The Times continues the Flowers craze!

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2016

Megan Twohey's slickness:
Did Bill Clinton ever have an affair with Gennifer Flowers? Did they have a 12-year affair, the way Flowers so thrillingly said?

(Back in 1992, Flowers hauled in more than $500,000 for making the thrilling claim. By 1999, she was reduced to doing hour-long TV appearances, discussing the Clintons' many murders and telling the world that Hillary Clinton was the world's most gigantic lesbo. The gruesome Chris Matthews gushed and fawned about how super-hot she was. The mainstream press corps accepted this gruesome gong-show, which they'd enabled and peddled for years.)

Back to Bill and Gennifer! Did they ever have "sexual relations?" Did they ever "have sex?" Did Bill Clinton ever confess to such things? To having "an affair?"

If we're all still speaking English, we'd say the answer to all those questions is no. That said, it's easy enough to explain what we know about this ancient matter. Last week, it became fairly clear that the New York Times actually knows these basic facts:

Gennifer Flowers claimed that she and "her Bill" had a torrid, twelve-year affair. In 1999, under oath, Bill Clinton said they interacted sexually on one occasion. He was forced to testify under a sprawling technical definition of "sexual relations"—a definition which encompassed a lot of behavior which fell short of intercourse, or even of oral sex.

For the pitiful details, see last Friday's report.

After Clinton testified to that one interaction—sorry, to that one incident of "sexual relations" under Technical Definition One—a Clinton spokesperson said that he was talking about a single grope-and-grab session. That's the full extent of what Bill Clinton ever said.

Nothing else is known about whether these two people ever did or didn't engage in conduct that would normally be described as sexual relations. Flowers never backed away from her thrilling claim, but as we recalled last week, she is a truly horrible person. Unless we're just complete utter fools, there is zero reason to believe anything a nutcase like Flowers says.

Last week, the New York Times published several reports which indicated that they know and understand these facts. This morning, though, the Times has published a 2900-word, front-page report which wallows in the Flowers mess and grossly misdirects readers.

The reporter, Megan Twohey, works hard to disguise the known facts of this matter. It's the kind of piece which has often made us wonder if life forms like Twohey are human.

Twohey isn't some clueless kid typing in her pajamas. She's been a full-blown journalist for 18 years. In 2014, when she was still working for Reuters, she was even a finalist for a Pulitzer prize.

That said, her piece today seems baldly dishonest—and it's an example of the way the experienced "journalists" work.

Twohey is busily pimping the claim that Hillary Clinton did terrible things to the women who accused her husband of extramarital activity or of sexual misconduct. Gennifer Flowers is the clear focus of her endless piece.

As noted, Twohey's piece runs 2900 words. But very quickly, early on, we get handed this:
TWOHEY (10/3/16): Confronting a spouse's unfaithfulness is painful under any circumstance. For Mrs. Clinton, it happened repeatedly and in the most public of ways, unfolding at the dawn of the 24/7 news cycle, and later in impeachment proceedings that convulsed the nation.

Outwardly, she remained stoic and defiant, defending her husband while a progression of women and well-funded conservative operatives accused Mr. Clinton of behavior unbecoming the leader of the free world.

But privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign's aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting—tactics that women's rights advocates frequently denounce.

[...]

By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to ''sexual relations'' with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by the private investigator to brand her as a ''bimbo'' and a ''pathological liar.''
According to Twohey, Bill Clinton eventually "admitted to 'sexual relations' with Ms. Flowers." Her placement of quotation marks around the key term can only be called slippery, disingenuous—slick.

In that passage, Twohey gives the impression that she is quoting a free expression made by Clinton himself. What she's actually quoting is the term used in an extremely broad definition under which Clinton was forced to testify about his interactions with Flowers.

You can tell that Twohey knows that; she just never explains it to her readers. She also knows that, contrary to Flowers' sweeping claim, Clinton testified to having "sexual relations" (as defined in Deposition Exhibit 1) on only one occasion. Just once, in all those twelve years!

