Subject: MUST READ FROM MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA: When There's Nothing Left To Uncover About Hillary
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 12:10:59 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

When There's Nothing Left To Uncover About Hillary
<http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2014/09/23/when-theres-nothing-left-to-uncover-about-hilla/200850>Why
1971 Letters Don't Qualify As Damaging NewsBlog
<http://www.mediamatters.org/blog>››› 1 hour and 6 minutes ago ››› ERIC
BOEHLERT

If the conservative site Washington Free Beacon is still paying a
Republican opposition research firm $150,000 a year to dig up dirt on
Hillary Clinton, editors might want to renegotiate their contract. Because
if Free Beacon's latest installation of its deep-dive into Clinton's past
is any indication, GOP investigators have already run out of leads.

The Free Beacon news flash? Back in 1971, Hillary Clinton (then Hillary
Rodham) corresponded twice with Saul Alinsky, a liberal organizer and
activist of renown in the 1930s, `40s and `50s. More recently, Alinsky's
been immortalized as a bogeyman by conservatives who for years have waged a
fruitless campaign to portray President Barack Obama as a radical-left
acolyte of Alinsky's.

And now the brief Clinton correspondence from more than 40 years ago is
being trumpeted: "The letters obtained by the Free Beacon suggest that
Clinton experimented more with radical politics during her law school years
than she has publicly acknowledged." (Wait, Clinton's a secret commie who's
also tight with Wall Street? Very confusing.)

Some conservatives on Monday strained to explain why any of this matters,
and why their weird, hard-to-understand obsession with someone like Alinsky
ought to be of importance in American politics today. The Free Beacon's
meaningless revelation set off lots of Twitter chuckling, but the story
itself went nowhere, much to the dismay of Rush Limbaugh, and for good
reason: There's no there there. (Favorite line: Hillary's letters were
"paid for with stamps featuring Franklin Delano Roosevelt.")

Keep in mind the attempts to attack Clinton by invoking Alinsky are nothing
new. Back during the 2008 presidential campaign, conservatives tried to
make hay out of the fact that Clinton had written a senior thesis about the
author.

After the story failed to make an impact outside the conservative bubble, a
Free Beacon editor claimed the article was never meant as a Hillary gotcha.
Instead, they were simply sharing "primary documents" with voters. I guess
that's one way to spin a swing-and-a-miss.

The whiff highlights what's becoming a growing problem for the right-wing
media industry: After operating under the microscope during her thirty-year
public career, there's not much about Hillary Clinton we don't know or that
hasn't been dissected. And there's probably not much more that we're going
to learn in the coming years, considering that trolling the Clintons has
been an established far-right cottage industry that dates back to the early
1990s.

Based on three decades in the spotlight as a governor's wife, the first
lady, a U.S. senator, presidential candidate and then secretary of state,
there's simply no other public figure active in the U.S. political arena
today (possibly other than the one who currently occupies the Oval Office)
who's been more scrutinized by the media, who's endured more "scandal"
coverage, who has been thoroughly trashed by the partisan press opponents,
and who still comes out the other side marching on.

So now what?

If Hillary dominates the political landscape in the coming election cycle,
how does the right-wing media pretend they're uncovering all kinds of new
and startling facts about her past, her policies, her influences and her
alliances? How does detailing a couple of letters Clinton wrote to a labor
organizer 43 years ago fill the right-wing media need for fresh, new, and
scary Clinton revelations?

Even when small nuggets of new Clinton information are unearthed, there's
no evidence this year that voters and news consumers care about minor
events or recollections from Clinton's professional past, especially ones
that occurred decades ago. Increasingly, the spectacle of collecting those
snippets seems more like right-wing media intramural sport than it does
attempts at newsgathering.

Still, the Ahab-like quest continues.

Recall that back in February Fox News hosted discredited smear merchant
Kathleen Willey for a session with Megyn Kelly to bash Hillary Clinton.
Willey's synonymous with her unfounded allegations of Clinton skulduggery
from the 1990s, when she claimed Bill and Hillary may have killed her cat,
her husband, and Vince Foster. And that they were definitely behind the
burglary of Willey's home.

More recently, Clinton-bashing authors this summer tried to generate some
momentum with books claiming to blow wide open the truth about Hillary and
her supposedly shocking and immoral ways. The titles included Daniel
Halper's Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine,
Edward Klein's Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas, and Ronald
Kessler's The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden
Lives of Presidents

But they all shot blanks.

Halper's book embodied the struggle of uncovering anything new (and
verified) about Hillary. A supposedly detailed dive into Clinton's
political life, Halper came up with very little and he was reduced to
gossiping about Bill Clinton's sex life on national television in hopes of
drumming up sales interest in his book. (That part didn't work either.)

Edward Klein did score a commercial success with his oddball, fiction-like
account of a villainous Bill and Hillary Clinton who came across in his
book more as soap opera characters than American dignitaries. But no, the
book didn't contain any new information about Hillary. At least not any
that a lucid reader would consider to be accurate.

And then there was Kessler, who had previously accused Hillary Clinton of
"pathological lying" and pushed the conspiracy theory that she was
responsible for Vince Foster's suicide. In his new book, Kessler apparently
uncovered so little new material about the former first lady that he
essentially copy-and-pasted passages from his previous books in order to
fill out the First Family Detail manuscript.

Hillary's determined opponents in the far-right press won't ever stop
attacking her or making wild allegations. (That's what passes for editorial
content.) But as a possible Clinton campaign awaits on the horizon, those
opponents must privately concede that after all these years and after all
those hollow allegations, if uncovering innocuous letters from 1971 is what
passes for Hillary news, then the oppo research cupboard is running bare.