First, Toles. This cartoon ran on Sunday:
Isn’t that nice? The whole e-mail episode, investigated by the FBI, raising issues of mishandling of classified information (which is a crime), destruction of evidence (which can be a crime, but is always unethical and suspicious) and competence (Hillary says the security implications of making sensitive communications on a private server never occurred to her!), and which Clinton continues to stonewall and lie about, is just an invention of the news media!
Poor Hillary! Look how frustrated she is! How can sending out paid spinners and liars to muddy the water and confuse the issues be a cover-up? How can destroying e-mails before they can be reviewed be a cover-up? How can the State Department employee that she paid to moonlight as her private e-mail tech taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying to Congress be part of a cover-up? How can an obvious cover-up be a cover-up?
This isn’t an ‘editorial cartoon.’ This is Spinning for Hillary, and for the Post to give it center page dominance on its editorial page is endorsing deception and partisan propaganda. Toles has always been a simplistic progressive hack; his cartoons make his predecessor Herb Block look even-handed. This goes beyond hackery, though, to misleading the public. Or do you believe this is his real opinion? If so, he is too naive and dim-witted to have an editorial voice.
Andrea Mitchell’s Hillary enabling is of a different sort: rank cowardice.
The MSNBC host interviewed Clinton last week, the equivalent of an audience with the Pope; after all, Clinton has deigned to grant just three nationally televised interviews since her campaign began. The topic was the e-mail mess, bu Mitchell said today that she didn’t ask the follow-up questions she felt needed to be asked because she was concerned the campaign would have cut off the interview.
“We were told we had a 15-minute interview,” Mitchell said. “I asked more than 12 minutes on emails before I felt, out of concern that they would cut it off, obviously, that I had to move on, so I couldn’t ask everything that I did want to ask, but I think we did get a good chance to ask a lot of questions and discover that she did not have an answer for why she did the personal server in the first place.”
In other words, Mitchell compromised the right of the public to know, either the truth or the fact that a candidate for President won’t tell the truth, because of threats from the candidate. She was intimidated, and didn’t have the guts or professionalism to call the bluff of a candidate trying to corrupt the news reporting function.
Why not dare Clinton to pull the plug after a tough question, Andrea? Why not let the public see how essentially totalitarian this candidate is? See if she walks out on you. Show her for the secretive, entitled , sinister character she is. That’s called doing your job.
But no. Andrea Mitchell regards the sensibilities of Hillary Clinton more important to serve than the needs of her audience.
Coward.
Corrupted.
“It’s not destruction of evidence, it’s just a poor decision” -a progressive round these parts.
“Clinton is way way better than a moderate republican who has been far more ethical and much more likely to lead a compromise platform and seek bipartisan support in the style of a classical American president.” -paraphrase of another progressive round these parts
Huh, I took the ‘just makes it a lot worse’ is about her denial that it was a crime. People screw up, but this denial and spin worse than a mistake by itself. So I don’t think this is pro Hillary spin.
No, that’s not Toles. The bad guy (in this case, the press) always says what Toles thinks is the underlying injustice. He’s all Hillary/Democrats, public unions/Obama’s a genius/police are evil/ Conservatives are morons/ guns should be banned ?all the time. Actual occurrences and facts don’t matter.
It’s incredible.
Toles is the worst, verging on down right evil.
I read it the same way Marie did. “The cover-up is worse than the crime” “But there was no crime” “That makes it worse” seems like a clear condemnation. If Toles meant that to spin positively for Clinton, I think it was awkward and may not have translated well.
He’s being Kafkaesque; she’s trapped and its a Catch 22.
If you look at the last panel, in the right bottom corner you can see the ‘fourth panel’ where Clinton says, “There was no cover up!” and Toles responds with, “Of what?”. The “Of what?” suggests to me that Toles accepts Clinton’s statement, “There was no crime!”.
Then there’s Hillary, who’s not verging on anything.
But she IS a truth virgin.
I would say “Truer words were never spoken” but you’d think I was making a really bad pun…which, of course, I would be.
The media wore in a sticky wicket when Trump threw Jorge Ramos out of his press conference. Ramos criticized Trump’s actions as being worse than third world dictatorships, bordering on totalitarian shut down of the press. The media wanted to defend Ramos but thought (rightly) that Ramos had stepped over a line. Yet, there will be no condemnation of Mitchell’s decision to cave in to political pressure out of fear that the Clinton campaign would shut down the interview. Think of the optics of that one: Clinton storms out of an interview because she is asked tough questions about an issue of national security and Clinton’s qualifications to occupy the highest office in the land? That alone would have obliterated Clinton’s fading chances. But no, Mitchell is a coward.
jvb
I am just shocked by the outright lies the press keeps repeating. In May, classified material was found on Clinton’s server. In June, her attorney told them he had copies of all of this information and he was going to keep it. The FBI found highly classified material (including NSA spy satellite photos) that had come from the classified network and had been transferred to the unclassified e-mail network, stripping the classification notifications. That is known, fact. That is against the law. Fact. There is no wiggle room here. This isn’t “Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt”, this is “Let’s cover up crimes”. That goes for all who apologize for her. There is no “well, it depends on your point of view” on this. Also, remember, it isn’t classified because it is marked, it is marked because its classified.
I guess the good news is that we don’t know of anyone who died in THIS Hillary Clinton hide-the-documents scandal…yet.
What are you talking about?
“It was just a poor choice” – paraphrased Beth
“She’s way way way way better than a moderate republican who would likely lead like a compromising bipartisan statesman of days gone by” -paraphrased Charles Green
Nothing to see here, move on move on. Look over there! Trump just embarrassed the Republicans again!