By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
If I remember correctly it was Bob Dole who first exclaimed, “Where’s the outrage!” to describe his amazement over how Bill and Hillary Clinton avoided public condemnation for their unethical and illegal activities. Many other Republican and conservative commentators made the same point in different words, rattling off instance after instance of shady dealings by the Clintons.
If asked for the best examples of those shady dealings, I would point to the mysterious appearance of the missing Whitewater files on a desk in the White House, the pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich after his wife’s donation of $450,000 to the Clinton Library, and the 33,000 destroyed emails from Hillary’s private email server.
No doubt, you could come up with other examples, perhaps the cattle futures flimflam.
We are at a teachable moment. We can see now how the Clintons beat the rap: They were not hit with the unrelenting smear campaign that the Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the media can put together when they put their mind to it. They did it once before to drive Richard Nixon from office, and are doing it now to Donald Trump. You have to admit: It is powerful and effective.
The constant drumbeat of accusations against Trump is staggering. We hear members of Congress talking of impeachment, overwrought CNN and MSNBC commentators suggesting that Trump has committed acts of treason, Hollywood personalities and rock stars throwing about terms such as “collusion” and “obstruction of justice,” law school professors staring unashamedly at the camera and telling us “this is worse than Watergate!”
The campaign proceeds day after day: Maxine Waters here, Dick Durbin there, Jonah Goldberg on the right, Rachel Maddow on the left. Trump is incompetent in the afternoon, a subverter of justice in the evening, a likely victim of Russian blackmail at bedtime. The late-night comedians pound away, too, wild-eyed and vulgar, sneering at Trump and his wife and children in a manner they would call sexist and tasteless if directed at the Clinton and Obama families.
It all goes on without proof. It may turn out somewhere down the line that evidence pops up against Trump to indicate some illegality or underhanded behavior. I would bet against it, but who knows? The point is that no evidence of “collusion with the Russians” or “obstruction of justice” has surfaced so far. The reporters talking in solemn tones about Trump’s likely impeachment, the shrill comedians posturing like tough guys taking a stand against a dictatorial threat, the politicians rushing to the cameras to moralize about the “constitutional crisis” we face — have nothing to offer to make their case except “unnamed sources,” leaks, and one-sided interpretations of what was said at private meetings.
There was a time when enlightened opinion called it McCarthyism when someone engaged in defamation of character and accusations of treason without proof. It is mainstream now.
And it is working. I hear people in diners and at in supermarket checkout lines repeating lines that I suspect they heard from Whoopi Goldberg or Rachel Maddow about “collusion” and “obstruction of justice” and how the country is on the verge of “another Watergate.”
Can you imagine what would have happened to the Clintons if they had been subjected to anything like this? If all the networks hammered away in the manner that they are covering Trump’s firing of Jim Comey about “destroyed email evidence,” about “quid pro quo payments to the Clinton Foundation,” giving us demonstrations of how difficult it would be for an inexperienced investor to make over a hundred-thousand dollars in cattle futures simply by “reading The Wall Street Journal,” as Hillary informed us she did; about Hillary attending private meetings with international investment bankers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be in her company.
But didn’t we get that sort of thing from Fox News and from Rush Limbaugh? We did. But what we are discovering now is how much Fox News and people like Rush Limbaugh are on the periphery of American life, in comparison to the mainstream media — the major networks and cable news outlets, the national newspapers and a long parade of celebrities whacking away at Trump day after day.
Fox News and Rush did not have anywhere near the impact on the public’s perception of the Clintons as this all-out effort to drive Trump from office. I think honest observers, without an ideological axe to grind, will admit that. We are looking at a difference not just in degree, but in kind.
There are implications. We have to keep in mind that there is no reasonable middle ground to be found in this battle. Either Trump is lying and will be exposed as a sinister figure conspiring with the Russians, or we will find that the mainstream media and celebrity culture have been caught up in irrational hate-driven hysteria, willing to lie and distort the news for their partisan purposes. (Do you think we will get apologies from them in that event? Don’t hold your breath.)
No doubt the liberal elites caught up in this campaign against Trump are convinced there is some revelation to come that will justify their angry rhetoric. (Just as Trump appears to be supremely confident that his innocence will be established.) We’ll see. But it will have to be a blockbuster revelation the elites to do that. Proof that Washington lobbyists and wheeler-dealers like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Gen. Michael Flynn were lobbyists and wheeler-dealers will not do the trick.
Manafort and Flynn were removed from the Trump team once their shady side became known. It is not an impeachable offense that Trump did not remove them as quickly as the hosts at MSNBC, in hindsight, contend he should have removed them. That’s not an impeachable offense. It is a nitpicking, arbitrary, and partisan judgment to make the case that it is.
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