In a move that is either reckless or clueless, Hilly Clinton’s family foundation has decided to continue accepting money from foreign governments and oligarchs, despite the practice having been revealed in a series of damning reports. The organization announced that it might reconsider “should Secretary Clinton decide to run for office,” which is a pretty funny thing to say about a woman who is hiring staff, picking out a headquarters and who has been seeking the highest office in the land for the better part of a decade. If there were some concern about the ethics of what is clearly a shady practice, wouldn’t the correct answer be to stop now and consider resuming if Clinton opts not to run? -Fox News
Here’s a tip: If you are a politician and find yourself publicly questioning the patriotism of a foe’s dead, World-War-II-veteran grandfather, you’re probably having a bad day. And former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was certainly having a bad day on Thursday. Giuliani wrapped things up on “The Kelly File,” where he expanded his argument that President nObama doesn’t love America to include nObama’s family. An incredulous Megyn Kelly asked why Giuliani wasn’t worried about this being used against his party, to which Giuliani said it was okay because he was “right about this.” As if rightness were ever the ultimate defense in politics! Even if the president was having Saul Alinsky séances in the attic of the White House with Bill Ayers, Giuliani would of course have still harmed his party and one of its potential nominees, Scott Walker, who was present when Giuliani made the original remarks.
Consider the speed with which embattled DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz pounced on Giuliani's remarks. She was probably moving so fast because she was thrown clear from the car crash of her Senate campaign launch. (Yikes.) The president and his party love this conversation. Just as they reveled in Donald Trump’s peak birtherism, they are doubtless squealing with delight at the thought of having a conversation about a thing of no importance that manages to fire up Democrats and further depict Republicans and mean, nasty nativists. Would you rather have to defend the administration’s ISIS and Libya policies or your “Greatest Generation” grandpa? Yup.
Two lessons for Republicans in this: First, it doesn’t matter. The president has 100 weeks left in office. His upbringing, psychology and motivations will be an interesting topic for historians. They are not germane to current politics. It’s not as if NBC News and the New York Times didn’t know about his radical associates and will now drop what they’re doing for a five-part series on Jerimiah Wright. They know. They do not care. Republicans, much like Hilly Clinton in 2008, have often made the argument that nObama sees America differently – as a peer of other nations, not God’s anointed light in the world. nObama won anyway. He won in part because of Trump and others who made the argument about nativity and upbringing and not policy.
One proves his opponent is a socialist by talking about his programs, not his high school friends. Maybe with some white dude, but not with the first African-American president. Like a five-gallon bucket of heavy-duty primer, accusations of racism cover a lot of imperfections. nObama won twice and he will serve out his last 700 days in a deepening haze of adoration from his supporters and the press. Giuliani being right or wrong will make no difference. “But what about the media double standard?” they cry. Democrats, including nObama, did go substantially unpunished for calling George W. Bush unpatriotic. The same goes when the president makes explicit and implicit claims that his rivals are unpatriotic for opposing his plans to increase taxes and spending. But complaining about media bias is like complaining about the fact that it was below zero this morning in Washington: It’s doesn’t change the reality. Just put on your booties and start walking.
Which brings us to the second lesson for the GOP: Just win, baby. The next election will not be contested on the question of whether Barack nObama loves America. It will in all likelihood be contested on whether the Clintons can convince voters that it would be sexist to oppose Hilly, for all her flaws. Put another way, it will depend on whether the Republican nominee can make the case that having the first female president is not worth the baggage and policies she will be lugging with her. But neither side will be making much of an argument about nObama, other than its time for a change. As Walker tries to get astride a fast horse and seriously challenge Jeb Bush, he can ill afford to look like someone who lacks good judgment. Walker’s response in an Thursday appearance on CNBC was fine, saying that he wouldn’t offer a judgment, but that both Giuliani and nObama could speak for themselves. But it won’t end there.
Walker now heads to Washington for the National Governors Association winter meeting where he will hear countless calls from the left, the press and some fellow Republicans to do what John McCain and Mitt Romney felt forced to do in similar situations: extoll at length the president’s love of country and marvelousness as a person. That always sounds like an admission of guilt. What Republican voters want to see is a fighter, not another version of the previous two campaigns, which were often mincing rather than marching. Maybe the Republicans running for president should start carrying air horns to blow any time they hear something offensive said about the president. But seriously, anyone who wants to criticize nObama for what he thinks or feels rather than what he does shouldn’t be within earshot of any of the frontrunners. And the frontrunners had better get serious about avoiding their company, no matter how rich they are. -Fox News
Beyond Nuclear: The Increasing Threat from Iran
He was a bona fide and veteran foreign correspondent. I knew him at CBS, where I am now a contributor, a young man but already a person of stature, known for daring and judgment. He was different from the clichés of his job: He didn’t have movie-star looks or a polished baritone. But he had guts, flair, the mind of a reporter and a clear, clean writing style that, on inspection, was more than clear and clean.
