She stands by her men

Bookworm did us a favor and watched a two hour Frontline documentary last night on PBS. She titled her piece PBS savagely attacks Donald Trump, using a sober tone to hide its basic dishonesty

It was not, in fact, an honest documentary. It was a savage hit piece, using a patina of documentary sobriety to hide its core dishonesty.

To appreciate just how awful it was, you have to know a bit about Frontline. It’s a long-running show that always focuses on very serious subjects. Whether at home or abroad, it’s viewpoint is hard Left, although it will never acknowledge that it has a bias. Indeed, to prove that it is unbiased, it is, as I said, very, very serious. It always has grim music and the regular narrator, Will Lyman, has the deep, slow, serious, mostly uninflected voice of an aspiring funeral home director. How can something be biased if it’s both serious and sober?

Nor am I exaggerating the effect its serious, sober quality has on receptive (i.e., Progressive) audiences. CNN was impressed by the fact that “Frontline soberly profiles Clinton, Trump in ‘The Choice’"...

...Frontline did forget to note a couple of things in its tight little narrative about Hillary’s move from Watergate to Arkansas. First, they don’t mention that the DC bar is and was widely considered to be the easiest bar exam in the country. She must have taken it on a really bad day.

Second, and much more importantly, Hillary didn’t vanish from the Watergate committee just because it wrapped up. She was fired.

Jerry Zeifman, a Democrat, served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings. He was also Hillary’s boss. According to him (and much as the Left has tried to discredit this story, they haven’t been able to), he fired Hillary for rank dishonesty and refused even to give her a letter of recommendation, something that is a much more likely reason for high-tailing it off to Arkansas than merely having failed to pass the bar:

At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry staff that included Hillary Rodham—who was later to become First Lady in the Clinton White House.

During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book, Without Honor, and are now available for inspection in the George Washington University Library.

After President Nixon’s resignation, a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel—as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following:

John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics]. Labovitz said, ‘That came from Yale.’ I said, ‘You mean Burke Marshall’ [Senator Ted Kennedy’s chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, ‘Yes.’ His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition.

At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.

[snip]

After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”

Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then-most-recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff—where they were no longer accessible to the public.

Hillary had also made other ethically flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with—or take depositions of—any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Department’s special Watergate prosecutor.

Only a few far-left Democrats supported Hillary’s recommendations. A majority of the committee agreed to allow President Nixon to be represented by counsel and to hold hearings with live witnesses. Hillary then advocated that the official rules of the House be amended to deny members of the committee the right to question witnesses. This recommendation was voted down by the full House. The committee also rejected her proposal that we leave the drafting of the articles of impeachment to her and her fellow impeachment-inquiry staffers.

That’s Hillary in all her glory: hard Left, an unethical lawyer, and a dishonest human being. And yet somehow this “sober” PBS documentary didn’t think any of that information about Hillary’s Watergate career was relevant. Instead, the show’s writers and producers put in just enough of her Watergate history to burnish her credentials as an individual yearning to change the world for the better, rather than the hard Left, corrupt party operative she already was in 1973.

Hillary’s Arkansas years get short shrift too. There’s no mention of Whitewater and the cover-up to remove her name from the Rose Law Firm’s work on that scandal nor do we hear about cattle futures. Instead, one day Bill is elected governor and the next day he’s running for the White House, with stalwart Hillary at his side.

The White House run, however, does force Frontline to mention Jennifer Flowers, who went public about her 12-year affair with Bill. Throughout 1992, Bill absolutely denied the affair. Frontline applauds Hillary for standing by his side as he destroyed Flowers’ reputation with his false denials.

Hillary’s support, of course, came about because Hillary had a burning desire to make the world a better place. It’s only some residual journalistic integrity that has Frontline acknowledging that Bill admitted under oath in 1998 that he, not Flowers, was the liar.

...It seems worthwhile mentioning just one more time at this point in the narrative that while the show interviews Hillary’s friends it only interviews Trump’s enemies. Also, at this point in the “documentary,” I’m actually thinking I’d rather have a fighter than a victim as my president, but maybe that’s just me.

...And then came that fatal January in 1998: Bill woke Hillary to warn her not to worry about the fact there were false news reports that he’d had an affair with a former White House intern. Hillary later insisted that Bill lied to her as he did to everyone else and that she naively, lovingly believed him. It was the blue dress that forced the truth on Hillary.

On the Today Show, she bravely stood by her man, repeating her lies — because she was a private individual with a burning desire to make the world a better place. Hillary was and is a fighter: It’s all the fault of the vast right-wing conspiracy. (While Trump is mean, Hillary knows how to deal with scandal.)

