RW hissy fit hypocrisy
by digby
The Wall Street Journal had a hissy fit last week when Paul Krugman had the nerve to criticize Alan Greenspan for agreeing to appear at a right wing circus to “counter” the Fed meeting. It was ever so uncivil and yet another example of liberal fascism because Krugman was said to have scared Greenspan away by attacking his policies which is apparently tantamount to character assassination.
Which is funny considering the Journal’s history of character assassination. I wrote about all this in Salon this morning:
The good news is that the right wing is fighting for civic decency, particularly the columnists and editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, which goes out of its way to take the high road. Here’s a perfect example from one of their columnists last week:
I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive such a book. I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”
That’s Peggy Noonan, of course, another civility cop who routinely smears the reputations of Democratic politicians with all the finesse of a 15th century House of Borgia hit man, and then whines whenever someone on the other side decides to fight fire with fire. This has literally been going on for decades. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal has pretty much defined the genre of high end character assassination for decades now. Famously, they targeted former Clinton aide Vince Foster several times, in “a string of highly critical editorials in the Wall Street Journal in June and July 1993,” as the Washington Post put it, which “ left Foster even more ‘distraught.’”
Suffering from clinical depression, Foster killed himself shortly thereafter. And then the right wing media, the congress and much of the mainstream political press which blindly followed them as if they were Pied Pipers, spent years and many millions of dollars torturing the family with absurd allegations and investigations into his death, some even suggesting that Hillary Clinton murdered him. (That included, among others, Rush Limbaugh, who has continued to make this insinuation in the years since. That would be the same Rush Limbaugh who Weekly Standard editor William Kristol once described as “almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves.”)
Read on for more examples. Links are all in the original article.
Honestly, the delicate right flowers of the right wing media are just too much. They love to swagger around brandishing their rhetorical weapons and then get all bent when the other side gives the mildest criticism. Krugman didn’t disparage Greenspan’s character, although he did point out that he was once an avid Ayn Rand cultist, which is true, and I can certainly understand why anyone would find that embarrassing.
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