We all like Hillary Clinton here. If you don’t, please be respectful.
If you haven’t had the chance, check out the daily News & Views and the Hillary Writers Circle, as well as the afternoon Hillary Hangouts and the #ImWithHer evening open threads. In addition, here are some new diaries:
teacherken: Peter Daou’s Open Letter to the Media
BFSkinner: HRC picks up endorsement of National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce
blkutter: Clinton Foundation is a charity, not a scandal
Murfster35: Perfectly done Hillary! Now, please be careful!
publius21: Media Hypocrisy And The Clinton Foundation
Learning Curve: Clinton’s Field Operation vs. Trump’s: How Large Will the Impact Be?
map: Associated Press botches Hillary Clinton report
First, thank you StarbucksGirl51 for doing such a great job filling in last weekend!
It’s nearly September and Hillary is still ahead, so the media are grumpy. They don’t have the Olympics to distract them anymore, and they need something to keep people clicking on their articles. They could just investigate the many, many concrete, well-documented things wrong with Trump’s commercial empire, but instead, they’re producing smoke around the Clinton Foundation and—you guessed it—emails.
I don’t expect any of this will actually result in Hillary’s loss. In fact, when David Atkins at Washington Monthly fretted that Hillary was only 5 points ahead of Donald based on one Reuters/Ipsos poll, I said:
The polling aggregate shows her between 6-8 points ahead. I think it could be more.
I remember the polls showing Claire McCaskill ahead of Todd Akin by an average of 6.
She beat him by nearly 16 points.
What worries me is that this shoddy both sidz!1!1! could diminish enthusiasm enough to prevent the Democrats from getting quite the wave they need to take both chambers of Congress. Because Hillary Clinton is going to need both chambers of Congress to get anything done.
Otherwise, the refrain will be way too familiar. Weaselly Paul Ryan and his band of feckless idiots will investigate every puff of smoke that emanates from President Hillary Clinton, even if they or the press have to manufacture it. Greater abuses will get ignored (such as George W. Bush deleting millions of emails, or Colin Powell destroying emails he should have preserved, and getting hacked using a commercial server) while every minor error Hillary Clinton makes will get put under the microscope. From the first week of her presidency, the press will wag their tongues saying she’s a failure, doomed to be a one-termer, doomed to lose against a competent Republican challenger in 2020 (never mind that she beats most Republicans in head-to-heads). Every wrong will be her fault. Every insinuated scandal will be real.
To me, that is the most frightening thing of all. Because I have no confidence the press will shed its pathological contempt, if not hatred, for Hillary Clinton, I want her to have at least 2 years where she can push aside the scandal mongering and get shit done. After that, she’s more than earned the right to walk away and tell the collective media and political establishment to piss off.
Meanwhile, here’s what else is going on:
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