- Apr 29, 2010
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Anyone wondering why the Clinton email scandal isn't gaining traction?
Look to the Clinton Foundation scandal.
In the Clinton Foundation "scandal", we have bad intel running on repeat trying to slam a charitable foundation as a slush fund or "sold influence" based on virtually no supporting evidence.
The people who claim the foundation spends next to nothing on charity got their information from a brazenly dishonest NYPost article (or the dozens of right-wing blog articles that mirrored the exact same lies) which couldn't tell the difference between the charity's overhead and the charity's operating costs; the difference being that the latter includes the charitable work the foundation does in-house. There have been numerous articles debunking this including a very thorough one from FactCheck.org, but the myths keep coming on repeat by people who are convinced that the foundation only spends 5-10% of its funds on actual charity work. Because they can't tell the difference between overhead and operating costs.
Then there's the idea that she "sold influence", based on her meeting with a whopping 84 people who donated to the charity during the first half of her tenure as secretary of state. The hype for this was, again, dishonest - while the actual AP article smothered everything in caveats, few people seem to have read that, . It's notably lacking anything resembling a smoking gun, with the examples the AP chose to highlight this "quid pro quo" being phenomenally innocuous. The most you could tell from this is that running a major charity, or having your family run a major charity while you are in a position of political power opens you up to the appearance of impropriety, even without any actual hard evidence of impropriety.
These are both non-stories. There's no smoking gun, no hard evidence, and large amounts of it are just flat-out false.
Just like almost every other Clinton Scandal.
Almost every "scandal" brought up about the administration has carried the stench of dishonesty and half-measures. Of leaping to conclusions about the intention and effects. Of insinuation, not hard evidence or proof. Obviously, some worse than others, but when you have people still willing to repeat the insane conspiracy theory that Clinton was responsible for the death of Vince Foster, or the long-debunked crap claim that the Obama administration ordered soldiers to "stand down" from protecting people in Benghazi, it all sort of blends together into a mishmash of scandal that makes it very hard to distinguish the signal (real things we should care about) from the noise (stupid conspiracies and baseless allegations).
The republican party and right-wing news sources have, at this point, very much become the boy who cried wolf. The last X Clinton Scandals (and the list really does just go on and on and on) were partisan nonsense; why should we buy this one?
Look to the Clinton Foundation scandal.
In the Clinton Foundation "scandal", we have bad intel running on repeat trying to slam a charitable foundation as a slush fund or "sold influence" based on virtually no supporting evidence.
The people who claim the foundation spends next to nothing on charity got their information from a brazenly dishonest NYPost article (or the dozens of right-wing blog articles that mirrored the exact same lies) which couldn't tell the difference between the charity's overhead and the charity's operating costs; the difference being that the latter includes the charitable work the foundation does in-house. There have been numerous articles debunking this including a very thorough one from FactCheck.org, but the myths keep coming on repeat by people who are convinced that the foundation only spends 5-10% of its funds on actual charity work. Because they can't tell the difference between overhead and operating costs.
Then there's the idea that she "sold influence", based on her meeting with a whopping 84 people who donated to the charity during the first half of her tenure as secretary of state. The hype for this was, again, dishonest - while the actual AP article smothered everything in caveats, few people seem to have read that, . It's notably lacking anything resembling a smoking gun, with the examples the AP chose to highlight this "quid pro quo" being phenomenally innocuous. The most you could tell from this is that running a major charity, or having your family run a major charity while you are in a position of political power opens you up to the appearance of impropriety, even without any actual hard evidence of impropriety.
These are both non-stories. There's no smoking gun, no hard evidence, and large amounts of it are just flat-out false.
Just like almost every other Clinton Scandal.
Almost every "scandal" brought up about the administration has carried the stench of dishonesty and half-measures. Of leaping to conclusions about the intention and effects. Of insinuation, not hard evidence or proof. Obviously, some worse than others, but when you have people still willing to repeat the insane conspiracy theory that Clinton was responsible for the death of Vince Foster, or the long-debunked crap claim that the Obama administration ordered soldiers to "stand down" from protecting people in Benghazi, it all sort of blends together into a mishmash of scandal that makes it very hard to distinguish the signal (real things we should care about) from the noise (stupid conspiracies and baseless allegations).
The republican party and right-wing news sources have, at this point, very much become the boy who cried wolf. The last X Clinton Scandals (and the list really does just go on and on and on) were partisan nonsense; why should we buy this one?
