Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Anatomy of a Hillary Smear Campaign


Hillary Clinton spoke at a Southern Church service. It was reported on many news outlets like CNN. Nothing unusual about her speech.

The smear: The next day Drudge runs with a headline that Hillary adopted a wildly exaggerated Southern drawl before a Southern crowd and had a video. The Right Wing Noise Machine sprang into action and sent the story and audio-video link to all their conservative outlets. Within a short time the cable news networks were running stories on her pandering for Southern support. CNN, which had ran the story of her speech straight, then went into overdrive and ignored their previous reports.

The truth - even ignoring the fact that Hillary has lived for decades in Arkansas, the clip was carefully edited and showed her reading a Southern hymn in what she imagined was the dialect of the time it was written.
"I don't feel no ways tired.
I come too far from where I started from.
Nobody told me that the road would be easy.
I don't believe he brought me this far to leave me."
Her speaking before and after the quotation was edited out. Isn't it obvious, except for completely credulous morons, that she must be quoting something? Lucky she was not Gov. Howard Dean with his "over-miked scream" or this would be played hundreds and thousands of times in a few days. Or have I spoken to soon?
This clip makes it sound like Hillary is adopting not just this drawl, but the language and rural grammar, as her own.

Yep, on Sunday, CNN's Crowley didn't give the drawl even a passing mention. But on Monday, after CNN assignment editor Matt Drudge had made it his lead story, Crowley suddenly thought it was a sign that Hillary is "very, very studied."
Source for most of this - Greg Sargent's The Horse's Mouth.

ADDED - The GOP grassroots are turning their smears and dirty tricks on each other now in their presidential primary races.

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