Matt Yglesias Has a Very Important Post on Media's Hillary Clinton Coverage

I touched on this in my last post.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/its-not-hillary-but-beltway-press-who.html

I also urged in my last piece that it's time for us Hillary supporters of the world to Unite! We need to make the media respect Hillary and the way to do this is to make them respect us. We are her supporters and we are real Americans not phonies like the Beltway press that talks about her emails all day.

In the 1930s FDR supporters pointed out-even some Republicans admitted this at the time-that you can't eat the Constitution.

Well you can''t but it's still better sustenance than emails. You could eat the Constitution but it wouldn't taste very good. You literally can't eat emails.

Yet they serve the public with email talk all day.

Thankfully, someone as sharp and with as a high a profile and loud a megaphone as Yglesias is calling out the Beltway press.

"Why is the media more interested in Hillary's email than in Jeb's profoundly dishonest tax pitch?"

"The formative experience of my political life was the 2000 presidential campaign, in which the media mercilessly persecuted Al Gore over a series of trivial exaggerations and now-forgotten pseudo-scandals while giving George W. Bush a pass on the fact that the central premises of his economic agenda were lies."

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9300871/jeb-bush-tax-plan

This is a very good point. What they are doing to Hillary is something like what they did to Gore in 2000. In both cases they attack the Democratic nominee on purely personal and trivial grounds. 

In fact they accused Gore as they are accusing Hillary of just being in some vague way, somehow-even they never really said how-dishonest. Not in any big way they conceded. But he lies about trivial things where there's no need to. 

And what was their Exhibit A for that? Well, they claimed he said he 'invented the Internet.'  Which of course he never said. 

His claim was rather that he had created the project do develop the Internet as a sponsor in Congress. But for some reason the media just kept pulling on this issue and mooning over it like a scab. 

Now they are making Biden sound like a Democratic savior-we should all just run to Joe!

Then you remember that this very same Beltway press that spends their whole day razzing Hillary and lauding Joe where razzing Biden and boosting Hillary during the 2012 primary. They were urging President Obama to drop him for her!

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/remember-when-media-wanted-obama-to.html

Back to Yglesias:

"People too young to remember the campaign may wonder how Bush persuaded the country that budget-busting tax cuts for the richest Americans were the prescription the country needed. The answer is that he simply misdescribed his plan. In speeches, in televised debates, and in advertisements he represented his plan as consistent with a continued budget surplus and as primarily benefiting middle-class taxpayers."

"Bush won the election and enacted hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Surpluses turned into deficits, and the promised economic boom never materialized."

"None of this was surprising or unpredictable to anyone who cared to dig into the details. The problem was political reporters had found those details much less interesting than snarking about Al Gore's wooden speaking style and complaining that his "demeanor"was disrespectful during a debate exchange in which Bush repeatedly attacked Gore with bogus math."

Right. Remember the 'Gore sigh that cost him the election?' Just like they accused Gore of being 'wooden' they are accusing Hillary of being a 'bad candidate' who is 'not relatable' to the public.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/09/there-they-go-again-politicos-new.html

This is a great point by Yglesias as he's dead right: the Hillary Treatment of 2016 so far looks strikingly similar to the Gore Treatment of 2000.

Yglesias points out that journalism failed in 2000-and it is failing again.

P.S. However, the one difference between then and now is us: the liberal blogosphere and social media world. We now have a megaphone we lacked then.

It's up to us to fight back this smear campaign against Hillary as we were unable to do for Gore. She needs us and our country needs her!

I know that a lot of folks are just sick of even watching the mainstream press now a days.This is fine though not watching it doesn't stop the damage they are doing.

 A lot of people tell me that they have just been boycotting MSNBC or CNN, etc.

I'm all for a boycott, but let's make it an organized boycott where the Beltway press can no longer ignore us.

Media Matters is a great model. They are here now and weren't back in 2000.

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/09/14/vox-blasts-media-for-repeating-mistakes-that-ha/205523

It is on us not to let the press get away with this again. We cannot afford another Bush!