And the NYTimes and every other media outlet got completely played:
Journalists have suggested that conservative author Peter Schweizer’s forthcoming book attacking Hillary Clinton is more credible because he will follow it up with a similar book examining Jeb Bush. But according to his publisher, no such book is in the works: Schweizer’s reporting on Bush will be published on the website of his non-profit organization.
Over the past few days numerous media outlets have begun reporting on allegations Schweizer makes in his forthcoming book Clinton Cash about allegedly unethical ties between the Clinton Foundation and actions Hillary Clinton purportedly made as secretary of state. Critics — including Media Matters — have noted that Schweizer is a Republican activist and strategist with a history of reporting errors.
Pushing back against this narrative, Bloomberg Politics reported on April 23 that in contrast to the “left-wing clamor that Schweizer is simply out to get Hillary Clinton,” “Schweizer is working on a similar investigation of Jeb Bush’s finances that he expects to publish this summer.”
Picking up the story, Politico reported that Schweizer “is reportedly working on another book that he expects to release in the summer. Only this time, he’ll be writing about Jeb Bush.” CNN likewise reported that the “book on Bush… would be published this summer.”
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
(via C&L)
Baud
Isn’t there a hoocoodanode tag?
srv
All the Bush haters have is ad hominem
Cervantes
@srv:
Plus fear and surprise.
MattF
And here I was, expecting the revelation that Jeb! is a wonderful, kind, decent, brilliant, humble, genetically superior person who deserves to be President. Does this mean he’s not, actually?
Baud
Technically, Fox didn’t get played.
schrodinger's cat
No one cares besides the people who comment and write on blogs.
Craig Pennington
@Cervantes:
…and an almost fanatical devotion to George Soros.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
And those people are the worst.
Linda
Seriously, the old saying is that you can’t cheat an honest man. This is a case in which the media got played because they willed themselves to believe something that a day old baby could have seen for a lie.
Baud
@Craig Pennington:
Ahem. That’s Lord Soros.
Neddy Merrill
Is our media learning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI-xqtTtgKI
Baud
OT: A nice headline from Newsmax, which is back on the mobile site.
Bobby B
The NYT and media’s parent companies continue to financially profit from all this. Who got played again?
Baud
@Baud:
Cole added the tag! Thanks to whoever tweeted him my suggestion.
gbear
He didn’t realize till he was half way into that line that finishing it would have him on record saying ‘Shame on me!’ and he stumbled all over himself to not say it. He knew that that video would (rightfully) NEVER disappear. Moron.
patrick II
Bill Clinton took money from rich contributors for making speeches while raising money for his foundation’s charities that supported solutions for:
Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, et al will take billions from billionaire contributors for which they in turn want to make and enforce laws that support:
Misogeny, Guns for everyone (including assault rifles for crazy people), Taking from the poor and giving to the rich, Business monopolies, evasion of taxes with overseas accounts, War (of all kinds), Racism, Monetizing (and depleting) education, Privatizing water supplies and public assets of all kinds, and Climate change denial
Yet somehow accepting money for Clinton’s foundation is a scandal but accepting billions that corrupt every effort for government and public decency is not.
Howard Beale IV
Our conventional media is so far in the tank for access vs truth it’s surprising that we’ve managed to keep the facade of being a representative democracy alive for as long as we have.
Now that the Supreme Court has on its docket the nonsense about the drugs used for lethal injection, maybe the guillotine/beheading isn’t such a bad ideal after all.
Ruckus
@patrick II:
Here you are making sense again. How can we have that in politics?
WaterGirl
@Baud: hahahahaha
Snarki, child of Loki
Oh, I think the entire rest of the world had figured out by that point that Dubya had no shame.
Cervantes
@WaterGirl:
Which reminds me:
That’s from the Congressman’s web-site.
WaterGirl
@Cervantes: That is good!
Cacti
My favorite part of the breathless NYT story was that they buried this in paragraph 10:
Then in their editorial demanding answers, this was a bit closer to the top:
Villago Delenda Est
If the free market actually worked, the editorial staff of the NYT would be asking people, right this second, if they want fries with that burger.
