February 8, 2008

Clinton derangement syndrome

"It sure would have been nice, over the previous eight years, if the same press corps that today has trouble controlling its roiling contempt for [Bill] Clinton would just once or twice flash the same passion and anger towards Bush for what he's done in the White House and what he's done to this country."

Dude. From Eric Boehlert's scathing column on the lapdog press's monumental failure in covering the Dictator-tot:

"What really struck me was the difference in tone from the recent Bush and Clinton coverage. The sitting president was delivering his final State of the Union, capping off his failed presidency, which has provoked deep despair among most Americans about the future of the country. And for that, Bush has been tagged the most consistently unpopular president in modern history.

"Yet the reaction from the press and pundits last week when marking the final chapter of the Bush decline was mostly to shrug their shoulders and look away. The media has, throughout Bush's gruesome political collapse, shown very little interest in taking part in the usual Beltway pastime of dissecting the miscues, assigning blame, and yes, doing a little bit of grave-dancing.

"When it comes to Bush's two-year decline, the press has remained oddly detached. By contrast, the recent coverage of Clinton has been dripping with emotion; with disdain and contempt that bordered on vitriol.

"Bush literally drives the country into a ditch while erecting new standards for secrecy and incompetence (Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Walter Reed Hospital, Hurricane Katrina, staggering national debt, etc.), and the press yawns. But Clinton makes ill-advised and insensitive unscripted comments on the campaign trail, and that's what really gets the Beltway press upset -- enrages them, really, as they scramble to find just the right adjective to describe Clinton's allegedly deceitful, abhorrent behavior.

"Am I the only one struck by the disconnect here?"

As far as the "mainstream" "liberal" media goes? That would be yes. Read more here -- it's a doozy.

3 comments:

ThePoliticalCat said...

Does anyone even bother to read the shit-eating cobags anymore? I got Seymour Hirsch, Greg Palast, Robert Fisk, Robert Scheer, Matt Taibbi, and maybe five or ten others that I can even look at without vomiting any more. The rest are just swine.

Anonymous said...

Journalists have been known to lose their jobs for criticizing the Bush administration. Add it all up and it spells Complete Corpocratic Controls.

The Big Media Moguls tell the journalists what they can say and what they can't say, and if they disagree or disobey, they lose their cushy jobs.

Anonymous said...

It's not just the MSM it's us Americans. If Bush had been caught having sex with Connie or Harriet or Colin, there would have been a tidal wave of special reports and round-table commentary. Larry Craig was proof of that. But look at what we get now. Brittney and Keith Ledger instead of poverty here or wars in Africa. Who's bitching other than the occasional blogger? It last for a day or two then we move on to the next problem.

It must be that in the past, media gave credence to what we should see and hear instead of what we want. You see shades of that in the BBC.

If a great movement arouse where people demanded more bad news or stories you would actually have to think about instead of the feel-good slop we're fed now we'd probably get it.