Thought for the Day

I've been trying to bring myself up to speed on the Clinton e-mail witch-hunt (because you know that's what it is). It occurs to me that if there's anyone the right-wing hates worse than Obama, it's the Clintons.

This, from a patently slanted story dated May 8 at The Hill:

Over the next two months, at least six current or former aides to Clinton will be asked to give depositions as part of those cases, which are being led by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. Clinton herself could be asked to testify as well, a federal judge has ruled.

“Out litigation’s going to continue,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told The Hill in a recent interview.

“It doesn’t really matter what the FBI does, what the Justice Department does, in the sense that we have an independent right to get some accountability and to have the FOIA law vindicated.”

(Emphasis added.)

However, a May 6 article from Mediaite has this:

For all those Hillary Clinton opponents who have been hoping against hope that the likely Democratic presidential nominee will be indicted as a result of the FBI review of Hillary’s email server, CNN has some bad news. According to CNN correspondent Pamela Brown, the FBI is close to wrapping up the “investigation,” and thus far have found “no criminal wrongdoing”:

The interviews, we’re told, are focused on whether classified information was mishandled, and the security of the server. So far officials tell us, no, there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing at this point in the investigation, but, again, the investigation is not over.

It sounds like they’re really just waiting for Hillary Clinton to be interviewed so they can wrap things up, but if Republicans and Bernie Sanders and the media are counting on Hillary Clinton to suddenly crack under questioning, they haven’t been paying attention.

The bottom line is that the Republicans are going to keep harping on this, and on Benghazi!!1! (even though we now know that whole "investigation" was nothing more than a politically motivated witch hunt), and even Vince Foster, right through the conventions and the remaining campaign.

And the media will help.

And if you don't believe that last statement, read this, from Eric Alterman (via Digby):

On March 15, Donald Trump won Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois, dispatching Marco Rubio’s campaign to the ash heap of history and giving every impression that he had become the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. Hillary Clinton also did extremely well that day, taking Illinois, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. The New York Times gave its prime spot—the top-right corner of the paper’s front page—to a story headlined “2 Front-Runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Find Their Words Can Be Weapons.” Readers quickly learned, if they had missed it previously, that Trump frequently used words like “bimbo,” “dog,” and “fat pig” to refer to some of the women he didn’t like, and this had led to disapproval ratings among women that reached historic proportions. And what “weapons” did Clinton give her adversaries? During a recent speech in coal country, she had suggested that her support for sustainable, clean-energy jobs would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Surely, you get the symmetry: Trump employs sexist school-yard taunts to denigrate roughly half the people on the planet. Clinton bravely tells her audience something they might not want to hear in support of a policy with short-term costs for some but long-term benefits for all. Same thing, right? Just ask, as the Times reporters did, a spokesman for the “anti-Clinton super PAC” America Rising, who opined that Clinton demonstrated a “brazen disregard for the men and women who help power America.” So you see, “dogs,” “pigs,” and “bimbos” versus clean energy. Both sides do it.

Read the whole thing -- you'll find all your contempt for the contemporary "news" media fully justified.