Category: Corruption

The Hired Liars of Liberal Media

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Andrew Breitbart used the phrase “Democrat-Media Complex” to describe the dishonest and hypocritical frauds who consider their partisan opinions to be synonymous with Truth and Virtue.

Based on my own experience — as an ex-Democrat who has been in the news business since 1986 — I long ago concluded that most journalists don’t notice liberal bias for the same reason fish don’t notice water. It’s everywhere, all around them, and it’s all they’ve ever known. Because liberalism is the default mindset of nearly everyone in the media, it becomes a sort of self-confirming prejudice, where those who don’t buy into the liberal mythology are systematically excluded from the industry and the few dissenters are ostracized within the industry.

ABC News Anchor George Stephanopoulos
Donated $50,000 to Clinton Foundation
ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation in recent years, records show. The contribution is publicly available information, but the host had not previously disclosed it to ABC viewers, despite taking part in on-air discussions about the Clinton Foundation and its controversial relationship with foreign donors.
Stephanopoulos, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, confirmed the donation to POLITICO’s Dylan Byers after the Free Beacon contacted ABC News for comment. The host, who acknowledged making two donations of $25,000 between 2013 and 2014, issued a statement of apology for failing to disclose his contributions. . . .
Stephanopoulos’s recent coverage of the topic has been challenged by critics who question his objectivity as a longtime Clinton aide. The host’s April 26 interview with Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, for example, elicited partisan reactions after Stephanopoulos repeatedly pressed the Schweizer to acknowledge the lack of a “smoking gun” among the allegations in his book. . . .
Conservative commentators, meanwhile, complained about Stephanopoulos’s “aggressively” dismissive questioning, and took issue with a former Clinton operative asking Schweizer, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, about his “partisan interest” in writing Clinton Cash. . . .

The vile dishonesty of the Democrat-Media Complex is exceeded only by the vile hypocrisy of the Democrat-Media Complex.





 

Did Mobsters Beat Harry Reid?

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John Hinderaker at Powerline returns to the unanswered questions surrounding the retiring Democrat senator’s injuries:

When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

Read the rest. Reid’s corruption is notorious, even by Democrat standards. The media won’t tell the truth about him, but when was the last time the media told the truth about anything?

 

Sidney Blumenthal, Of Course

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The most loyal of Hillary’s loyalists:

If the motives to wipe the hard drive on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server weren’t already crystal clear, a new development last night put it in Ultra HD. Gawker’s Jeff Girth and Sam Biddle uncovered a secret, private intelligence network run by Sidney Blumenthal for Hillary’s benefit, apart from the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Hackers got e-mails that went through Hillary’s private server between her and Blumenthal, e-mails that show her own private intel group was also warning her that Libya was collapsing in the weeks and months prior to the sacking of the consulate in Benghazi . . .

Predictably, Hillary deleted the evidence on her private server.

Obstruction of justice is like a career with these people.

 

30,000 ‘Personal’ Emails?

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Hillary Clinton’s big press conference Tuesday, where she “addressed” the subject of her official emails, she said this:

We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work- related emails and deliver them to the State Department. At the end, I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.
No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy. . . .
In going through the e-mails, there were over 60,000 in total, sent and received. About half were work-related and went to the State Department and about half were personal that were not in any way related to my work. I had no reason to save them, but that was my decision because the federal guidelines are clear and the State Department request was clear.
For any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related. I am very confident of the process that we conducted and the e-mails that were produced.

Now, this is an issue because (a) Hillary’s emails as Secretary of State have been subpoenaed by a congressional committee, and (b) Hillary has admitted carrying on official correspondence with a non-governmental email account that was hosted on her own private server. Therefore, investigators are being asked to take her word for all this, because there is no verifiable record — no government computer with a hard drive that can be checked with forensic methods — to confirm what she’s claiming.

And here’s my thing: 30,000 “personal” emails in four years?

Do the math: That’s 7,500 emails a year or (divide 7,500 by 365) 20.5 personal emails every day, 7 days a week.

Gosh, Mrs. Clinton, you were the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world, in charge of a federal department with 18,000 employees around the world, and you had time for 20 personal emails — “not in any way related to my work” — every single day? Madame Secretary, I don’t have time for that, and I’m just a damned blogger.

Does anyone actually believe that Hillary had 7,500 emails every year — at the same account she used for her State Department business — about planning Chelsea’s wedding, condolence notes, yoga routines, family vacations? Her husband doesn’t even use email, so who all had Mrs. Clinton’s private email address to be sending her these personal emails  “not in any way related to my work”? Were these people not the least bit reticent about emailing the Secretary of State?

Think about it. In my line of work — and I’m just a damned blogger — there are some people I only contact with very important information. You don’t want to be the guy who’s bombarding, say, Mark Levin or Glenn Reynolds with an email announcing every little clever bit of snark you write.  No, you only send those guys an email tip when you think you’ve got something hot, something big.

From such an understanding of ordinary email etiquette, therefore, we may assume a few things. First, that this private email address — the one Mrs. Clinton hosted on a server located in her home — was known only to a few people who were very close to her. It wasn’t like she was handing out business cards with this email address to people she shook hands with at cocktail receptions, OK? Exactly how many of those people would be emailing her about yoga routines? Or who, among these close associates of hers, after finding a joke on the Internet and in the process of spamming it out to their friends, would think, “Hey, this cat video is so funny, I’ll CC it to the Secretary of State”?

