Justin's Political Corner
At least most of them aren’t snickering about the blood clot.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently hospitalized after doctors found a blood clot in her head, a condition that ABC News reported was “potentially ‘life-threatening.’” The hospitalization came in the wake of the news in December that Clinton had suffered a concussion after catching a virus, becoming dehydrated, and feinting.
The unhinged concussion response seemed to mark the unofficial return of the Clinton Crazies, that marauding mindset among conservatives who spent the 90’s launching endless attacks against the Clintons; vicious and wildly personal attacks that went far beyond partisan debate. (i.e. Accusations of killings and mass murder.)
What else explains the conservative media’s decision to treat Clinton’s head trauma as being side-splittingly funny? There’s something very disturbing about how it coalesced around its strategy to make fun of her health. I’d suggest there’s also very distasteful about gleefully mocking the health of a woman in her mid-sixties.
But boy, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham thought the story was a hoot:
Ingraham loved the tasteless “Immaculate Concussion” quip so much she went on The O’Reilly Factor that same night and shared it with a national television audience, delighting in the phrase. Host Bill O’Reilly couldn’t contain his laughter. “I haven’t heard that! That’s good!” roared O’Reilly.
Still laughing, Ingraham responded, “Did she really have a concussion? Maybe she did. I mean, who knows.”
In truth, it might be easier to list the Fox talkers who didn’t laugh out loud while discussing Clinton’s faltering health last month. On The Five, Dana Perino chortled when co-host Greg Gutfeld joked Clinton couldn’t have a concussion since she’d been “ducking everything” regarding Benghazi. Later that same night, Sean Hannity’sshared a chuckle with Fox’s Charles Krauthammer for mocking Clinton’s “acute Benghazi allergy.” (A “good line,” Hannity assured his guest.) It was noteworthy that Fox host Greta Van Susteren went out of her way, via her blog, to distance herself from the “sarcastic” and “snarky” Fox News comments about Clinton’s health.
The topic of Clinton’s faltering condition became a running joke for weeks. Right up until the day the troubling blood clot news was revealed, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg was still making light of her condition:
In the December 31 issue of The Weekly Standard, readers were encouraged to laugh at the news of Clinton’s head trauma.
Blogger and USA Today columnist Glenn Reynolds recently made sure to share with readers a photoshopped picture of Clinton (with her head attached to a burly man’s body) that suggested she was “drunk as skunk” when she fell and suffered a concussion:
Reynolds also hyped the blatant lie that that Clinton had flown to a “Caribbean resort” for New Year’s Eve.
Reynolds’ baseless behavior was not unexpected. Two weeks earlier he had treated the concussion revelation as one big joke, writing, “HELP, I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T TESTIFY ABOUT BENGHAZI”
When Clinton’s doctor recently announced a blood clot had been found during an examine, Reynolds quickly linked to right-wing conspiracist Ann Althouse, who in a pair of blog posts wondered if the “oddities” surrounding Clinton’s health reports stemmed from “fakery.” When critics lampooned her rumor mongering, Althouse insisted she’d been sponsoring “political debate” by raising baseless doubts about the Clinton story.
In the New York Times report about Clinton’s blood clot, the newspaper quoted David Rothkopf, an acting Commerce Department under secretary in the Bill Clinton, who noted the heated politicization of the Hillary Clinton’s health. Beseeching common decency, Rothkopf urged partisan to stop the unseemly behavior and to just act like “human beings.”
For the Clinton Crazies, that’s not always an option.
The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg is claiming that 18-year-olds should be denied the right to vote because they are “so frickin’ stupid about so many things.” In a video first posted by the Daily Caller, Goldberg laments the culture’s obsession with youth and argues that conservatives should “beat out” young people’s belief that “socialism is better than capitalism.”
The magazine fired popular conservative columnist John Derbyshire in April after he topped off a long history of racism and sexism by advising children to avoid “concentrations of black.” It later ended its relationship with Robert Weissberg, who had ties to the white nationalist group American Renaissance.
Yesterday, a post appeared on a Google+ account representing itself as belonging to Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:
The trouble is, Krugman doesn’t have a Google+ account and did not make this statement. This morning, a post from Krugman on his actual New York Times blog explained:
Well, this is interesting. I hear that the not-so-good people at National Review are attacking me over something I said on my Google+ page. Except, I don’t have a Google+ page.
[…]
Apparently some people can’t find enough things to attack in what I actually say, so they’re busy creating fake quotes. And I have enough on my plate without trying to chase all this stuff down.
So if you see me quoted as saying something really stupid or outrageous, and it didn’t come from the Times or some other verifiable site, you should probably assume it was a fake.
A number of right-wing outlets jumped on this statement without bothering to check whether the Google+ account actually belonged to Krugman.
The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney tweeted:
Hot Air, following the link from Carney, put up a post attacking Krugman, which it later updated to acknowledge that Krugman never made the statement.
The Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll wrote a piece with the headline “Quake exposes Keynesian fraud,” which has since been updated to acknowledge that the Krugman statement was a hoax. However, Carroll apparently stands by his attacks on Krugman:
Some thought Krugman’s pining for more damage was so outrageous that the Google+ post was a hoax. Maybe it is. [UPDATE: It is a hoax!] But Krugman’s quake statement is perfectly in line with everything else he has ever said on the subject. After 9/11, Krugman wrote: “Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.” In 2008 he said on This Week: “it took an enormous public works program known as World War II to bring the economy out of a Depression.” And just recently Krugman suggested that massive government defense spending to prevent a fictional alien invasion could also spur economic growth.
But what happens when the aliens don’t attack? Wouldn’t all that spending on anti-alien rays be wasted? Yes. But the Church of Keynsianism doesn’t care. As long as government policy is driving up spending, it doesn’t matter what the government spends the money on or what else gets destroyed in the process.
Reason magazine also put up a post without bothering to investigate whether the account was legitimate:
The post has now been updated with an apology.
National Review Online’s Kevin Williamson indicated that he hoped he was “being had” but, like many of his conservative colleagues, did not bother to investigate further before putting up his post:
First the stimulus wasn’t big enough. Now the earthquake isn’t big enough. Paul Krugman:
People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.
I honestly cannot tell if I am being had here. I hope I am.
Where’s the Nikkei opening today?
However, the winner in this contest of irresponsible reporting may be National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg. He sent out numerous sarcastic tweets attacking Krugman for his supposed statement, and has thus far not retracted:
This is not the first time right-wing websites have skipped the fact-checking process and reprinted as fact something that later turned out to be a fabrication.
h/t: Media Matters For America
