Robert Parry: Bill and Hillary's 'Stockholm Syndrome'

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



Bill and Hillary's 'Stockholm Syndrome'

By Robert Parry
April 14, 2008


As one of the few mainstream Washington journalists who defended the Clintons when they were under often unfair attack in the 1990s, it sometimes pains me to watch how that experience shaped – or misshaped – them in their national political revival a decade later.


The two most distinctive features of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – and Bill Clinton’s attempts at a supporting role – are a seemingly bottomless pit of self-pity (excavated in part by the right-wing attack machine years ago) and the copycat use of many right-wing tactics to demonize their opponents and critics.

It’s like watching a Democratic mirror image of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove (albeit without all the creative destructive brilliance and with more whining about alleged media bias against individuals, Hillary and Bill Clinton).

Not that the Right didn’t whine over the years. A central theme in the Right’s faux populism was the long-asserted grievance about “liberal media bias.”

That right-wing complaint emerged historically in the 1950s when white Southerners grew angry about what they saw as sympathetic Northern news coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights protesters.

The “liberal bias” argument gained steam in the late 1960s and the early 1970s when mainstream TV and print journalists were blamed for undermining public support for the Vietnam War and for driving Richard Nixon from office over the Watergate scandal.

Indeed, the Republican Party’s chip-on-the-shoulder style can be traced to these alleged injustices – even if the complaints hold little water (few Americans today would defend racial segregation; U.S. military historians pin the Vietnam defeat on incompetent battlefield strategy and high casualties, not the press corps; and President Nixon was guilty in the Watergate scandal). ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/041308.html

[sniffa]

1. Good read

and so true.

:kick:

[phrigndumass]

2. Kicked & Rec'd

:hi:

[Skidmore]

3. Exactly why the revolving Bush-Clinton presidencies need to be ended.

K&R

[IndyHatedByBothSides]

4. Has Clinton really mirrored neo-con tactics?

A mirror is merely a reflection. This primary has convinced me that Hillary is the real thing.

[cali]

5. She certainly didn't hesitate to use Grover Norquist

and Ed Rollins to attack Obama.

[IndyHatedByBothSides]

6. Like I said, she doesn't mirror neo-con tactics, she initiates them