Sam Smith - By the time the Clintons came along I had covered politics for over three decades, with a special interest in corruption. I had lived in corrupt towns like Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis yet had never seen broad corruption so broadly accepted, especially by the national media who turned the Clintons into false heroes of the national liberal constituency.
Hillary Clinton's recent grossly narcissistic misinformation about her campaign reminded me of this strange period when politics was converted into a false fantasy rather than the grim reality one found understood, say, by voters in corrupt Philly and Boston.
I blame television for much of this. Before TV, politicians had histories, relationships, and habits well known to average voters. But on the air, these could be easily be replaced by images, fantasies, and falsehoods that needed no support greater than a script. Jack Kennedy was the first president to benefit from TV, but Clinton was the first to use it to successfully rewrite his story, a skill also used by his wife.
So keep this in mind as you watch the sick, false saga of Donald Trump. The one thing you can say in his behalf is that he wasn't the first president to bludgeon reality to death.
2 comments:
The Clintons have demonstrated conclusive and repeated evidence of all the things Trump is accused of doing and being. Yet the "evidence" of Trump's malfeasance is mostly accusatory bluster, hysteria, and guilty by association - all things commonly thought to be the bane of liberal thought and decency. Or so we were told during the McCarthy era and the Cold War.
I wonder why that is...
Fillmore and Fremont added together in 1856 would have handily beaten Buchanan. Fillmore was not necessarily a spoiler, perhaps it was Fremont, although Fillmore's positions were untenable. The similar inability of Sanders and Clinton to make common cause delivered the election to Trump. But here the untenable ex-presidential Clintons controlled the major party to stop the more widely popular Sanders whose appeal to independents and former Republicans makes the Clinton Dems about as insular as Fillmore's party in 1856.
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