Twohey understands that. But she doesn't tell her readers until paragraph 69, deep inside her highly selective report. And when she does drop this puzzling buzzkill, she just can't help it! She gets all slick again:
TWOHEY: Mr. Clinton later admitted, during a deposition in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, that he had sex with Ms. Flowers once.
Be sure to note Twohey's slickness there:

When he testified in that deposition, did Bill Clinton really say that he "had sex" with Flowers, even on one occasion? Not as the term is normally understood! On two occasions as he spoke, he stressed the fact that he was only talking about "sexual relations" as defined in the very broad definition he'd been given by the Ken Starr gang. His spokesperson later clarified the matter further, saying that he was talking about a brief grope-and-grab session.

Twohey could have explained all that, of course, but she chose not to do so. Either that, or she couldn't find a way to explain it in the 2900 words she had to work with.

How dishonest does Twohey seem to be? Try to believe the disgraceful construction shown below, from early in her report. In this passage, she is describing the first accusation of sexual misconduct which greeted Bill Clinton's announcement, in late 1991, that he was running for president.

The charge was made by a world-class nut. Twohey never quite cops to that fact:
TWOHEY: [T]heir first taste of trouble came in a Penthouse magazine story by a rock groupie named Connie Hamzy, who claimed Mr. Clinton had once propositioned her at a hotel in Little Rock, Ark.

Mr. Clinton brushed off the story, saying that Ms. Hamzy had made a sexual advance toward him, George Stephanopoulos, the communications director of the 1992 campaign, recalled in his book, ''All Too Human.''

But Mrs. Clinton demanded action.

''We have to destroy her story,'' she said, according to Mr. Stephanopoulos.

In what became a common tactic, affidavits were collected, from an aide and two others who stated that they were with Mr. Clinton at the hotel and that Ms. Hamzy's story was false. (Contacted recently, Ms. Hamzy said she stood by her account.)

When the work was done, both Clintons called Mr. Stephanopoulos, together, to offer their thanks.
But Mrs. Clinton demanded action? Of course Mrs. Clinton demanded action!

"In what became a common tactic?" Pseudo-journalist, please!

In context, Twohey is plainly suggesting that this was part of the roughhouse conduct—the "aggressive strategy of counterattack"—in which Hillary Clinton engaged. Truly, there's nothing these life forms won't say and do to maintain the stories they love.

Let's give credit where due! Twohey is at least willing to describe Hamzy, somewhat unfortunately, as a "rock groupie." In fact, she may have been the most famous "rock groupie" in the country at that time. (A major group had written a song about her.) She was also an Arkansas-based clown whose crazy story no one believed, as Stephanopoulos' book seems to make clear.

According to Stephanopoulos, Hamzy had come up to Clinton at the hotel in question years before and she'd proceeded to flash him. In the affidavits to which Twohey refers, that's the incident to which the three witnesses were swearing.

According to Stephanopoulos, the Clinton camp was justifiably concerned about a (false) claim of this type at the start of Bill Clinton's campaign. In response, they did what anyone would have done; Stephanopoulos collected sworn statements concerning what actually happened.

Let's review! Hillary Clinton's husband had been falsely accused by a person who was widely known to be a nut. (As Stephanopoulos noted in his book, Hamzy was using the allegation to promote her upcoming appearance in Penthouse.)

In response, the Clinton campaign collected sworn statements as to what had really occurred. In the full context of this morning's report, Twohey makes this thoroughly sensible conduct sound like some sort of nefarious attack. Truly, these life forms will do and say anything to keep treasured stories alive.

Almost surely, Hillary Clinton knew that Hamzy's claim was false. Almost surely, she assumed the same about Flowers' grossly improbable claim of a 12-year affair.

(Uh-oh! In 1990, Flowers had sworn, in an affidavit, that she never had sexual relations with Bill Clinton. The claim had originally been made as an act of revenge by Larry Nichols, a crazy former state employee who had been fired by Governor Clinton for making 140 phone calls to the Nicaraguan contras on the state of Arkansas' dime. When Nichols made his charges—he named four other women who he said had had sex with Clinton—Flowers and the other women all swore that his claims were false. Twohey didn't find space to mention these facts in her 2900 words, though they're all in Stephanopoulos' book. If we might borrow from the late Richard Ben Cramer, life-forms like Twohey will do "what it takes" to foul our White House campaigns.)

