Glenn Reynolds makes an excellent point this morning at Useless Toady [1], in a column that I can’t imagine they weren’t loathe to print:
The irony, of course, is that while purporting to worry about Russian interference in American politics, by advancing this story the press was actually doing Putin’s work, sowing division and confusion through the American polity. As former Clinton pollster Mark Penn tweeted, we wasted two years, thirty million dollars, and a lot of institutional credibility at the FBI and Department of Justice over ‘a false story of Russia collusion based on oppo research that was always unsubstantiated and preposterous.’
And and why were they going out on that limb? To save Hillary Clinton’s face.
Actually, it was always a crock, dreamed up immediately after Hillary Clinton’s election-night defeat by her staff to explain away failure. As reported in the campaign book “Shattered,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Clinton refused to take responsibility for her defeat, and the day after her concession, top officials gathered “to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.… Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.”
Though this was a matter of record — the book was hardly obscure — the news media chose to run with the Russia story, which quickly morphed from “hacking” to the more nebulous “collusion,” quite credulously. They did so because they wanted it to be true, because they hoped it would hurt Trump, whom the press almost universally despises, and because it was good for ratings and clicks.
I’m not sure I buy that last part. The fact of the matter is, outside of people trapped in airports waiting for planes, CNN doesn’t have any viewers other than the extreme far left …and there just isn’t that many of them. If CNN actually gave a damn about ratings, they’d be handling things a little bit differently, don’t you think?
The real issue here was, is, and always shall be, supporting the Democrat Party line and in this case that means Hillary Rodham vonPantsuit. That’s the Hill, (pardon the pun), that the credibility of MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Etc., all died on.
It is as Rick Moran suggested yesterday…
Over at The Federalist, Jason Beale agrees [3], saying in part:
We will hear a lot about the accessibility of the information in the Mueller report. Will we all be able to read enough of it to be comfortable with the prosecutorial decisions made, and the underlying investigatory details that informed those decisions?
Everyone asking that question knows the answer is “Yes,” yet they’ll keep asking because they need a grievance to supplant, and deflect attention from, the failure of the treason narrative.
The idea is to demand a level of access and transparency that is impossible to attain — since here will always be limitations on the release of classified sources and methods, or legitimately privileged information — then create a hypothetical scenario wherein the redaction or withholding of such material is an injustice worthy of protest and suspicion.
Which in turn, is precisely why I called yesterday [4] for a complete release of the documents involved without any redaction whatsoever.
There may be legal issues to overcome to facilitate such a release, but those can be overcome by executive order in a heartbeat. The president would do well to consider it.
But, as is suggested in all these articles I’m quoting, don’t expect any Mia culpa out of the mainstream media at any point in the near future.
One really must wonder however, what form retribution from the public will take… Against both the press and the Democrats.
And here’s a parting thought;
How screwed are we, when the Press and the Democrats are so desperate to prove the president is a criminal, with no evidence?