Incompetent and gullible beyond belief. Don’t have the sense that the universe granted to a fucking amoeba.
WereBear
@Baud: You have made my day!
KS in MA
@patrick II:
Well said.
gogol's wife
The comments on the Public Editor’s blog are ripping the NYTimes to shreds.
Brachiator
So let’s see now. The Clinton Foundation is supposedly raising money from bad people and doing all kinds of mysterious unspecified wrong. Meanwhile the GOP and the Tea Party want to eviscerate the IRS for supposedly investigating conservative exempt organizations for using money from various sources for political and financial purposes.
This is the long con.
And remember. The Clinton’s are bad people, while conservatives are patriots. You can read all about it in the NYT.
Mayur
@Villago Delenda Est: no reason to insult fast food workers.
Brachiator
@efgoldman: I wonder who the editor of the Times is these days. I don’t keep up anymore. I don’t know if anyone at the Times really reads the comments or whether the Public Editor has any strong mandate to be able to rub the editor’s nose in it when they’ve really made a mess.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
Wonder no more.
Cervantes
@efgoldman:
“Newspaper of record.”
Tenar Darell
@efgoldman: Are you kidding me? They fired her, she actually made them fire her. She refused to leave gracefully, or sign a thing. I knew it was bad with the book, but that’s really bad. Wow, NYTimes can’t even do recent history on themselves without lying.
Germy Shoemangler
I am loving the comments on the nytime’s public editor’s blog.
Tree With Water
It might even be worse than the Times being played. The shot-callers at the paper may have known all along- in fact, they probably did, if their recent track record is any indication..
LT
Got played? That’s just nuts. They reported on the Clinton Foundation, and shady aspects of donations and people connected. It is 100% solid reporting on legitimate issues.
Play this: Jeb Bus is found to have been involved in deals as governor connected to his former-president close relative (brother or father, rather than spouose), and Kazakh and Russian uranium and oil brokers, that led to Russians owning 51% of US uranium interests. (This ignores Bill Clinton’s lie about the meeting, and the faliure todisclose several donations related to all this.)
I’m supposed to belive Dems would yawn? And say “NYT got played!” if they reported on it?
Dems have lost their minds.
Brachiator
@Cervantes: A repressed memory. I forgot that the only good thing that Baquet did at the LA Times was to get fired for protesting newsroom cuts. Apart from that, he was just another co conspirator in the death of a once good newspaper.
LT
Got played? That’s just nuts. They reported on the Clinton Foundation, and shady aspects of donations and people connected. It is 100% solid reporting on legitimate issues.
Play this: Jeb Bus is found to have been involved in deals as governor connected to many millions of dollars in donations made to the foundation of his former-president close relative (brother or father, rather than spouse), and Kazakh and Russian uranium and oil brokers, that led to Russians owning 51% of US uranium interests. (This ignores Bill Clinton’s lie about the meeting, and the faliure todisclose several donations related to all this.)
I’m supposed to belive Dems would yawn? And say “NYT got played!” if they reported on it?
Dems have lost their minds.
[this is an edit of previous comment, which gave me error msg when thrying to edit]
LT
@Cacti: You have lost your fucking mind.
I’ve seen ppl using that as proof of something. Honestly – Dems have become the lowest koind of mouthbreathers since Obama became president. There is no such thing as a core Dem anymore.
NOTE TO WORLD: REPORTERS REPORT ON ALLEGATIONS *ALL THE FUCKING TIME. THAT’S ABOUT 90% OF WHAT REPORTING IS. YOU DUMB FUCKING BARK BITING FUCKS. JESUS.*
Cervantes
@Tree With Water:
And yet does it really matter whether there was any plan to publish that book about Jeb Bush?
different-church-lady
@efgoldman: New?
LT
@Cacti:
This is the very first story – concerning shady dealings by shady people and donations and huge business transactions – that led to the eventual arrest and imprisonment of Duke Cunningham:
http://legacy.utsandiego.com/news/politics/20050612-9999-1n12windfall.html
The story does not purport to prove anything illegal happened. The story reports on deals related to an elected official that looked suspect – because appearance of impropriety actually matters:
I love Cunnigham’s response:
Sound familiar?
