2008: "Vile Hillary" vs. "Saint McCain"?

Gene Lyons is keeping up with the important news:

It's amazing what you can learn in a supermarket checkout line. Like every red-blooded American man, I yearn to comfort poor Jennifer for what Brad did to her. I'm also worried about Jessica and Nick, whoever they are. The tabloids say their marriage is on the rocks. Reportedly, so is George and Laura Bush's 29-year marriage. According to a recent issue of the Globe, old Dubya's hitting the Jack Daniels again. A "family friend" confided that "after their last fight over booze, [the president and first lady ] just stopped talking - period." I hate it when that happens.

Personally, I'm much more worried about poor Britney's marriage troubles and how those mean papparazzi are interfering with her child-raising responsibilities. But, as Lyons tells us, we can get our celebrity gossip from more sophisticated - or at least more "respectable" - sources than the papers in the check-out line:

Bill and Sen. Hillary Clinton, too. The New York Times recently put 2000 anonymously sourced words on its front page speculating about their marriage. Evidently, "several prominent New York Democrats" pronounced themselves concerned about, get this, an earlier Globe photo depicting Bill leaving a Manhattan restaurant with a dozen people, among them a hot, blond Canadian politician. The Times thought that couldn't help but "fuel coverage in the gossip pages." Now you'd ordinarily think "hot, blond Canadian politician" a contradiction in terms, like "leggy basset hound" or "worldchampion Chicago Cubs." But the nation's crackerjack political press was serving notice: If Hillary runs for president, it'll make headlines any time Bill appears in the same time zone with an attractive woman. They'll be sniggering like Beavis and Butthead on "Meet the Press" and "Hardball." Are they, like, doing it? (my emphasis)

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby reads the current press corps "scripts" for the 2008 Presidential campaign as being Vile Hillary against Saint McCain. War? Unemployment? Outsourcing? Mega-deficits? Massive corruption? A broken health-care-insurance system?

Boo-oor....ing!! Washington reporters are suffering what James Wolcott wisely labels a "nookie drought". And I have to agree with the Howler on this one: if liberals don't recognize what our mainstream press (not just the Republican Party's noise machine) is already doing with the 2008 election, then our dysfunctional "press corps" will put the 2008 election into Maverick McCain's lap. And we can have eight more years of preventive war, new tax subsides for the wealthiest, and Unilateral Executive authoritarianism instead of the Bill of Rights. Or the rest of that pesky Constitution thing, for that matter.

| +Save/Share | |