Hillary Clinton's Truthiness Problem

As if Hillary Clinton did not have enough problems we can now add one more - she's making some
of the same mistakes Al Gore made.

Actually, that's a cheap shot and not fair - she's making the same mistakes Al Gore was falsely accused of making.

Remember the stories about Al Gore claiming to invent the Internet? Or how he claimed he found the Love Canal scandal? Much of those stories turned out to be hogwash and not in the way the media reported. No, the hogwash was the media coverage itself - they would pick up one detail or comment Gore made and then distort it to the nth degree and soon there'd be stories claming Al Gore said something Al Gore never said.

If you don't believe me read this excellent retrospective piece in Vanity Fair.

You would think that some would learn a few things from that coverage. What I personally learned from watching the media coverage was that many in the news media like to form a stereotype, a formula, for a candidate and then they focus their reporting on stories that fit that formula at the expense of more important stories that don't fit the formula. Thus we'd have story after story about alleged gaffes instead of, say, stories about substance and policy proposals.

I don't know about you but I'm starting to see it happening again. Only this time I'm not sure the fault can be layed at the feet of the media. Instead, the problem seems to lay with Hillary.

It began with her distortions of the Bosnia trip, as described here and satirized here and here.

That sparked some excellent questions like why the media had not reported on what some knew personally to be a false story. There's nothing news reporters hate more than looking bad. That's one of the points I repeatedly tried to make in Cliff Porter's articles, namely that while some in the news media may have a love affair currently with Obama and give him more positive coverage there's always a downside to those love affairs. That downside being when the media feels spurned and realizes the candidate is not doing what he said he would do. The irony of the Clinton camp complaining about this is that the last person who benefitted from this kind of awestruck coverage was Bill Clinton. The media ate him up and helped secure his rise to the Oval Office and then, when he waffled on issues and didn't come through in ways he promised, that scorn and discord from the now dysfunctional relationship was a factor in their coverage of his future problems. Put simply, what comes up must come down and the media (forgive the generalization) loves to promote people who it wil later turn on. But I digress.

After the Bosna controversy there were reports in the news media of journalists going back to check and recheck other stories Hillary has told and retold, to see if she has fibbed in other ways.

Sure enough today the New York Times reported on the second big get, a story told by Hillary which is not, in fact, correct the way she is telling it.

In the coming days you can expect more and more of this, especially if she doesn't stop and fact check her own stories.

Don't say I didn't warn you. If Hillary gets busted again, she has nobody to blame but herself. For if anyone should have learned anything from Gore's steps and mis-steps you'd think it would be Hillary. But it seems she did not learn that important lesson.

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