The Fall of the House of Clinton

Rush Limbaugh is shocked and perplexed. He would never imagined, in his wildest wish fulfillment dream, that the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters and New York Magazine would be bringing down the house of Clinton.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported, in slightly less than 5,000 words, that Clintons facilitated the sale of 20% of America’s uranium to a Russian company.

It’s jaw-dropping:

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

Keep in mind, this is the New York Times. It is not repeating information it got from a book written by a conservative. It is reporting the results of its own extensive investigation.

The Times story does not stand alone, but it stands forth.

Rush Limbaugh is gobsmacked to see the Times run such a negative story on a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. Especially at a time when there does not seem to be a viable alternative.

In his words:

Here's the New York Times story.  This and the Reuters story, well, the Washington Post, too, they're equally devastating.  The New York Times article, 4,337 words.  Now, the average op-ed column in a newspaper is 750 words, just to give you something to compare it.  Eighty-eight paragraphs.  It is one of the most amazing articles I have ever read in the New York Times.  It is one of the most unexpected articles I have ever read in the New York Times.  It actually doesn't require all those words to do this.  It exposes the Clintons as the most shameless influence peddlers in the history of the world to the point of treason, folks, to the point of criminality. 

It's unprecedented for the New York Times to go after any Democrat like this in my lifetime or memory.  There may be one that I've forgotten, but none as prominent as are the Clintons.  And I'll tell you something else about this New York Times story.  Because it's from the New York Times, it completely destroys Hillary's claims that these charges are all just from the vast right-wing conspiracy. 

Many conservatives suspect that it’s a ruse, Rush continues. They believe that the Times must have an ulterior motive. And yet, Rush says, we should also consider the possibility that the Times has no ulterior motive.

For all  you and I know, the Times might have decided that it needed to recover its own journalistic integrity, something that it and many other mainstream media outlets sacrificed in order to elect Barack Obama.

Also, keep in mind, the publisher of the Times summarily fired his first female executive editor—i.e. editor-in-chief—for following Sheryl Sandberg’s bad advice and leaning in.

Keep in mind, the Times, a few months ago ran a cover piece in its Sunday magazine extolling Fox News host Megyn Kelly. The article, dutifully covered on this blog, was more than generous toward Fox News.

The Times loves Megyn Kelly because she is fair and balanced. Often she takes positions that run directly counter to the Times editorial position, but she calls out both liberals and conservatives, equally.

Also, keep in mind, that when it comes to dollars and sense, Fox News is easily the most profitable news organization in the country today. If you were running a newspaper would you rather be known as the print version of MSNBC or the print version of Fox News.

OK, the Times is not going to become Fox News, but its chief executive has to be asking himself why Fox News has been succeeding while CNN has been failing. And if he knows that the Fox audience contains a significant number of liberals and independents, he will ask himself what Roger Ailes knows that he doesn’t.

Perhaps he will conclude that his paper and the rest of the mainstream media has been losing audience because it is perceived to be biased. As someone from the Times told me many years ago, Noam Chomsky once said that with the Wall Street Journal you can trust the facts.

If a newspaper earns the reputation for skewing the facts, it will be competing with the Nation and the New Republic. Opinion journalism has never been a great money maker.

So, before jumping on the latest conspiracy theory and concluding that the media outlets that are trashing the Clintons are really trying to put Hillary in the White House, we should, because we are gracious and generous, consider that they are trying to be good journalists.

Besides, they never much liked Hillary anyway. However much she fashions herself the champion of women’s rights, Hillary Clinton owes nearly all of her august titles to her husband.

Beyond all of that, there’s the money issue. With Bill Clinton the issue was sex. With Hillary, it’s money.

From the point of view of the newspaper that covers “all the news that’s fit to print” stories of salacious sexual encounters are tabloid journalism, beneath its dignity.

Bill Clinton was a charming rogue. He might have been decadent, but while he was in politics, he wasn’t in it for the money. In fact, he wasn’t even in it for the girls. He would have had as many women if he had never been president.

People seemed not to care about Bill Clinton’s sexual indiscretions because they believed that he wanted to do what was best for the country, not what was best for his own bottom line.

With Hillary Clinton, things are different. While there have been some suggestions of salacious sex scandals, her most serious problems, from Whitewater to cattle futures trading, have been about money.

The Clintons did not really walk away from the White House broke, but they most likely entered it broke. As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton had been earning something like $35,000 a year. Clearly, Hillary had been outearning him, but they were certainly not wealthy in 1993.

They were surrounded by people who had immense wealth. In comparison, they had nearly nothing. If they weren’t broke, it felt as though they were.

Now, in the aftermath of the presidency, Bill and Hillary Clinton have amassed a fortune in the tens of millions. All of a sudden, the Clinton’s do not look like selfless public servants. They do not even look like the souls of charity. And yet, the media seem to believe that the drive behind amassing a fortune must come from Hillary.

If the editorial pages of the mainstream media are opposed to anything, they are opposed to the corrupting effect of money in politics.

Selling your office, doing what is best for you regardless of whether it is good for the country… such actions are the ultimate form of corruption.

To people who believes the money corrupts, selling a large chunk of America’s uranium to Russian interests who might very well ship it to Iran… feels like the ne plus ultra of corruption.

If Hillary is really in it for the money, she will certainly not be a reliable champion of liberal causes.

In fact, Hillary was so thoroughly blinded by her love of money that she made one serious miscalculation. She expected that the mainstream media would have her back. For now it looks like she made a very grave mistake.