Please understand—Hillary Clinton almost surely knew that her husband had had affairs. In his 2007 biography, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein reported that Bill Clinton had had a long and serious affair with a Little Rock woman in the years leading up to his 1992 campaign. Bernstein describes the painful, pained negotiations which led to the Clintons' decision to maintain their marriage.

Unless Bernstein's reporting was crazily wrong, Hillary Clinton knew that her husband had had affairs. Presumably, though, she didn't believe the crazy stories of local clowns like Hamzy and Flowers.

Today, though, a bottom feeder at the Times is working hard to keep these treasured old chestnuts alive. She picked and chose her facts with care to keep her readers from understanding either one of these episodes.

In the case of Flowers, Twohey worked slickly to keep her readers from knowing what Bill Clinton actually testified. In the case of Hamzy, she made it sound like defending oneself against a false charge is some sort of "counterattack" against the person bearing false witness.

It's very hard to come to terms with the behavior of people like Twohey. Most people couldn't imagine doing such things. It simply doesn;t occur to us that others do.

For the record, Twohey grew up with all the advantages. She went to Evanston Township High, then Mother and Father sent her to Georgetown. She graduated in 1998. Eighteen years later, she's crawling on her belly through a barrel of misleading, slick old slime.

Amazingly, the New York Times has played these games forever. There is no chance they'll ever stop, or that career players will ever challenge their endless conduct. Even in the face of a possible President Trump, their slippery conduct goes on and on. As we've told you:

Trumpism started at the Times long before the world ever dreamed of a Candidate Trump.

Normal people don't understand that life-forms like this exist. Twohey has done a very slick thing, as she did last year with Michael Barbaro in a semi-sliming of Trump.

Who the heck is Twohey's editor? Is her editor human?

19 comments:

  1. Last I heard, Bill Clinton is not running for President. Unless it can be proven that Hillary murdered one of these women, I doubt any of this slime will stick to her. She is, after all, the victim of Bill's infidelity, real or imagined.

    People may not understand the ins and outs of politics or the economy or foreign relations, but they do understand the nuances of social situations. They will not blame Hillary for this, no matter how sneaky the Times tries to make her seem.

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    Replies
    1. "They will not blame Hillary for ____________." Unfortunately, this is not often true, for any event.

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    2. They didn't even blame Bill Clinton when he was accused the last time around.

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  2. Over the weekend, Book TV ran an appearance of David Cay Johnston at Politics ad Prose in support of his new book on Trump. (He is reporter specializing in tax issues. A registered Republican (he says), he writes for the Daily Beast and appears frequently on numerous MSNBC shows. With his gray hair and beard, I might mistake him for Charlie Pierce, if he weren't so intelligent.)

    In answer to a question, Johnston offered a brief observation on the average journalist, as if to explain the nature of the beast. He said that while most journalists do a good job of asking this or that source for one side of a story, then asking someone else for another side, they are not good at understanding a subject to any great depth.

    He also said (Holy coal mines, Batman!) that journalism is one of the most rapidly dwindling white-collar occupations in the economy. He told of being in the Times Washington Bureau newsroom that week and wondering, "Where is everybody?"

    He summed up by laying it all on the damned readership. People don't want deep investigative reporting anymore, he said. (Did they ever?) They don't even want the truth. They want their comfortable little views of the world validated by their chosen cable networks, including the one regularly pelted by this blog. (Could it be these big guns are aimed at the wrong target?)

    The old vaudeville signs said it all: "Cute Girls and Catchy Tunes." Throw in free beer and they'll listen to anything, even a singing frog.

    Right, Charlie?

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  3. It may be the case that "there is zero reason to believe anything a nutcase like Flowers says." OTOH there is also zero reason to believe anything Clinton says about his sex life. So, where does that leave us?

    BTW Clinton is a slick lawyer. If the entire extent of his "sex" with Gennifer were a single hug or grope, he could have said that. In other words, he may have specified that broad definition to mask the fact that he did do something major with Gennifer.

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    Replies
    1. This is all nonsense. Go away.

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    2. " ... where does that leave us?" You mean you and all the other despicable trolls"? Probably from whatever rock you crawl out from. Why should anything change ?

