Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
“The Clinton Confounding Principle” can be stated thusly: An attempt to decrease Clinton popularity by scandal causes an equal and opposite increase in Clinton popularity.
“If the Republicans had any other candidate who ran, right now the news would be filled with WikiLeaks such as Hillary promising open borders, it’s impossible to screen for terrorists, bashing Catholics, and telling Wall Street she’ll have to lie to the public to put through their backroom position.”
Sorry, but I can’t agree here. Any candidate we put forward would have said something stupid at some point or have something questionable in his past and that’s all we’d be hearing about. In Trump’s case, they’re mentioning all sorts of stuff, in any other candidate’s case, they’d be spending just as much time harping on one or two things.
Romney was as morally upright as any candidate we’re ever going to have and he was still successfully framed as a monster who tortures dogs and either wants women to die of cancer or be kept prisoner in binders.
And if there’s nothing true and the candidate’s actually perfect, they’ll just make stuff up. We’ve got to let go of the idea that we can successfully attack Democrats only with candidates who’ve done nothing wrong themselves. With the media’s help, they’ll twist anyone into a monster of some sort.
The principle can also be stated that the Clintons are protected from accusations of corruption by their very reputation for corruption. I think that was from Peggy Noonan.
I take comfort knowing they’ll be gone soon enough. They really don’t look well.
She is going to inherit a mess and then mess it up some more.
I wonder how history will write them?
The Manchrian left will write the history so :
The Clinton’s are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings I’ve ever known in my life.
They use the fact that they always elude consequences for their crimes as proof of innocence for subsequent crimes.
Chelsea’s going to be around for a while, and from what I hear she’s very much her parents’ daughter.
Not to try to make you feel less comfortable or anything…
You had me right up until here.
The “news” would be filled with anything other than the truth about Hillary. We ran a boy scout in 2012 and when it came down to it, he was toppled by “47%,” having held down a possibly gay kid while other teens shaved his head, and having once lashed his dog to the roof of a car for a family vacation.
It’s nice to think the media would tell us the truth, but it’s pure fantasy.
But he was up against a blank slate. Not so here.
Not in 2012.
Awesome.
This has been bugging me for years.
Although I do think it somehow extends to all Democrats everywhere.
I remember catching a Rush Limbaugh program at one point during GW’s stormy first term when the debate over Operation Iraqi Freedom was going on. Rush pounded the desk and thundered, “Why is George Bush on trial here!”
Great post, Tommy. I agree with most of the above that things would be bad for any Republican — and just repeated more if few things could be harped on — but this election is really special for the media, really special. This is the most fun they have had in decades.
But, really it comes down to the media’s professional integrity. They are the driving force here and the Clintons are just willing to ride the horse the longest. It hard work for most people and seemingly the Clintons like that kind of hard work. They are getting rich for doing their part here.
I still say the big single problem in the country is the media, especially combined with an opposition party of little girls. Every single intractable and contentious problem is there because of the media’s support for the left wing’s opinions on them. The Republicans advice is always to try and get the message out in such a way that it can not take flack.
It’s so weird that there are always two enemies and the Republicans simply will not fight the one that is killing them with the pincer movement from the rear.
They also take lots of media hostility as evidence they should do the opposite of what they really should do.
For example, there was an ad campaign in Maryland a few years back geared towards black voters. It was alerting them to how Social Security was screwing them over. Apparently it was pretty effective.
Cue the media onslaught against the “divisive” ad campaign geared towards “deceiving black voters”. So of course they suspend the ads.
They thought the media attacks indicated they were doing something wrong, when in this (admittedly not every) case the media attacks should have been taken as evidence we should have been expanding the ad campaign, not suspending it.
There’s no way we’ll ever get our message out without being attacked, and the better we get out the message, the more ferociously we’ll be attacked.
We want it to be easy, but it’s not.
I do know that at The Beast or The Stain’s funeral the press will look like this.
In the whole sordid history of the Clintons I have never read a satisfactory explanation as to how and why they get so many people to invest in them. First, they build an iron circle of unprincipled butt-kissers who never rat and never have qualms of conscience. Cheryl Mills, for example, makes Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen seem like a boy scout.
Then they build wider circles of people who don’t merely want them to succeed but somehow need for it to happen. The MSM investment in them is more than merely remarkable or indicative of liberal bias. There are books waiting to be written about the sheer volume of Hillary’s habitual malfeasance and about the psychological pathology that underlies it but somehow a duty of omerta to the Clintons applies to journalism. The story is never about whether they did it but that their accusers have over-reached or that it is old news which supposedly absolves it all.
Part of it has to do with the transformation of the Democratic party from a blue collar-centered party to one run by and for a narrow demographic comprised entirely of snarky, wealthy, white, narcissistic twits. The need for narrative and caricature rather than moral or intellectual substance is the perfect growth media for the parasitic Clintonian infection to thrive.
As long-time Clinton supporter Screwtape put it: the goal is to get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return. Seems to be working.
I don’t think of it as the Clinton Confounding Principle but rather the Gary Hart Lemma.
In 1987 the major media players were still in Watergate mode. And though reliably left-leaning, they accurately reported on Gary Hart’s tryst on the yacht ‘Monkey Business’ with a young lady who was not his wife. These revelations destroyed the Presidential hopes of Gary Hart who – until the affair getting publicized – seemed to be the golden boy of the Democratic Party and a lock as the 1988 Presidential nominee. The end result was Mike Dukakis as nominee and GHW Bush as President. In the wake of this defeat … Brought about in large part by Hart getting scuttled by media-fired scandal…. I believe the major media vowed “Never Again!” The fact that this No-More-Gary-Harts vow rebounds to the benefit of the Clintons is merely a function of the fact that the Clintons produce more potential scandals than any other Democratic candidates. The impact is the same as the CCP, but the cause is different.
This way of thinking is ingrained with some people. Back in the 80’s I read Intellectuals by Paul Johnson. The author brought up the many failures in the personal lives of leading thinkers admired by the left. I mentioned the book in passing to a liberal friend who remarked that he didn’t see why that would matter.
“Character” is racist, sexist, homophobic, patriarchal and–even worse–passé.
In my judgment, what happened this year was a function of the Republican landslide in 2014 and the failure of those elected to use the power of the purse to curb the shenanigans in which the Obama administration was involved. Without the power of the purse, the legislative power is nothing. With it, it is almost everything. To surrender it, as the Republicans have done, is to make the Presidency an executive dictatorship.
The party base drew the following conclusion from this failure: “We cannot trust any elected official.” And so they opted for a demagogue who spoke half-truths that no one is allowed to speak. I do not approve of their choice, but I do not blame them for their disappointment. The Republican Party should adopt as its emblem the white flag of surrender.
The terrible thing about this election is that, if Trump were to win, we might be worse off than if Hillary were to win. I intend to vote for the bum because I suspect that she will be worse. But I also harbor the suspicion that he will do very great harm. He is not a conservative. He is not a constitutionalist, and he is not a thoughtful man. He is a man of impulses . . . most of them ugly.
I do not blame those who will opt to vote for Trump. I do not blame conservatives who apt to opt to vote for Hillary. I do not blame those who will refuse to vote. We are between a rock and a hard place, and it is difficult to discern which is worse.
A horse is a horse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse , of course……..
I’ve said and written this many times before but when Bush won in 2000 despite the press calling Florida early and all the other shenanigans , (see Bill Sammon’s ‘At Any Cost’ ), I said to my wife that Bush would be the last Republican President because the PRESS would simply never let that happen again.
Hillary and Webb Hubble?