Supplemental: The jihad keeps rolling along!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2014

Hillary Clinton's speaking fee and the sick society: Once the press corps invents a theme, the corps’ “rock makers”—just click here—have always been extremely skilled at advancing that theme along.

Case in point: We were struck by a letter in today’s Washington Post. It’s the only letter on the topic of Hillary Clinton’s wealth.

On line, the letter appears above all other letters. Headline included, this is what it says:

Just like CEOs, Hillary Clinton’s compensation is too high

The article “Clinton’s fee for speech paid by a private fund, UCLA says” [news, June 28] reported that Hillary Clinton received $300,000 for a single speech at the University of California at Los Angeles. That compensation tracks with the ridiculous pay for chief executives. Even though Ms. Clinton’s UCLA speaking fee was paid by a private fund, the bottom line is that we have a sick society.

WSL, Kensington

In hard-copy editions, the letter appears beneath this headline: “Hillary Clinton’s overcompensation.”

We’d have to say the Post is ratcheting its published language. Clinton’s fee isn’t just “grotesque” and “obscene” today. Through this letter, the Post helps us see that her compensation is a sign that we have “a sick society!”

We agree with that letter in certain broad respects. We think there are obvious problems with the levels of compensation observed at the top of our various pig-piles—with the vast sums paid to our leading “journalists,” to cite an important example.

But how odd! This letter cites, and links to, last Saturday’s news report by Philip Rucker, the cub reporter from Yale. But the letter fails to mention this key point from that report:

The $300,000 in question is going to the Clinton Foundation to fund charitable concerns!

Wouldn’t you think a leading newspaper would want to include that basic fact, especially when such heated language is being thrown around? If you think that, you don’t understand the small minds and low IQs of our “mainstream press corps.”

Further question: Has the Post really received no letters challenging its jihad concerning Clinton’s wealth? We find that a bit hard to believe. But no such letters appear today, just that one overwrought cri de coeur (“cry of the corps”).

Make no mistake—this is the way our papers behave when they get on a jihad. At present, the Post is on this particular jihad. As we noted yesterday, the New York Times is not.

In his column today for The National Memo, Gene Lyons adds a fact about that UCLA speaking fee—a fee which is very high:

LYONS (7/2/14): Following ABC’s Diane Sawyer, a celebrity journalist earning more money than LeBron James—a reported $20 million a year—the Post spent last week belaboring Bill and Hillary Clinton’s lofty income, often without doing the most basic kinds of due diligence.

“Clinton’s rarefied life could be a liability in campaign,” was the headline above Philip Rucker’s June 23 report. It expressed concern that the former Secretary of State’s Washington home is “appointed like an ambassador’s mansion.”

Which, um, is precisely what it used to be.

A few days later came “How the Clintons went from ‘dead broke’ to rich.” Rucker’s third effort complained about the “grotesque” and “obscene” amounts Hillary earns giving speeches—money which, the Post neglected to point out, most often goes directly to The Clinton Foundation, the family’s widely praised charitable endeavor.

Indeed, if you visit the organization’s website, you’ll learn that President and Secretary Clinton are currently matching all gifts, “dollar for dollar.”

The Clintons are matching all gifts dollar for dollar? Is that part of our sick society too?

We’re just saying!

Back in the 1990s, Lyons literally wrote the book on the press corps’ wars against the Clintons. His first book, published by Harper’s magazine, bore this unacceptable title:

Fools for Scandal:
How the Media Invented Whitewater

Within the press corps, you’re not allowed to say that the corps invented a pseudo-scandal. For that reason, Fools for Scandal was widely ignored, despite its provenance at a major journal like Harper’s.

Lyon’s second book on the subject, written with Joe Conason, was called The Hunting of the President. For obvious reasons, major “journalists” avoided its contents too.

The press corps’ long jihad against the Clintons and Gore constitutes a truly remarkable journalistic episode. The most remarkable part of the story is the way the “career liberal” world has agreed that this long-running, viral jihad mustn’t be discussed, explored, reported, revealed, opposed or resisted.

Hillary Clinton isn’t our own favorite pol. But she may well be the next Dem nominee—and the last time the liberal world let the press attack a major Dem this way, the silence of our self-serving lambs sent George W. Bush to the White House.

They won’t tell you that either.

Despite what happened in that campaign; despite the Swift-boating of Candidate Kerry; despite the gender-trashing handed to Clinton in Campaign 2008; despite these precedents, the lambs are keeping their traps shut again. Tomorrow, we’ll continue with our basic anthropological question:

What kinds of people do this?

Still coming: Cable stylings from CNN’s Hoover and Hostin

Correction from yesterday: Hoover and Hostin appeared together with Erin Burnett on three separate programs last week.

They discussed Clinton’s troubling wealth on Monday, June 23; on Wednesday, June 25; and on Friday, June 27. True to the script, their twinned concern—from the left and the right!—pretty much never abated.