Hillary, Jeff Greenfield, and those magic cows

Jeff Greenfield offers yet another disguised hit job on Hillary Clinton. Naturally, this piece ignores the real problems with Hillary, such as her neocon foreign policy and her association with the Kagan clan. Instead, Greenfield wallows in the familiar beltway bullshit: Oh, those Clintons are so sneaky and shady. And they always, always get away with it!

What's particularly cute about the way Greenfield mounts his attack is that much of it is phrased as a defense. Nice trick. Of course, that trick also works in reverse:

"It doesn't matter what people say about Jeff Greenfield. I'm sure that he will always have a prosperous career, even if he were to be accused of bank robbery and child molestation and puppy strangulation and poisoning the water supply. Let me state right here and now that I have seen no evidence that Greenfield has ever actually strangled a puppy."

Be honest. Isn't that what Greenfield is doing here...?

For close to a quarter-century now, the willingness—make that eagerness—of voices on the Right to embrace every accusation against the Clintons has proven to be a pearl of great price for Bill and Hillary, serving to insulate them politically from allegations that were, in fact, credible. (No, the Clintons did not murder Vince Foster, nor profit from the Whitewater deal. Yes, there was something distinctly non-kosher about how Hillary Clinton made so much money trading cattle futures. No, the Clintons did not hang pornographic toys on a White House Christmas tree; yes, the Marc Rich pardon was indefensible).

"So much money" came to about $99,000. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that she made millions.

For years now, I've been asking: Just how does one rig the cattle futures market? On a couple of occasions, I've asked people who know about money to explain the futures market to me. Although I quickly forgot the details of what they tried to teach me, those experts did make one thing clear: They had zero idea as to how to rig the cattle futures market. They implied that if they knew how to do a thing like that, they would have done it.

The Marc Rich pardon was just a bit of farewell fellation for Israel. After all, Bill had Hillary's career to think about.

What I find most intriguing are these words: "No, the Clintons did not murder Vince Foster, nor profit from the Whitewater deal." This, from Jeff freakin' Greenfield -- who, back in the day, had helped to wrap the Whitewater smear around the Clintons.

In 1994, Greenfield was smarming it up on Whitewater, treating that pseudoscandal (the pseudoness of which should have been apparent even at the time) as though it were the equivalent of Iran-contra. Here's what he had to say about the appointment of' Ken Starr...

So ask yourself: Remember how angry you were at how Lawrence Walsh was acting when he was Iran-contra independent counsel? Remember all those stories in The Wall Street Journal about Walsh's political agenda, his partisanship?

How come that doesn't apply when it's a fired Republican U.S. attorney investigating the affairs of the president who fired him?

Greenfield is addressing Clinton's Republican critics here. His wording implies that Walsh really was a partisan hack who deserves comparison to Starr. Hardly the case.

What angered me back then were the mainstream media guys like Greenfield who gave the Iran-contra malefactors a free pass. What angered me was the hyper-scrutiny given to nonsense like Whitewater by the very same pseudo-journalists who had refused to look very deeply into such matters as Reagan's illegal dealings with Iran. (Any Democratic president who had sold arms to Iran would have been removed from office.)

From a 2000 story by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, when those two were at the top of their games:

Even more damning was a “Nightline” report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about “the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be.” He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: “Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said.”

Up came a video clip from Hillary’s April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. “The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work,” she said. “It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.” Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. “She [Hillary] did all the billing,” the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself.”

What the audience didn’t know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression.

Greenfield and Koppel accused Hillary Clinton of lying about the very bit that was snipped out. As Media Matters later summarized:

It was a shockingly dishonest report; Greenfield and ABC were simply lying about Clinton -- there's really no other way to put it. Those involved should have seen their reputations take a serious hit -- at the very least. Yet they suffered no consequences due to their dishonorable and unprofessional actions.

In his recent column, Greenfield complains about the Clintons' ability to avoid consequences. My question: Why didn't Jeff Greenfield suffer any consequences from his participation in that Nightline hit piece?

The mainstream media was definitely out to get the Clintons in those days. That undeniable fact is damned near the only reason to support Hillary now. If she has enemies like that, she may be capable of doing some actual good, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.