.” Citizens United, the group that won the Supreme Court case allowing a flood of new campaign spending, is producing a movie about Clinton’s performance as secretary of state, focusing on whether she did enough to protect the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, where militants killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans in 2012. Americans for Prosperity, a group funded by the Koch brothers, turned its conference last August into a forum for a wide range of Hillary bashing.>
<An already-emerging line of attack is the framing of Clinton as a plutocrat: elite, rich, and out of touch with average Americans. In some ways, it’s the evolution of the old portrayal of the Clintons as vulgar money-grubbers, Arkansas grifters involved in an assortment of sleazy deals all the way down to trading old underwear for tax breaks. Now, by contrast, they are portrayed as operating on a much grander scale, acquiring their money from universities, charities, and shady international ventures. Whenever possible, America Rising cites the perks that go along with the Clintons’ new wealth. Last September on the group’s Web site, a story based on a Bloomberg News video appeared under a breathless headline: “$25,000 to Burn? Bill Clinton Smokes World’s Most Expensive Cigar!” (In the video, the CEO of Gurkha—whose high-end cigars retail for $25,000 a box—mentions that Clinton is one of his clients.)>
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/among-the-hillary-haters/384976/?utm_source=SFTwitter
* Sure makes one wonder just how much money is being thrown around out there to find something that sticks or to engineer a high profile attack from all fronts.
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