What a difference a month makes, I guess. In today’s Washington Post Magazine, staff humorist Gene Weingarten writes about Hillary Clinton in the most flattering terms: “I would say, in my personal judgment, that Hillary Clinton not only represents womanhood at its finest, but humanity at its pinnacle.” He’s joking, of course – the gag is he’s denouncing a man for putting a personal letter from HRC for sale on Ebay, even as he’s buttering her up so he can get one, too. But for readers who, well, see Hillary as a fierce competitor with her husband in the Bald-Faced Lying Olympics (like me), and worse, forced themselves to suffer through eleven years of sticky valentines to her because it’s their job (me again), it’s a little tedious.
About a month ago, in a much more obscure place – his weekly washingtonpost.com Internet chat on June 17 – Weingarten was quite upset with the Junior Ultraliberal from New York. He exposed her for lying in her hauteur-biography. In 1993, then-reporter Weingarten broke a very interesting front-page Post story – Bill Clinton has a second half-brother that his father, Bill Blythe, sired on the road as a traveling salesman. But in one of the numerable whoppers in Hillary’s Fairy Tales (Amazon called it “Living History,” right?), she claimed that she missed her last scheduled dinner with Vince Foster so that she could comfort Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, with the news. Weingarten
notes with an understandable amount of pique that this story is a little implausible:
Virginia Kelley knew precisely what the story was going to say ten days before it was published. I know that because I told her. I reached her by phone and not only told her all the details of Bill Blythe’s life and prior marriages, but in the story I QUOTED HER AT LENGTH REACTING TO THIS INFORMATION.
Examples like this are the wellspring of “Clinton hatred.” Not simply the blatant lying, but the blatant getting away with it – that instead of the truth, our fearless media have always preferred to give the public plastic, action-figure Clintons, wonkish superheroes doing battle with those hateful hordes who care about whether their utterances match
reality.
Weingarten is no Barbara Walters today, actively seeking to issue the latest tiring example of permanent-campaign propaganda, but the piece is saddening nonetheless.