Does that make sense? No, it doesn’t make sense at all.

Hillary’s message to America: “Go to Hell.”


 

Server, Serve Her: Clinton Crumbling

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EmailGate is reminding Americans of the scandalous Clintonian habit of deception and corruption. Ed Morrissey scoffs:

Hillary Clinton violated the Federal Records Act for four years, hid all of her e-mails as Secretary of State for nearly six years, and only began giving some of those communications to State a couple of months ago. Now that the FOIA dodge has been exposed, Hillary wants everyone to believe that she’s a paragon of transparency.
No one’s buying this, are they?

No, Ed. Nobody ever expects the truth from a Clinton. The question is whether she can get away with this particular lie:

Democrats and outside allies of the Clintons read that as an invitation to deride the investigation. Media Matters and Correct the Record, two of David Brock’s organizations—one that occasionally defends Hillary Clinton, and the other that does nothing but—have repeatedly called the e-mails story “false” and an extension of the “Benghazi hoax.”

Right: This is the familiar Vast Right Wing Conspiracy defense, wherein the question is not whether Clinton broke the law, but whether defeating Clinton’s enemies is of greater value to Democrats than enforcing the law. Every Democrat is expected to become a Clinton co-conspirator, so that the core principle of the party becomes Getting Away With It.

Is it time for Democrats to start hedging their bets?

Democratic primary voters are about to be reminded on a semiweekly basis of what left a lot of them so ambivalent about Hillary in 2008 — namely, the perception that the Clintons are like an unregulated industry within the party, impervious to scrutiny and contemptuous of anyone who would get in their way.
And this is why, if I were Joe Biden, and if I still harbored designs on the Oval Office down the hall, I’d be inclined to ignore what the insiders were saying. I’d run, and I’d run now.

You know the Democrats must be in a pretty desperate bind when they’re counting on Joe Biden to rescue their party.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 


 

Unfortunate Metaphor Alert: IRS Assigns Blind Worker To Lerner Case

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by Smitty

An explosive revelation from J. Christian Adams:

Now, somebody I know is going blind, and it’s not a pleasant thing. So stipulate that we’re not piling on somebody doing their job. Somebody has to do it. Stevens, Smith, Doherty & Woods are unavailable.

However, it strikes me that, if you had an interest in rebuilding an organization’s credibility, there are better means than this to do it.

A Sordid Scandal in Oregon

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By the time she was 30, Cylvia Hayes had already been married and divorced twice. She then reportedly was paid to be the “green card wife” of an Ethiopian immigrant. At some point, she became involved in Democrat Party politics in Oregon, running unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 2002. A year later, she began dating John Kitzhaber, a recently divorced Democrat state senator. When Kitzhaber was elected governor of Oregon in 2010, he said his girlfriend Cylvia would serve as the state’s first lady. The idea of the governor shacking up with his girlfriend apparently didn’t bother many Oregonians. It’s a liberal state where Obama got 54% of the vote there in 2012 and where 57% of voters in 2014 approved a measure to legalize recreational marijuana.

Fornication in the governor’s mansion? Who cares?

The general shabbiness of Cylvia Hayes’ character was exposed in 2014 by her ex-boyfriend, and that was before revelations about conflicts of interests involving Hayes’ consulting business. Kitzhaber’s office reportedly attempted to destroy evidence of the governor’s corrupt dealings and, at last, even Democrats in liberal Oregon have had enough:

Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek met with Gov. John Kitzhaber on Thursday morning and told him it was time to resign.
At a 1 p.m. press conference to discuss the meeting, Courtney said the discussion with Kitzhaber was difficult.
“He was upset,” Courtney said. “He was defiant. He was struggling.” . . .
Courtney said that he and Kotek have been trying to get security for Secretary of State Kate Brown, who would become governor if Kitzhaber were to step down.
Courtney said that he had received a note from the governor’s staff earlier in the day saying that Kitzhaber was attempting to reach the secretary of state to “set up the transition.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Courtney said.
Kotek said later that the governor has been consumed by all the legal investigations and media inquiries.
“The work of the state has to go on,” she said, “and he’s not able to focus on that right now.”
“It has become clear to both of us that the ongoing investigations surrounding the governor and Cylvia Hayes have resulted in the loss of the people’s trust,” Kotek said.

It takes an awful lot of corruption to become “too corrupt” to be an Oregon Democrat, but somehow Kitzhaber’s done it!

 

‘Operation Stalk My Girlfriend’

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Kevin D. Williamson has a column about NSA employees who were caught using the agency’s surveillance technology for personal purposes:

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. . . .
In a free and open society, there is a generally unspoken understanding between the citizens and the intelligence forces: We the people understand that they’re going to necessarily conduct themselves in a nefarious fashion from time to time, bending or breaking some laws along the way. We know this: That’s what spies do, being a necessary evil that is no less evil for being so acutely necessary. The spooks’ end of the bargain is: being good at what they do, not comporting themselves like a bunch of jackasses, and getting really bendy with the situational ethics only when doing so advances some legitimate national-security interest. Operation Mincemeat we can live with; Operation Stalk My Girlfriend we cannot. . . .

Read the whole thing. Kevin’s a brilliant writer.