Campaign watch: Kevin Drum batters Judicial Watch!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014

Gives mainstream "press corps" a pass: Recently, we told you that Kevin Drum is our favorite blogger.

Oh wait! We said it earlier today. This afternoon, we're going to tell you the other side of the story.

The analysts screamed when Uncle Drum penned the complaint shown below about the latest scandal or pseudo-scandal surrounding Candidate Clinton. Truth to tell, the highlighted claim made the analysts writhe:

DRUM (2/24/16): This is all courtesy of Judicial Watch, the Scaife-funded outfit that brought us so much endless Clinton paranoia in the 90s. To this day, most people—including an awful lot of reporters who ought to know better—still don't realize just how deliberate and manufactured the effort to destroy Bill Clinton was back then. Despite thousands of hours and millions of dollars of investigation, virtually none of the "scandals" turned out to be real. They were just an extended effort to throw mud at the wall and see if something stuck. Ironically, the only one that did stick had nothing to do with any of the mud. It was just an old-fashioned sex scandal.

As always, Candidate Clinton is surrounded by scandals, alleged scandals or pseudo-scandals. As Drum notes, it has ever been thus.

The current batch of alleged scandals and alleged character flaws is extremely serious. Candidate Clinton has been badly damaged by the past two tears of scandal pursuit—scandal pursuit which has been met by the liberal world's standard refusal to push back or fight. This means that, if she is the nominee, Candidate Trump could win.

In that post, Drum makes a peculiar statement. He says "an awful lot of reporters who ought to know better still don't realize just how deliberate and manufactured the effort to destroy Bill Clinton was back then," meaning back in the 1990s.

Everything is possible, of course, as we frequently note. But on what basis are we supposed to assume that Drum's assessment is true?

Much of what happened in the 1990s tilted toward utterly phony. Starting in March 1999, the vicious attacks against Clinton and Clinton were seamlessly transferred to Candidate Gore, Bill Clinton's chosen successor.

Both here and at our companion site, we spent years producing material about the nature of those press corps attacks, the attacks which sent Bush to the White House. Are we supposed to believe that the nation's reporters don't know that their war against Gore was fake and phony, a press corps confection, a stampede of payback, a journalistic hoax which went one percent too far?

(You've never read a published account of Chris Matthews' astonishing conduct during the twenty months of Campaign 2000. Is that because "an awful lot of reporters who ought to know better" still don't know what Matthews did? Really? Can that possibly be what we're supposed to think?)

People like Drum have always refused to discuss this part of our recent history. He's joined in that decision by everyone who works at Mother Jones, a career journalist hive.

For that reason, many liberals don't understand the nature of that decade's attacks, first on Clinton and Clinton, then on Candidate Gore.

Liberal voters may be clueless about this basic history. Are we really supposed to believe that the nation's major reporters are clueless about it too? Just because Drum has typically chosen to duck these topics, are we supposed to think that he doesn't understand the scope of what occurred during that era?

In our last post, we mentioned the mainstream press corps' ubiquitous code of silence. A vast silence surrounds the press corps' conduct during the 1990s, including in the writing of Drum.

Drum's commenters don't seem to be mentioning that peculiar highlighted claim in their reactions to this new post. We the liberals are very gullible when it comes to the trust we place in our intellectual leaders.

Members of The Other Tribe have always unwisely believed in Rush. Relentlessly, we the liberals believe in our "leaders" too.

Congenitally, we seem unable to come to terms with the decade in question. We simply refuse to come to terms with the history of that era.

Al Gore said he invented the Internet! He gave us Willie Horton! He lied about the union lullaby! About the cost of his dog's arthritis pills! He said that he inspired Love Story, that he discovered Love Canal! Al Gore hired a woman to teach him how to be a man!

Do we still, in our pitiful way, think those repetitive claims by the nation's reporters were actually made in good faith? Do we think "an awful lot of reporters" still don't know better?

Can this possibly be what we still believe? If so, please don't ask who gave us Trump. Candidate Trump sprang full-blown from us, from our massive unparalleled tribal refusal to function.

A lot of reporters don't know any better! Would that include people like Mika and Joe? Is that what our team believes?