All CBS, the next day, was in mourning. “Oh my God, this place just dissolved,” said his “60 Minutes” colleague Lesley Stahl. “Everybody here loved Bob Simon.” She had just come from a meeting of the show’s staff. “Everyone spoke, from the control room to reporters to editors to assistants, and everybody said basically the same thing, which is what he really wanted to be was a regular guy. . . . He didn’t want to be a big TV star, he didn’t want the trappings.” He wanted to walk the streets unrecognized.
“He was no-bull about people and things,” said John Reade, a former CBS News producer who worked with Simon for three decades. “His attitude toward news was ‘Get a load of this!’” It wasn’t indignation or “Are you kidding me?” It was, as Mr. Reade put it, “Get a load of this, it’s beautiful!”
He wasn’t dramatic or self-valorizing. “He didn’t take unnecessary chances, he took necessary ones,” said Mr. Reade. He protected his crew. “Television is a collaborative business. A finished piece, if it’s well-shot, well-cut, well-written, well-narrated, is a gem the whole crew can enjoy. They were proud to work with him.”
Both praised his writing. Ms. Stahl: “He was maybe the best writer for television news alive. He could get more feeling and thinking in a piece than anybody else. There was almost a moral quality to his work. A lot of his stories dealt with injustice, and there was a simplicity to his writing, a poetic succinctness.”
And he had range. “He covered a lot of war, a lot of violence—wherever there was any kind of explosion, there he went. But he also loved music and has a body of work about opera, orchestras, young musicians.”
Once a former president of CBS News suggested he get voice lessons, and everyone at “60 Minutes” groaned: “This is Bob—you can’t take Bob away from Bob,” Ms. Stahl remembered the thinking. “His writing and his voice were the same thing.”
Bob Simon was 73. He was the real thing.
* * *
And now the counterpoint. Some thoughts on Brian Williams.
I watched like everyone else the past 10 days, at first thinking one bad embarrassment does not sink a career, and then seeing the embarrassments pile up. An acquaintance, a journalist, quoted an old Japanese saying to the effect that people forget everything after 2½ months. I think we forget the specifics, the ins and outs of a scandal, but we retain the essential word that captures it, and the word here is lies. That isn’t a word that can be attached to the public face of a major news organization.
I think NBC essentially ended Mr. Williams’s career as anchor of the evening news, and did what they had to do.
He could not continue as a reporter of the news, or an interviewer who elicits news, because he could no longer report or grill when the story is lies. And in modern America the story is always lies. The 2016 presidential campaign has already begun. There will be famous gaffes, fibs, embarrassments, embellishments. How can an anchor or reporter ask questions when his own tendency to invent and embellish is well-established and a subject of national mirth?
Why did he invent tales of Bob Simon-like derring-do? He was already at the top and he was brave in the sense that everyone who goes to where the explosions are is showing physical courage. He was impressive without embellishments.
He probably doesn’t know himself. Watching the story unfold I thought of a line from the 1974 film “The Gambler”: “They’re all looking to lose.” Everyone who gambles isn’t only looking for the high, the score, the win but also for the other thing they need, the loss, the brush with death, the adrenal jolt of being ruined.
Mr. Williams’s fictions look very much like a form of gambling. They say he was warned, and he didn’t stop. He must have known each time he was telling an untruth that he was heightening the risk he’d be caught. He came up in the age of videotape and reigned in the age of the Internet. Someone was going to find something, and year by year they didn’t. He added to his stories the way a gambler on a streak increases his bets. “The rocket hit a helicopter” became ‘the rocket hit my helicopter,’ the crime in New Orleans became the gangs that overran his hotel.
Lessons? Anchors shouldn’t be allowed to become anchor-monsters. When management knows its anchor tells tall tales, it has to have the means to stop him. Things that are too big to fail, fail.
No one is safe anymore. Status is no longer a buffer. We know this in the abstract, but it’s still startling in the particular. Technology makes scandal faster and more completely devastating.
They can hurt you with tape but kill you with laughter. Many people, uncoordinated and unaffiliated, can bring down a target by doing a full frisk of past statements on the Internet, that incredible tool. But as powerful a weapon is anarchic wit. If you went to #BrianWilliamsMisremembers on Twitter , you laughed at the picture of him standing with Lincoln on the battlefield, or reporting live, apparently as St. Joseph, on the birth of Christ. American wit is in very good form, and it can be lethal. It wasn’t only investigative work that shaped the outcome of the Brian Williams story, it was the number of people laughing.
America is hungry for authenticity and honesty and fiercely resents its absence from places where it should be.
A longtime reader of this column, age 84, emailed recently to say the heartbreak of his life the past few years has been witnessing the daily corruption of all information—the rigging of numbers and claiming of facts, the scientific papers that manipulate data to advance a political agenda, the misleading government statistics. We’re drowning in lies, he said.
That is not an exaggeration.
http://www.peggynoonan.com/an-honest-reporter-and-his-antithesis/
Comments