Supplemental: NBC News loves the children of fame!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2014

Chelsea’s circle of friends: Early this morning, we noticed two quick items in the news:

Maureen Dowd is lounging somewhere en vacance. Bill Clinton is in Australia, speaking at an AIDS conference.

One of the two is said to be “wantonly acquisitive,” quite possibly out of touch. Can you guess which one it is?

Whatever! As the press corps has blown up its latest jihad about the Clintons, we’ve remembered what happened in 2000, after two years of this sort of thing.

The liberal world has been very lazy about such matters in the past. If we might quote from Barney Fife, we think liberals ought to learn to nip these things in the bud.

With that in mind, we’ll offer one more reaction to part of the recent jihad about Chelsea Clinton. Dowd expressed the complaint in her recent overblown column, the one where she didn’t luv Bill:

DOWD (7/13/14): If [Chelsea Clinton] really wants to be altruistic, let her contribute the money to some independent charity not designed to burnish the Clinton name as her mother ramps up to return to the White House and as she herself drops a handkerchief about getting into politics.

Or let her speak for free. After all, she is in effect going to candidate school. No need to get paid for it, too.

There was disgust over Politico's revelation that before she switched to a month-to-month contract, Chelsea was getting wildly overpaid at $600,000 annually—or over $25,000 per minute on air—for a nepotistic job as a soft-focus correspondent for NBC News.

According to the Clinton Foundation, most of Chelsea Clinton’s speeches actually are for free. Dowd forgot to include that.

Dowd seems to have advice for others concerning every part of their lives. Today, we’ll focus on the part of that passage dealing with NBC News.

“There was disgust over Politico's revelation?” Dowd forgets to say where this disgust occurred.

That said, Chelsea Clinton has been making decent pocket change if Politico’s report was accurate. We don’t know why NBC would have paid her that much, or why they would have hired her at all.

But then, NBC News seems to enjoy hiring children of fame. Let’s take a look at the record.

For what it’s worth, Clinton is one of three presidential offspring employed by NBC News. Jenna Bush is still a special correspondent for NBC's Today Show and a contributor to NBC Nightly News. Ron Reagan is still an MSNBC contributor.

Children of candidates get hired too! Meghan McCain was an MSNBC contributor for a while. Since last summer, Abby Huntsman has been the token not-that-conservative conservative on The Cycle, MSNBC’s 3 PM daily program.

A further guess:

If Ronan Farrow had been Ronan Sinatra, NBC would have hired him even sooner. In the mornings, Mika Brzezinski is carrying a well-known last name too.

Also, Willie Geist Jr.! And what about Luke Russert? Remember Maria Shriver?

We don’t know why NBC News does so much famous-name hiring. Some of the current people seem perfectly competent. Some of them, possibly not.

Nor do we know how much money these other children of fame get paid. Do you?

But ever since Chairman Welch established that comical Nantucket Irish Catholic Circle, NBC News has been involved in various species of odd hiring.

By established rules of the guild, you’re not supposed to notice or discuss such things. Except when a narrative starts blowing up, almost nobody does.