New Orleans Did the sun just rise in the west? Is down up and up now down? Did hell just freeze over? What’s up with the world?
Why do I wonder?
Simply put when the rightwing editorial page of the Rupert Murdock owned Wall Street Journal makes the case that Hillary Clinton is too close to Wall Street something is definitely topsy-turvy in the world as we know it. This is a classic case of the exception proving the rule. Normally, the editorial page of the Journal is the national equivalent of the society page in your local daily paper: a must miss feature! They run a hater nation page there with a heavy-handed Republican bias, and if their editorials are just snide and snippy, instead of hurtful and malicious, it counts as a good day.
All this is very worrisome, because if the Wall Street Journal thinks that Hillary Clinton is too close to Wall Street, where they butter their bread, then what are the rest of us to think? One can try to pry facts off of someone’s shoes, but it’s hard to get something that seems like gospel out of your head.
The Journal used the recent New Hampshire debate before the upcoming primary as the platform for their question about the $675,000 Mrs. Clinton had received from the financial giant Goldman Sachs.
“Host (CNN) Anderson Cooper asked her whether she really had to be paid $675,000 for giving three speeches. ‘Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,’ said Mrs. Clinton – to much audience laughter. She then tried the argument that every Secretary of State does it, and then settled on the unbelievable claim that at the time she took the money she didn’t know she would be running for President again. Mr. Cooper was so startled he asked her to repeat the point.”
Ouch! The Journal then piles on by following that very expensive blow with some cheaper shots, claiming that Clinton’s deal reflected the working détente between Democrats and Wall Street where the big Demo-dogs take their money, then mega-mouth attacks on them in public, while letting them get away with, well, everything let’s hope, but murder, in private. The Journal wants to believe that has to do with Wall Street trying to muscle out competition from elsewhere, but the rest of us worry, especially in light of the riches and ruin of recent years, that it is really about having them march in the constant favor parade whose big and small floats pave the way to even more of their riches at the expense of the rest of us.
The kicker comes at the end as they wrote,
“When asked on CNN if she regretted her income windfall from Goldman, Mrs. Clinton replied, ‘No, I don’t, because, you know, I don’t feel that I paid any price for it and I am very clear about what I will do and they’re on notice.’ Mrs. Clinton is the one on notice that there is a political price to be paid for it…And because everyone knows why Goldman paid her $675,000.”
This isn’t a shouting match about emails that amount to making a mountain out of a molehill, but something a lot more serious, and these answers really aren’t enough to make any of us comfortable, even the Wall Street Journal.