Impostor
by Dover Bitch
Beyond the usual pleasure of reading one of Digby’s dispatches, I was happy to read this morning’s anecdote about the Hillary supporter who was ready to work hard to get Barack Obama elected.
Though I’ve been greatly annoyed by the relentless reporting of the “rift” in the party, when Hillary gave her fantastic speech last night, I started to wonder if the media’s inflation of the magnitude of the perceived internal war might actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Clinton so skillfully connected this election and its consequences to the history, sacrifice and struggle of American women for equality and fairness, I began to think maybe John McCain did the Democrats a favor with his ads fanning those flames. Clinton’s Harriett Tubman reference last night was brilliant.
I also thought about Hillary’s campaign and how different the outcome might have been had she taken Rachel Maddow’s advice early on and focused her attention on John McCain and the GOP, instead of trying to take down Obama.
But, as Digby wrote this morning, the media narrative is like a piece of Ikea furniture. The holes are already drilled, the dowels already measured out and there’s only one way to put it together, no matter how painful it is to assemble it into its catalog-photo orientation. And in the end, of course, there are obviously a few screws loose.
For the loosest screws, we can always turn to Fox News, where they set the bar low yesterday, explaining that Michele Obama’s speech actually re-enforced her negative image — that is, when you replace her words with completely different words. This will be fun to do with McCain next week. (“The glimmerings of democracy are very faint in Russia America today, and so I would be very harsh.”)
Steve Benen notices today that other media outlets aren’t replacing Clinton’s words with their own, they’re just ignoring them completely and inviting “body language experts” to demonstrate that she was essentially lying.
On the evening of June 28, a few hours after Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together in Unity, N.H., for their first post-primary joint appearance, CNN devoted quite a bit of airtime to “body-language experts.”
At one point, one of the “experts” argued that the position of Hillary Clinton’s navel carries great political significance: “She angles her belly button toward him. She’s treating him with respect. She has her hands in a fig leaf position, which tends to be a passive position, really turning the power over to Obama. We face our belly buttons and the core of our body to people we like, have affinity toward and people we respect. And she’s doing it.”
It was, to my mind, some of the worst on-air political “journalism” — I use the word loosely — I’ve ever seen from a major news outlet. And yet, CBS News this morning did the exact same thing.
I’m disappointed. I was expecting to wake up and learn that anonymous sources leaked word that wasn’t even Hillary last night, but an impostor. Maybe even Barack Obama in a Hillary costume.
I have the undeniable proof right here:
