Campaign watch: Drum all in on Hillary Clinton!

TUESDAY, MARCH 29, 2016

We can't help considering his source: Last evening, Kevin Drum went all in on Hillary Clinton.

His headline was a direct quotation, but he didn't put it in quotes:

"Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest and Trustworthy"

Is Hillary Clinton fundamentally honest and trustworthy? We're not sure how to answer that question. Beyond that, we're not sure that that's the sensible question you ask about major politicians.

That's especially true in the case of this major politician. The question will be repeatedly asked about her, but it won't be asked about anyone else. There is no way to answer the question Scott Pelley recently asked her, other than to note the fact that Pelley won't be posing this question to anyone else:

“Have you always told the truth?”

Has she always told the truth? Of course she hasn't always told the truth! Neither have the other candidates. Neither has the pitiful script-reading Pelley himself.

We're dealing here with one of the major political narratives of the past quarter century. Before this script was dumped on Hillary Clinton's head by the likes of Pelley, it was dumped on Bill Clinton's head, and of course on Candidate Gore.

This script sent Candidate Bush to the White House. People are dead all over the world because people like Pelley have spent several decades pimping this much-adored press corps script.

(And yes, this script is a press corps script. In its most destructive aspects, it didn't come from the "right-wing noise machine." It came from the mainstream press.)

Pelley was pushing a decades-old script when he asked Clinton that question. We'll say the name of someone else who's up to her neck in this death-dealing conduct. That person is Jill Abramson, the source of Kevin Drum's quote.

In the body of his post, Drum quoted at length from Abramson's silly new column in The Guardian, in which she vouches for Hillary Clinton as "fundamentally honest and trustworthy." Last week, Abramson made similar statements in this interview with Politico's Glenn Thrush.

Here's the problem: Abramson has spent a good chunk of the past twenty years in the belly of the beast.

In 1997, she came to the New York Times, the spawning ground for so much of the "character war" which was waged, and is still being waged, against Clinton, Clinton and Gore. By 1999, she seemed to be plagiarizing Ceci Connolly's amazingly dishonest attack on Candidate Gore's deeply troubling fund-raising. Abramson knows all about her insider guild's long war.

In April 1999, Connolly's disgraceful 7900-word attack piece was published as a cover story in the Washington Post Sunday magazine. Five weeks later, Abramson presented what can only be called a 3700-word rewriting of the piece in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

As a major insider, Abramson understands the war which has been waged against the Clintons and Gore. Today, she pretends she doesn't. She pretends that the double standard being applied to Hillary Clinton is being applied because she's a woman.

Manhattan corporatists, please! This exact same "problem with the truth" script was endlessly dumped on the head of Candidate Gore, as Abramson understands full well. She never said a word about it, and she never will.

Abramson's column is a joke, but so is Abramson herself. People are dead all over the world because of the horrible things she and her gruesome guild members have so endlessly done.

They'll never tell you they did it, or tell you why, and their colleagues will never make them. We don't think they should be quoted unless their full story is told.