Paul Krugman is a funny guy. At least I think he is - I mean I am assuming that it is his dry wit shining through when he complains about the “Clinton Rules” in use by the US media:

the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.

The guy has to be kidding right?

After 8 years of doing everything short of calling President Bush a puppy killing child rapist (or was that a child killing puppy rapist? I forget, but anyway you get the point. They are both bad and somewhere deep in the bowels of the New York Times they are trying to figure out how to work them into the next story about President Bush’s efforts to reform Social Security) he can’t possibly be serious.

Or maybe he is given that this time his target is Barack Obama instead of a Republican.

I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody. I’m not the first to point out that the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We’ve already had that from the Bush administration — remember Operation Flight Suit? We really don’t want to go there again.

Why the outrage?

Well first there was Whitewater which led a press eager to destroy the blameless Clinton’s to cook up scandal after scandal.

Then there was the accusation by Salon Magazine in Feb. 2004 that Hillary gave up flying for the Air National Guard in 1972 because she was abusing cocaine and the Air Force was implementing random drug tests. Later that year there was a related issue when CBS aired obviously faked documents calling into question Hillary’s service in the Air Guard and re-raising the question of whether her father had exercised undue influence to get her into the guard in the first place.

More recently Mrs. Clinton has been accused of “Not caring about black people” and mistakenly believing Nelson Mandela was dead when she was really using Mandela as a metaphor for Iraqi’s who could step up and help stop sectarian violence.

Couple this with the constant insinuation that rather than being inarticulate Mrs. Clinton might be mentally challenged despite the fact that she graduated from both Yale and Harvard Business School.

Looking back at that record I guess maybe I can see Krugman’s point the media does tend to treat people unfairly.

Paul Krugman, Hillary Clinton, Media

*OOPs, my mistake except for Whitewater all the above issues related to President Bush. Sorry about that.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 9:20 am by Chad and is filed under Loons, Election 2008 Live Team Coverage!, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.