The story led to more reporting, then to an FBI investigation. THAT is good reporting. Just like the NYT Clinton story is good reporting – that will almost certainly lead to more. (Especially on Bill’s lie.)
LT
@efgoldman: Sorry, don’t recognize your name.
Reporting on allegations and investigating facts behind them is standard journalism.
LT
Amy Davidson is very VERY good on this:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/five-questions-about-the-clintons-and-a-uranium-company
I love #3:
I’m sure Dems would shrug at such things if it were Jeb or Rubio. Yerp.
Bonus: I wonder if the anti-Snowden-ers are okay with this Clinton Kremlin stuff.
different-church-lady
@LT: Bill is willing to come home if he’s guaranteed a fair trial in the media.
Gravenstone
@efgoldman: LT (fka LongTooth iirc) has been a long standing purity troll and all around moron.
Cervantes
@Gravenstone:
Shorter: “often disagrees with me”?
different-church-lady
@Cervantes: Let’s compromise on “annoyingly adamant”, shall we?
Cervantes
@different-church-lady:
Remember these?
(Not the best example of the form, no doubt, but you get the point. Plus I bet the “all around moron” knows how to punctuate.)
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Cervantes:
More like Obama is worse than Bush! If you want to try and defend that as a rational proposition, be my guest.
different-church-lady
@Cervantes: Little minds. Hobgoblins. All that all that.
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
Why would I do that?
Cervantes
@different-church-lady:
What does consistency have to do with it?
different-church-lady
@Cervantes: I don’t know. I’m just trying to be annoyingly un-adamant.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Cervantes:
You seem to think we’re being unfair to LT. I’m letting you know what the substance of his arguments generally is. If you would like to engage him, be my guest, but those of us who have encountered him before know that there’s not much there there.
mclaren
What an amazing surprise.
Coming up next: Jeb’s astounding new tax cut plan for the middle class…that turns out not to actually cut taxes for the middle class, but only for the rich.
Haven’t we been here before?
Cervantes
@Mnemosyne (tablet):
That’s a complete waste of your time, believe me.
Cervantes
@mclaren:
Have we been elsewhere, really?
LT
@Cervantes: Yes.
LT
@Cervantes: Let’s just note for the record that some of the substance I’ve brought to this – that Substance Hound Syne has not responded to – regards the complete nonsense that this:
is evidence of bad news reporting. It’s just fucking stoneheaded stupidity. News reporters report on allegations – all the fucking time.
And the questons raised by Amy Davidson:
Will Syne respond to these? Meh. Don’t much care, but just wanted to note it.
Plus: Can’t remember if Syne is a member of the “SNOWDEN DA KREMLIN STOOGE!!!” brigade, but it would not surprise me.
weaselone
I think the stupidest thing about this controversy is that all the articles seem to brush off the fact that multiple departments have to sign off on this type of deal. If the fact is even brought up, it’s aggravatingly treated as it were somehow immaterial. If all the other departments signed off on these deals, including the DoD it’s asinine to assume that there is something nefarious in the State Department making the same determination as all the other departments.
J R in WV
@patrick II:
What a fine job of putting these political associations into a real-world perspective.
The Clinton Foundation is working to improve the lot of everyone who needs a hand up, while all the others are soliciting contributions to support work to kick people who need a hand up in the face, dropping them into the fire of extreme poverty, with no hope of ever climbing out of the pit of dispair.
lee
@Linda:
seriously Linda I wish I had as positive an attitude to life and was able to try and see the best in people like you appear to have. Im afraid I don’t though and to me it just looks like The Times and the others were just using the ‘forthcoming Job book’ lie as a way to cover themselves
LT
@J R in WV:
That’s a very weak argument. Plenty of organizations like like the CF have done good things – and bad things, too. Kinda human nature.
Bill Arnold
@LT:
Russia had been supplying the US with uranium for a while, ending 2013 when the last of 500 tons of surplus weapons grade uranium was used to, diluted to make reactor fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatons_to_Megawatts_Program
Did the Times article mention that? I haven’t read it yet.