So, the truth finally came out — and, of course, Bill and Hillary never apologized to any of the women who Bill used and both of them abused. Hillary was “a brilliant person who was played for a fool.” Hillary hated and was angry at Bill but she stood by her man because she always been a very private individual with a burning desire to make the world a better place. I would feel sorry for Hillary’s public humiliation too but for the fact that she covered for Bill’s affairs for decades and savaged innocent women — something the show ignores entirely.

...In 2008, once again fate screwed Hillary Clinton. She was supposed to win but for that darn Obama. (No mention, of course, of Hillary starting the birther story.) During the campaign, she was the pragmatist. Her youthful Wellesley enthusiasm was burned away. But the damn fool public wanted “change,” not Hillary, so Hillary has to pledge fealty to Obama.

While Hillary is slaving away, Donald was asking “why shouldn’t Obama show his birth certificate?” He said he believed it existed and asked (as many Americans did), “Why not show it?” This is pure Roy Cohn sleaze according to Frontline. No mention, of course, about the fact that Obama for years shilled his writing by claiming Kenyan birth. No mention, either, about the fact that Obama refused to release any personal records whatsoever.

The designated Frontline talking head scathingly says that Trump is pandering to the “Archie Bunkers” who can’t tolerate a black president. It doesn’t occur to them that Americans aren’t troubled by Obama’s color; they’re troubled by his own lies about his background, by his un-American attitudes, by his barely concealed dislike for traditional white America, etc. Lt. Col. Allen West would never have been the subject of the suspicion surrounding Obama. But as I said, the show won’t mention this.

And just why is it so unreasonable that a candidate for president, or even a president, be asked to prove one of the few requirements for holding the office?

In any event, it was all for naught. That crazy intelligent Obama undercut Trump by doing exactly what Trump asked: releasing the birth certificate. Oh, except that he didn’t release the birth certificate. He released a layered PDF which, rightly or wrongly, aroused suspicions because a truly scanned historic document wouldn’t have layers. But whatever…. That Obama sure beat crazy Trump. Poor Trump. Now he should just go away.

Even as Trump is being weird, Hillary became Secretary of State. A talking head concedes that she saw it as a stepping stone to another run for the presidency. At this point, something interesting happens on the show: How does a pro-Hillary documentary get around the fact that Hillary had a singularly unsuccessful tenure as Secretary of State? Among other things, she presided over the rise of ISIS, the failure of the Green Revolution in Iran, the fall of Libya, the bloody death of an ambassador and three other Americans, the rise of the Syrian civil war, and the dreadful collapse in the “reset” American relationship with Russia.

Simple: you sacrifice Obama, who’s leaving the White House anyway and, even if it offends Obama, it’s more important to destroy Donald and save Hillary. So it is that Frontline assures us that Hillary was tremendously surprised (and I bet she was) to learn that she was just Obama’s puppet. It was Obama who made all State Department decisions — which means everything bad was Obama’s fault. Poor Hillary. Once again, the good little woman, she stood by her man — in this case, Obama.

Even after leaving the Secretary’s office, the political attacks on Hillary wouldn’t stop. She was now being hounded about a private email system she set up. Typical Hillary, says Frontline — secrecy and denial. And that’s all that Frontline says about the email system. The subtext is that’s all there is to see here. Ignore all the laws she broke and the fact that she exposed all of America’s State Department secrets to foreign countries and every hacker around. You all know she’s secretive, we’ve admitted she’s secretive, so you can just forget this. It’s not important.

A talking head acknowledges that Trump is authentic. He’s real. Somehow he’s connecting with people. He won the votes of millions of Americans and became the nominee. We’re told that this is the only thing that was left for Donald to do to fulfill his insatiable desire for attention. He’s not running to make the world, or even America, a better place; it’s about ego aggrandizement.

And that, my friends, is the whole documentary. I’ve watched it, so you don’t have to. I hope I’ve made clear that Hillary is a plaster saint in this documentary, which her myriad scandals ignored or mentioned only in passing. Thus, the show makes no mention of the crimes and corruption in which Hillary engaged before, during, and after her time in the White House. In shallow strokes, she is painted as a hard worker, loyal, forgiving — and, of course, something with a burning desire to make the world a better place.

And Donald? He’s a warped man who knows nothing about business, lusts after fame, and is using stupid, racist, credulous Americans to feed his ego.

Aren’t you glad you didn’t watch the documentary? Frankly, having watched it myself, I feel a good 20 IQ points more stupid than before, and that’s despite Frontlines’ serious, sober tone.

Read more here.