The Washington Post’s desperate spin on the collapse of the Weiner-Abedin marriage is even more desperate than the last time Weiner was caught sexting. Chris “There Is No Pro-Hillary Bias” Cillizza wrote a petulant article headlined “Anthony Weiner is gross. Let’s stop paying attention to him.” And which candidate does that help, hmm?
Earth to Chris: You journalists were ignoring him. For months on end. Until he was exposed for exposing himself again, and the Wife dumped him. So condemn Weiner, and gush over the wife inside Hillary's inner circle. That's one of many examples of a pro-Hillary bias in the media elite.
From his high horse, Cillizza wrote:
Weiner was, for all of his flaws or maybe because of them, impossible to take your eyes off. He was totally and completely watchable. No more. At least not for me....
That’s why I have to hope this is the final chapter in the Weiner saga — or at least the last one we splash on front pages and talk about endlessly on cable TV. It’s now clear that there is something wrong with Weiner — something obsessive and reckless that drives him to this sort of behavior despite being married and having a son. That’s for him to deal with. What we should not — or at least I won’t — do anymore is give him the attention that he clearly craves.
He can do whatever he wants to himself. Don’t allow Weiner to drag his son into this thing. That should be a move too far. Or at least it is for me.
Cillizza also used that painfully Clintonesque spin that "No one really knows what goes on in marriages. I’ll not stand in judgment on the dynamic of their relationship." Real marriages with real fidelity don't need lame political excuses like this.
At least on the front of Tuesday’s Style section they used an accurate headline summarizing Post writer Monica Hesse: “We’re supposed to say that nobody knows what goes on in a marriage. Except we’re pretty sure what went on in this one.”
Aside from hitting that note, Hesse went heavy on the usual sympathy for Hillary’s closest aide Huma Abedin: “Thank God she left him this time.’ When Huma asked for privacy, Hesse proclaimed: “Privacy for Huma. All the privacy in the world for Huma. For him, no. None for him.”
The article concluded on the same uber-sympathetic note: “Go live out the plot line of a Nancy Meyers romantic drama: Accomplished woman with beautiful wardrobe recuperates from heartbreak, drinks wine, eventually meets someone who looks like Jon Hamm.”
One could imagine that hackneyed needle-scratching-a-record sound effect for this sentence in the middle: tolen from a friend on Twitter: “Anthony Weiner is proof that the Clintons don’t actually have people murdered.”
Finally, there's the Tuesday front page story from reporter Anne Gearan, which includes several whoppers coming to Abedin's defense. Start with this one: "Their 2010 wedding was a political society event attended by Hillary Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton."
Ahem: the Adultery President was the minister at this doomed wedding.
Gearan rallied around Hillary and Huma by insisting "there is no evidence of wrongdoing" in the Clinton Foundation emails that are being located, as if the hiding and "BleachBit" destruction of evidence isn't wrongdoing. Then Gearan aggressively denied Abedin had anything to do with her the Muslim journal her "academic parents" run.
Abedin was the quiet, glamorous figure at Hillary Clinton’s side. He is Jewish; she describes herself as a proud Muslim, reared in Saudi Arabia to academic parents from South Asia....
Clinton’s palace guard of aides and friends has always been intensely protective of Abedin, including during her marital troubles and in the face of conservative accusations about alleged ties to Islamist radicalism. She had denied any such ties, and they have been debunked by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column and others.
Let’s just include on the list of the Clinton “palace guard” who are “intensively protective” one Washington Post. Abedin's parents moved to Saudi Arabia to work for a think tank called the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs and a journal titled. Vanity Fair magazine mocked "right-wing" panic over this, but described it as a family business:
It turns out the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs is an Abedin family business. Huma was an assistant editor there between 1996 and 2008. Her brother, Hassan, 45, is a book-review editor at the Journal and was a fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, where Nasseef is chairman of the board of trustees. Huma’s sister, Heba, 26, is an assistant editor at the Journal.
Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler's denials of any radicalism from the Abedins isn't based on actually reading the articles. He finds a friend and insider to deny, deny, deny. Paul Sperry at the New York Post recently reported they published several articles that were strongly anti-American and anti-feminist as well. So why can't that be questioned? Vanity Fair explained why, and took a little shot at the Post:
The Washington Post once described Abedin as “notoriously private.” That’s a fiction, of course. Like many other political operatives, she appears in the media when it suits her agenda. (Appearing in Vanity Fair is not on it; the Clinton campaign declined to make her available despite repeated requests.) The campaign has put the fear of God into many who might speak about her. One longtime Clinton observer explained that, along with Chelsea, Abedin is “the third rail” of the Clinton political world. “I’m being very candid with you,” this person says. “It’s a situation where everyone’s afraid to comment for fear that they’ll be misquoted, for fear of saying something they may think is laudatory that others may not. You can’t imagine the paranoia…. It’s a paranoia that clearly affects how everyone responds to Huma.”
There is a long list of usually chatty Clinton surrogates and supporters who have gone mute on the subject of Huma Abedin. The ones who didn’t get the memo, or choose to ignore it, stick close to the prescribed script. Michael Feldman, the managing director of the Glover Park Group, a communications consulting firm, [who is married to NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie] says that after 20 years Abedin has become part of the “institutional memory” and now occupies “a really important and unique place in an organization.” Bob Barnett, the lawyer who brokered the Clintons’ multi-million-dollar book deals, says Huma is “now one of the key glues that holds Clintonworld together…. She knows everyone and everyone knows her. She knows their strengths. She knows their weaknesses. She knows the roles they’ve played, and that history is priceless to a person in public life.” “Huma is a terrific leader. She’s multifaceted, has a great strategic sense, and she’s a wonderful colleague. She’s an integral part of the team, and her competence is only exceeded by her humility,” says Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.
