Possumblog

"Liberal"?!

I am shocked, SHOCKED, I say!

Just noted this little fidgety blurb from USA Today about the new Hillary book, and the unlikely (to the reporter's mind, at least) instance where some conservatives have said it's trash. What struck me as the funniest thing had nothing to do with the subject itself, but this tortured little paragraph:

[...] Some of the influential, conservative "bloggers" who have used their Internet journals to raise questions about the "liberal" media and to spread damaging information about Democratic politicians said they won't endorse The Truth About Hillary. [...]

Heh. Awful lot of quote marks in there. Instructive is that they are used around "bloggers" and "liberal."

The first instance is somewhat understandable, give that there are probably about twelve people who are still unfamiliar with blogging, and all of them read USA Today, but the second is the corker. Does the writer use the quotes to indicate that the word liberal is as peculiar to his readers as the word blogger? Or does he find the idea of liberal media ironic? Does he believe it wrong for others to attempt to label his profession, while he himself is rather adept at labelling the critics he writes about? I mean, there aren't any quote marks around influential, or conservative.

Oh, who knows. It just comes across to me as him trying to say, "...a tiny group of Rove's lapdogs who are stupid and backwards, and who write things no one ever reads because they're stupid backward BLOGGERS (yet, who somehow manage to get all the glory, while I sit here taking a week to hammer some sort of controversy together that simultaneously exposes these self-righteous goons who DON'T EVEN HAVE AN EDITOR OR A DEADLINE as the Rovian lapdogs they are, while simultaneously defending the media as unbiased paragons of rectitude) THOSE GUYS, well, even THEY think this book is unfair, so vote for Hillary in 2008." Of course, that is rather wordy, so maybe he was right to stick with those very clever quote mark things.

One other thing struck me as sort of comical--this quote down at the end:

[...] Klein does have his supporters. Former representative John LeBoutillier, R-N.Y., wrote Tuesday in a column on NewsMax.com that the book "is a must-read for all of us who want to stop (Sen. Clinton) from being president." He called it "a well-crafted portrayal of Hillary's lifetime plan to get herself to the Oval Office - at all costs."

WHAT!? She wants to be the WHAT!? WHO KNEW!?

Look, if you never realized she had political ambitions and an ego to match LBJ's, then you've been living under a rock. But she's as astute a politician as anyone I've seen, and all this junk has been around for years, and it has hardly fazed her. She did manage to get herself elected as a Senator from New York, after all, which is harder than you might think.

Attacking her for being ambitious, and venal, and morally ambivalent, and thick-ankled, and shrewish, and mendacious, and opportunistic, and somewhat married to Bill--none of that is going to have any more traction this time around than it did in the '90s. There's a large enough segment of the big middle ground of the electorate--even with the rise of conservatism in the past election cycles--who would strongly consider voting for her. If the Republicans are going to mount an effective defense against her, it's going to have to be more than complaining that she's avaricious.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at June 22, 2005 02:07 PM