NY Times: Calling Hillary Fundamentally Dishonest Is A Bogus Narrative Or Something

The NY Times’s Nicholas Kristoff is Very Upset that people refer to Hillary as dishonest. Also, crooked, a shyster, un-trustworthy, poor character, and “belongs in jail”. And here’s here to set you big meanies straight

Is Hillary Clinton Dishonest?

But Clinton’s big challenge is the trust issue: The share of voters who have negative feelings toward her has soared from 25 percent in early 2013 to 56 percent today, and a reason for that is that they distrust her. Only a bit more than one-third of American voters regard Clinton as “honest and trustworthy.”

Indeed, when Gallup asks Americans to say the first word that comes to mind when they hear “Hillary Clinton,” the most common response can be summed up as “dishonest/liar/don’t trust her/poor character.” Another common category is “criminal/crooked/thief/belongs in jail.”

All this is, I think, a mistaken narrative.

Do tell.

One of the perils of journalism is the human brain’s penchant for sorting information into narratives. Even false narratives can take on a life of their own because there is always information arriving that can confirm a narrative.

Huh. So, it’s all in our brains. Kristoff makes sure to tell us this for many, many paragraphs.

One basic test of a politician’s honesty is whether that person tells the truth when on the campaign trail, and by that standard Clinton does well. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 50 percent are either true or mostly true.

So, 50% are either false or mostly false. If your friend, child, spouse, parent, boss, etc, told you a whopper 50% of the time, would you deem them dishonest? How about if they lied to you just 30% of the time? And many of the lies were about big things? Would you trust them? But, Kristoff, in the next paragraph, claims she is honest “by politician standards”. That’s more an indictment of the political class than saying Hillary is honest.

Kristoff attempts to shift Hillary’s Wall Street speaking fees from being dishonest to “just nuts”. If a person is telling everyone they are going to Do Something about some group, then getting paid huge sums to give speeches to them, would you find that dishonest? And then all these groups then lobby that person and seemingly get perks from the State Department?

Then there are the State Department emails, which are the subject of an F.B.I. investigation. What was she thinking in using a private email server? Why on earth would she do such a stupid thing?

Clinton is thin-skinned, private, controlling, wounded by attacks on her and utterly distrustful of the news media. Where Bill Clinton charms, she stews. My bet is that she and her staff wanted to prevent her emails from becoming public through Freedom of Information Act requests.

If she was doing it for that reason, that would still be….dishonest, would it not? Crooked? Poor character? Criminal? Kristoff is doing a piss poor job in attempting to make sure everyone knows that calling Hillary dishonest is just wrong.

Clinton’s private email server may have been penetrated by the Russians, though we don’t know that. But we do know that the official State Department nonclassified email system was indeed penetrated by the Russians, along with the White House unclassified email system.

The bottom line: If she had followed the rules and used her official email address, Vladimir Putin might actually have had a leg up on reading her correspondence.

That’s cute, but, it is also an argument that would not be accepted by any federal agency which found a high ranking private sector corporate officer using an outside email system to avoid federal record keeping laws. We’re also talking about the non-classified system, which wouldn’t be used to transmit the highly classified information found on her server. Nor the stonewalling from Hillary and her people for a long, long time.

So as we head toward the general election showdown, by all means denounce Hillary Clinton’s judgment and policy positions, but let’s focus on the real issues. She’s not a saint but a politician, and to me this notion that she’s fundamentally dishonest is a bogus narrative.

When a Democrat yammers on about focusing on “real issues”, you know this is an attempt to deflect from how bad the discussed issue is for them. If we want to focus on her judgement, though, Kristoff has just told us that it was rather pathetic. Poor. Nuts, even. Not much of a defense or endorsement.

Furthermore, should we accept this kind of judgement and policy from someone just because they are a politician? Should we not demand better, like following the rules, regulations, and laws that apply to everyone else? And that they should not lie to the general public while telling the truth to close compatriots?

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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11 Responses to “NY Times: Calling Hillary Fundamentally Dishonest Is A Bogus Narrative Or Something”

  1. Jeffery says:

    And the GOP is set to nominate the shapeshifter Donald Trump, for whom political honesty is just another commodity to be shared only in an emergency. Their backup is a Cuban-Canadian televangelist who lies and exaggerates, and just for fun, tortures the truth.

    The corporate media (what cons call the “liberal” media) has disliked the testy Hillary from day one, and forever since. And she doesn’t like or respect the media in return – and it shows.

    Trump is a showman, a salesman, an unapologetic self-promoter and a “businessman”. Dishonesty is one of their reflexes. He tells more lies in a week than Hillary has told in a career, yet the media claim she is the dishonest one, lol.

    Benghazi!!

  2. Zhytamyr says:

    I’m disappointed in your performance today Jeff, normally you slip in some racist hate speech. Too busy to read the comments at Stormfront for inspiration today?

  3. Jeffery says:

    Zamfir,

    Not all conservatives are racist, but all racists are conservative.

    Fear of the “other” is the cornerstone of modern conservatism.

    The modern conservative movement has three legs: Christianism, Caucasian superiority, Male domination.

    Feel better? Can you go back to blowing your flute? Or blowing whatever you blow?

  4. Zhytamyr says:

    There ya go Jeff, proud of you. Thought that you might be feeling poorly today, or perhaps just a little distracted. You had me worried.

  5. drowningpuppies says:

    …perhaps just a little distracted…

    The little guy has transgenders and dicks on his little mind.

  6. Jl says:

    That’s funny-if anybody is racist it’s Democrats, who continually think blacks need their “help”, through either affirmative action or the old standby-they somehow are incapable of obtaining an ID.

  7. Jeffery says:

    That’s funny – after a couple of centuries of conservative oppression it’s now Republicans blocking any help for Blacks and working overtime to keep them from voting Republicans out of office.

    Why do you think Blacks today don’t appreciate all that Republicans are trying to do to for them? Why do Blacks support Democrats? The truth is not racist, although the conservative meme to explain it is – but then, racism explains much of modern conservatism.

  8. Jeffery says:

    Yikes! Even Charles Koch thinks Hillary would be a better Prez than Donald or Rafi.

  9. Jeffery says:

    Is a dog portrait better or worse than a dog whistle? Or are they related?

  10. Michael says:

    No, just easier to influence.

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