In today's column, Paul Krugman discusses the bizarre Democratic primary and the steady stream of hatred or character assassination directed at Hillary Clinton -- not by rightwingers, but by Obama supporters.
Krugman is far from the only one who has noticed Obama supporters engaged in the alarming practice of mindlessly chanting hate-filled myths about the 'evil and corrupt Clintons,' myths that have been relentlessly manufactured by Republicans. Many of the guilty are apparently too young to remember, too lazy to research, and too busy ridiculing and mocking those who do remember to know that they are the products of “the Clinton rules of journalism,” which, by one definition, means "you can say any goddamn thing you want—as long as you say it about the Clintons."
Paul Krugman:
I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.
What’s particularly saddening is the way many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of “Clinton rules” — the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent. . .
During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.
And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.
. . . [I]f history is any guide, if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, he will quickly find himself being subjected to Clinton rules. Democrats always do. . Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.
Hillary Clinton Misogyny MSNBC Race, Class, Gender Paul Krugman Barack Obama News David Shuster Politics Media Bias Clinton Rules
