Media mavens vs. reality

Bob Somerby at the (incomparable) Daily Howler lays into Margaret Carlson, who truly has it coming:

Carlson displays a rare ability to rearrange well-known facts. In one of the ugliest parts of her reprehensible “book,” she struggles and strains to help us see how disgraceful those Clintons really are:

CARLSON (page 157): With the Clintons, transactions trump relationships. Forget that and you end up in prison (Hillary’s law partner and deputy attorney general, Webster Hubbell, whom the two never called once he went off to jail), [or] dead (Hillary law partner Vince Foster, who committed suicide because he couldn’t play the “blood sport” of the White House)…

It’s hard find words for such ugly, evil writing. Did the Clintons ever call Webster Hubbell? We don’t know, but it was hardly their fault that he wound up in jail. As you know—as Carlson’s readers don’t—Hubbell pleaded guilty to defrauding the Rose Law Firm of at least $390,000. Since Mrs. Clinton was a partner at the firm, some of that money belonged to the Clintons! Carlson leaves that out of her piece; instead, she makes it sound like it was the Clintons’ fault that Hubbell landed in jail. Then they cruelly abandoned him. Regarding the Foster matter, no words can suffice. Foster didn’t use the term “blood sport;” that is another of Carlson’s embellishments. And he hardly attributed the ugly conduct described in his suicide note to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

What really struck about me about that passage from Carlson was how it turned reality on its head. In the real world, there is no evidence that transactions trumped relationships for the Clintons; such evidence-free pronouncements smack of projection. But we have grown accustomed over the past eight years to such sanctimonious Beltway froppery. Indeed, it was this same mentality -- embodied by Carlson -- which gave free rein to so much right-wing hatred and viciousness that anyone who dared to get close to the Clintons made themselves likely victims of the collateral damage.

The Clintons' enemies hatred knows no bounds, and they will even now stop at nothing to get to them. Forget that, and you wind up like Web Hubbell and Vince Foster and a hundred others.