Ever see Bob Herbert get angry?
He was profiled a few months ago as being so calm that some found him too boring, But today he cut loose with a major rip on both of the Clintons. I’m not sure about the things he says they took, but it’s pretty clear Mr. Herbert is not going to be considered boring this time around.
And he didn’t even mention Marc Rich.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Actually, Kevin, Bob Herbert may not be capable of visible anger because of what appears to be preternatural calmness, but he knows how to be nasty, and down and dirty, and just plain wrong. He did it to the Clintons through-out the nineties, and he was part of the media war against Al Gore in 2000. Check out Bob Somerby’s incomparable archives and you’ll see what I mean.
In fact, I find it astonishing that any mainstream pundit would have the gaul to talk about the Clinton’s lack of grace and class, and even more astonishing when people on the left part of the spectrum fall for it, however much they feel critical of the either Clinton for being insufficiently “progressive.”
I’m an old-fashioned liberal myself.
How would you characterize the treatment of the Clintons by the SCLM during the nineties? Classy and graceful? What about the inveterate lying that went on. Not by Bill Clinton, who, as politicians go, ran a fairly open administration, and clearly tried to tell as much of the truth as he could. Those same media types still refer to the Clinton scandals. They still like to talk about Hillary’s commodity trades, and the ethical questions they claim the trades still bring up, even though those trades were vetted again and again, and there are no ethical issues they raise.
Don’t you find it interesting that you never hear any references from this same SCLM to the Bush scandals, of which there are so many most of us have given up counting. Weren’t these the same pundits who thought the Bush landing on that air craft carrier was just so cool, so filled with class and grace?
I once tried to make a list for myself of all the lies about both Clintons that have passed through the medium of the SCLM to become accepted narratives, no matter that they have no basis in fact. The list was so overwhelming long, I gave up.
This isn’t just about the Clintons. The same thing happened to Al Gore.
It’s about the disgraceful way that most so-called liberal pundits have acted toward all liberals political figures, especially if they are identified with the Democratic Party. Remember that memorial for Paul Wellstone, which the right-wing began to lie about before the damn thing was even over - insisting that it was some kind of shameful political show, without class or grace? Christopher Caldwell, who is supposed to be one of the “good” conservatives wrote a disgusting column about it, using the memorial as a way to attack Wellstone himself, this while a large family had lost not only a father, grandfather, mother, grandmother, not to mention the nieces and nephews, not to mention the countless friends of the Wellstones, were still in mourning. It was obvious to anyone who watched the memorial that Caldwell, hadn’t. Well, Al Franken called Caldwell up to ask if he’d actually seen the damn thing. And of course he hadn’t.
Yes, Caldwell, admitted, perhaps he should have before he wrote the column, or perhaps not have written it. But Caldwell never bothered to retract anything he’d said, or bothered to inform his readers that his column was written without benefit of his having actually seen the event he was critiquing. Nice example of class and grace, don’t you think?
I can still remember, after the Wellstone memorial, waiting for Mark Shields on the Friday edition of PBS’s New Hour, to defend the Wellstone family, and the memorial and the Democrats, and he did just the opposite - oh yes, the Republicans were right, it turned out, and all us Democrats needed to be ashamed, very ashamed. He even praised Peggy Noonan, whom you may or may not remember had written a column a day or so after the memorial, lecturing the Wellstone children, in the voice of their father yet, on how they had betrayed his legacy.
Bob Herbert is a member of that same club, all dues paid up, a club where class and grace are never allowed to enter.
I’m sorry for going on a tear like this, but I’m so sick and tired of of what has amounted to an almost two decades long public dehumanization of two public figures who, although surely worthy of genuine criticism, have done nothing to deserve to be treated as if they were less than human, and I just happened to be at your blog when it boiled over.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Leah!
I don’t mind the detail a bit. Of course I’m very aware of it all except that, until I went online (Dec 97) I was often unaware of the NY Times pundits unless they were reprinted in my hometown paper. So my familiarity with Herbert only goes back 10 years. And I didn’t know he was part of that firing squad.
I’ve also never heard of Caldwell, period. So in Tampa, Portland and Eugene, the national punditry that appeared most often was George Will, Ellen Goodman, Thomas Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Molly Ivins, Paul Greenberg and Katherine Parker. So I missed a lot of the piling on from the supposed liberals.
I know… 99% of it was ridiculous. And Hillary, especially, deserved none of it. I generally critique politicians for their records and proposals, not all the BS they got attacked for. It sounded like tin pie plate theory mostly.
So this was my first experience of seeing Herbert’s fuse lit about anything. Thanks for enl