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    3. Now now...David in Cal CLEARLY has been David in the Courtroom, and witnessed Bill Clinton's slickness as a lawyer. My bad... David is making shit up again. Of course, no one believes anything A NUT CASE like David in Cal says. Plus,he can't read. Clearly he must be fantasizing about some acts done with Flowers in his mind to speculate about "something major" when the record is clear what Bill Clinton's testimony was, and ALL THE TROUBLE he got in because of that lovely Linda Tripp and her inside baseball she was playing with Ken Starr and Lucyanne Goldberg... HOPING for some talk of making it to THIRD BASE or a HOME RUN, David? A mind is terrible thing to waste. To late for you, I see.

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    4. David - He may have fingered her vagina. That just shows what a lousy president he was.

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    5. Gunnery Sgt. Skip MahoneyOctober 4, 2016 at 1:53 AM

      The flopsweat GOP does it again!

      From today's redoubtable The Resurgent:

      If you are a regular reader of the Drudge Report, you’d never know today that somebody (Marla Maples?) leaked Trump and Maples’ 1995 tax returns to the New York Times, but you would know that Bill Clinton has a love child.

      That’s the main story, as of this writing, on the Drudge Report.

      If you have been a long time reader of the Drudge Report, however, you’d know that in 1999 Matt Drudge debunked the story of the exactly same person claiming to be Bill Clinton’s love child.

      Fun fact: Back in 1999, @DRUDGE_REPORT broke the story that the paternity test proved he *WAS NOT* Bill Clinton's son pic.twitter.com/rZ23J4inCt

      — Justin Green (@JGreenDC) October 3, 2016

      Must this year make everything more stupid? There are now going to be people who actually believe Bill Clinton has a love child who the same site they got the news from, less then ten years ago, showed wasn’t Clinton’s love child.

      Sure, Clinton might have an illegitimate child running around out there. But it is not this guy. How do I know? The Drudge Report told me so in 1999.

      The troll must be so proud of his tribe.

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    6. Once liberals sympathized with the poor and powerless. Old-time liberals would have taken the side of Gennifer against the most powerful man in the world. Today's so-called liberals look down on Gennifer as "trailor park trash."

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    7. You are such a pathetic loser. Troll is too good a name for you.

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    8. http://www.nationalmemo.com/hunting-the-clintons-the-true-story-behind-gennifer-flowers-500k-payday/

      "Musicians and club owners who had worked with Flowers described her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume falsely proclaimed her a graduate of a fashionable Dallas prep school she’d never attended. It also listed a University of Arkansas nursing degree she’d never earned and membership in a sorority that had never heard of her. Her agent told the Democrat-Gazette that contrary to her claims, Flowers had never opened for comedian Rich Little. A brief gig on the Hee Haw television program had come to a bad end, the agent would later confirm, when Flowers simply vanished for a couple of weeks with a man she’d met in a Las Vegas casino—and then concocted a tale about havingbeen kidnapped. She had never been Miss Teenage America. Even her 'twin sister Genevieve' turned out to be purely a figment of Flowers’s imagination."

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    9. David October 3 7:23PM - Clinton didn't specify the definition. Plaintiff's counsel specified it. After all the discussion, do you really not know that?

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    10. Characterizing Flowers as "poor and the powerless" is the ultimate in false equivalence.

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  4. I voted for Bernie and was going to vote for Jill Stein because I’m in a deep blue state and so thanks to the genius of “The Founders” with their Electoral College crap, my vote can’t affect the outcome. But trolls like David in Cal have reminded me that the Republican Party is the most despicable and most dangerous major party in the Western world, if not the entire world. So, I’ll be voting for Clinton and for every Democrat in hopes that Republicans lose by the widest possible margin. All who believe in democracy MUST do the same.

    Maybe trolls like David are really planted around the web by Hillary’s campaign to remind fence-sitting Bernie voters like me just how disgusting the Republican Party truly is. If this was their strategy, well, I must say, it worked in my case. So then, thanks goes I guess to the Hillary campaign(and David) for needed the wake up call. I’m with her now.

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    1. Why do care if Dems win by the widest possible margin? If you want the Dems to support policies closer to Sanders/Greens AND you are in a deep blue state, clearly you should support Stein to force Dems to move your way next time around, no?

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