to be called on it occasionally.â 24
Joe Andrew: victim of the Republican Attack Machine.
While pretending to be bravely facing down an Attack Machine, in fact, Andrew was capitulating to an Attack Machine: the media. The mainstream media switched their allegiance from the Clintons to Obama, so Andrew did, too. Surely no one noticed the about-face more than the Clintons themselves.
For years, the media took a sadistic pleasure in reporting that Bill Clinton, a sociopathic sex offender and bully with a narcissistic disorder, was wildly popular. The media simply asserted that Clinton was beloved across the landâdespite never being able to get 50 percent of the country to vote for him, even before the country knew about Monica Lewinsky. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who worked for Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, and was paid not to lie to his client, explained to
Vanity Fair
magazine that Clinton was banished from Gore's 2000 presidential campaign because research showed that whenever Clinton was mentioned, Gore's numbers plummeted. Greenberg said that if polls showed Clinton would have helped, he would have âhad Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back.â Mind you, this was when one man could still actually carry Al Gore on his back.
But the mainstream media wouldn't quit. No matter how preposterous it was, liberals just kept telling us that the chubby kid with the big red nose whose greatest moment on the football field involved a wind instrument was âElvis.â According to Nexis, that appellation has been applied to Clinton approximately 1,000 times. In print, that is. There's no telling how many drunken cocktail waitresses have whispered it in Clinton's ear during late-night elevator assignations.
As late as 2006, Clinton could expect an exchange like this with Meredith Vieira on
The Today Show:
VIEIRA: Where do you think [Osama bin Laden] is? Everybody's wondering where the heck he is. Where do you think he is?
CLINTON: I think he's probably inâ I have no intelligence,
okay? I think he's probablyâ
VIEIRA
(interrupting):
You have plenty of intelligence.
CLINTON: No, I mean government intelligence.
VIEIRA: I know, I'm kidding. 25
But then Obama emerged from the clouds, and at long last, liberals were finished with the Clintonsâwhich was as close to actual mainstream thinking as they'D been in years. Worst of all, the media turned on Clinton using the nastiest trick of the Republican Attack Machine: They told the truth about him.
If you've ever wondered how a Democrat would fare being treated like a Republican by the media, you'll still have to wait to see it. But at least liberals stopped aggressively lying for the Clintons. It took a decade, but journalists finally noticed that Clinton getting serviced by a White House intern whose name he couldn't recall may not have been the equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. âBill's affair with Monica Lewinsky,â liberal columnist Jonathan Chait wrote in the
Los Angeles Times,
âjeopardized the whole progressive project for momentary pleasure.â 26 Chait also mentioned the Clintonsâ âlying and sleaze-mongeringââwhile still denouncing âfrothing Clinton haters.â
Having finally noticed the blindingly obvious, Chait asked, âWere the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along?â He idiotically added, âMaybe not right to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach him, but right about the Clintonsâ essential nature?â Um. It wasn't a âtrap.â It was a âquestion.â Try sending a bimbo with a thong into the Oval Office of any Republican president and feel free to ask him any questions about it later, under oath. President Bush would have probably taken the strumpet to church with him. This is where the âessential natureâ issue comes in.
In a July 2008
Vanity Fair
article about Bill Clinton by Todd Pur-dum, husband
Kathleen E. Woodiwiss
Arno Joubert
Shelly Bell
Camden Leigh
Andria Large
Margaret Peterson Haddix
Loren D. Estleman
Rita Garcia
Loren D. Estleman
Eamon Javers