Poor Bill: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Bill Clinton, aka Hillary’s husband, just can’t win. He has spent a good deal of his political career defending himself from lies he has told to cover up the fact he boinked a bunch of women while married to the future president and pushed through a bunch of corporate-friendly legislation that ultimately hurt black Americans, led to the dot com bubble and its subsequence burst, and ultimately paved the way for overly deregulated banks to cause the great recession of 2008. Did we mention he oversaw more corporate mergers than Ronald Reagan? But we digress.
The point is he has been soundly chastised for not telling the truth.
So this week he apparently saw the error of his ways and decided to start telling the truth. Problem is, he started with Obamacare. While out on the road supposedly to drum up votes for Hillary in Michigan, hubby Bill drank some truth serum and blasted Obamacare as the craziest, worst thing he’s ever seen, noting that it didn’t create anything like universal affordable coverage but rather drove up costs for crappier coverage while being really hard on small business owners.
Finally Bill says what he really means.
Problem is, his wife is running on the “Obama is a deity” ticket and has embraced the current president’s signature health care achievement as the most important legislation since social security.
Now, we all know she has a powerful political reason for doing so that has nothing to do with health care, but you would think she would have shared that little piece of political manipulation with her future First Lady… uh, man. Poor Bill. He just can’t win no matter what he says these days. Bill’s blunder could really have hurt Hillary’s election bid if she wasn’t running against a bat-shit crazy, racist, reality TV star whose favorite movie is the first half of The Stepford Wives.
‘Denver Post’ makes the news
It’s a bit odd, but the Denver Post has found itself as the subject of a lot of news stories of late.
Westword did a nice piece describing the long history of the Post as it has transformed itself from important journalistic venture into its current incarnation as an increasingly pale donor to its current blood-sucking ownership. Westword asked the question: Can the Post survive its current ownership? It’s a good question considering the distressed-property-buying hedge fund that owns the paper has gutted the newsroom by more than 30 percent in just the past year in order to maintain its current level of profits, which are said to be quite high.
Denver magazine 5280 also did a large piece on the Post this month describing how the paper’s reporters are required to file many stories a day while also tweeting and monitoring their online pageviews so they know which kind of stories they should be writing. Not kidding.
The 5280 story described how the Post’s breaking news feed is more often filled with food stories and crap rewrites of press releases than actual news these days.
Which raises a different question than the one Westword asked. Instead of will the Post survive, the question should be will it make any difference when the Post goes away?
On the one hand, the answer is yes. It will matter greatly to the excellent, hard-working journalists at the Post who are doing their best to produce good work under insanely difficult circumstances.
But as it stands now, the Post’s owner, publisher and its editorial pages have already sold out to the oil and gas industry and other powerful corporate forces. So what good is a paper we can’t trust to look out for anything but its own bottom line? None at all. So in that sense, it’s loss would be meaningless.
BW would like to join with the journalists at the Denver Post in calling for the current ownership to sell the paper to a new local owner who will reinvigorate the newsroom and fire the current management scumbags who have destroyed a once-great paper in exchange for their oversized paychecks.
