Hillary! Exposed

I think I've linked this before but everyone seems to be linking it again.

A pretty good hit on Hillary!'s lying on FEC disclosures regarding a 1999 fundraiser hosted by Peter Paul. You can skip to 5:45; before that it just establishes background.

This won't bring Hillary down. It's not big enough and it's just more of the same. She just lies about where her money is coming from, then Democratic-aligned prosecutors and judges run interference for her, and she claims she's been vindicated by the system. And of course the media refuses to take interest.

Here's A Digest: I'm less than interested in this because I know from past experience Hillary! is Untouchable. But here's the basics, for those of you who don't want to sit through a long video.

Peter Paul made tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars worth of in-kind donations to Hillary in hosting a fundraiser for her; the fundraiser wound up netting her more than million dollars. Because Peter Paul had a previous conviction for something (not sure what), Hillary's chief fundraising director deliberately omitted his in-kind donations from required FEC disclosures. He was convicted on this charge. But the prosecution insisted Hillary had nothing to do with his actions, and since then the liberal/Hillary-camp talking point has been "she was out of the loop."

Peter Paul is suing her for damage to his business interests. He's a jilted would-be business partner of Bill Clinton, whom he was courting as a rainmaker for Stan Lee Media, a startup piece of crap business begun after Marvel fired Stan Lee. So his actual suit isn't really about the FEC filings per se, but he's pretty pissed off about everything so he's eager to allege wrongdoing by the Clintons.

The media has ignored the story entirely.

Here's my annoyance: the media constantly champions each and every proposed restriction on campaign donations in the interests, they claim, of good government, protection against corruption, and the public's right to know where a politician is getting her money from... and to whom they owe favors. And yet every time a Democrat breaks these rules (see Gore, Al, and Nuns, Buddhist), they take the position that all of these laws are ticky-tack and extremely minor and really, who cares?

If no one cares about these laws -- if they're so insignificant to enforce -- why are they on the books at all? How does the media consistently champion these laws as vital to democracy itself and then either explicitly or implicitly brand them as silly and unnecessary procedural hurdles whenever a Democrat breaks them?

Part of the reason I don't want further campaign finance laws is simply pragmatic and realistic -- I know they will only actually be enforced against Republicans. The only way to get enforcement on these in a politicized environment is to generate some amount of public anger at their being broken, and the media is only interested in stirring the pot of public resentment when a Republican is caught breaking them. Whatever Democrats do, from signing up millions of illegal voters through corrupt organizations like Acorn, abusing the "non-partisan" rules for tax-free contributions to plainly partisan creatures like Media Matters, lying about the source and extent of campaign contributions, accepting obviously illegal donations from hustlers like Norman Hsu, etc., is fair and proper in the media's eyes, and even if Democrats, um, bend the rules a bit, what's the harm? These are after all mere procedural sort of rules anyway, right?

The media likes to pretend that only Republicans take dirty money, and that's why they only report on such scandals -- they and they alone "fit the narrative." Even accepting that a story's newsworthiness should be determined by whether it fits a pre-existing "narrative," surely the media isn't so stupid -- and doesn't think we're so stupid -- as to be unaware that Hillary! has her own "narrative" of doing whatever is necessary to get her claws on dirty and sometimes illegal money, no matter what the source, and then simply lie about it when caught.

But apparently that narrative is too old and boring by now to justify any coverage.

posted by Ace at 12:34 PM

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