Chelsea Clinton, Shameless and Dishonest Attack Dog
Are you capable of feeling sympathy for Bernie Sanders? The Clinton campaign keeps coming up with innovative, groundbreaking new ways to be shameless. Now they're using Chelsea Clinton as an attack dog, making one of those patented technically-true-but-epically-misleading-out-of-context accusations. CHELSEA CLINTON: Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance. Now the Republicans in Congress have voted against the Affordable Care Act 55 times, right? Not because they want to replace it with something because they want to get rid of it. So I worry that if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we'll go back to an era before we had the Affordable Care Act that will strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance. Is it true? Well, Bernie Sanders supports "single payer." You can I could go on at length about what a disaster socialized medicine can be. In fact, let's look across the pond and check in . . . Hospital doctors in England staged their first strike in four decades on Tuesday, disrupting treatment for thousands of patients in the National Health Service and escalating political tensions over a publicly funded health care system so revered that it was once likened to a national religion. Operations were postponed and appointments canceled in a bitter dispute over pay and working hours between employers and junior doctors, a term that covers medical professionals with as much as a decade of experience. With the junior doctors offering only emergency care, about 3,500 operations had been affected by Tuesday afternoon, including routine procedures for knee and hip replacements -- prompting a warning from Prime Minister David Cameron that the labor action would create "real difficulties for patients, and potentially worse." Gee, maybe you don't want every medical professional in the country working for the same employer! Maybe choice and competition are as good a thing in the medical world as anywhere else! But as flawed and dangerous as single-payer is, Sanders's plan only "dismantles" Obamacare, CHIP, Medicare and private insurance to replace it with taxpayer-funded care for everybody. Chelsea's pointing to only one-half of Sanders' agenda in order to make it look like he wants to unplug Grandma from the respirator and snatch away Tiny Tim's cane. Perhaps we shouldn't be stunned that Chelsea Clinton, former NBC News reporter under the tutelage of Brian Williams, is running around telling stories that are exaggerated to the point of falsehood. Alternately, maybe Chelsea inherited the shameless lying gene from both sides. MARK HALPERIN: I've covered the Clintons since 1991. It takes a lot to surprise me. I am stunned watching Chelsea Clinton go on the attack. Stunned. Never seen anything like it. And the attack, which her mother is making as well, they're trying to attack Bernie Sanders from the left on health care, when he supports single-payer. I mean, I'm stunned, I'm stunned by the whole thing. I will say, you and I spent a couple days in Iowa. We saw Bernie Sanders. We saw the event last night. There is no doubt Bernie Sanders has built something real. There's no doubt that she has too, but the stakes for her now are immense. I think that she's building up Iowa and New Hampshire. I guess she feels they feel they have no choice. So I think attacking him and going after him is smart, but the way they're doing it, I don't think is smart. If there's one thing I could dispel from modern politics, it would be politicians' attempts to win an argument through a shameless obvious lie and then never backing down from it -- keeping the issue forever "disputed" when it's actually clear and one side is factually correct and the other side is factually wrong. We can argue about when this became a mainstream tactic in our discourse, but I think "I did not . . . have . . . sexual . . .relations with that woman . . . Miss Lewinsky," was a key moment. Naturally, Hillary insists her daughter is right, that Bernie Sanders wants to take away your health care. "You know, I adore my daughter and I know what she was saying," Clinton told "Good Morning America" about Chelsea Clinton. "Because if you look at Senator Sanders' proposals going back nine times in the Congress, that's exactly what he's proposed. To take everything we currently know as health care, Medicare, Medicaid, the CHIP Program, private insurance, now of the Affordable Care Act, and roll it together." What happens when Bernie Sanders shoots back, and calls out Chelsea Clinton on this? "HOW DARE HE ATTACK A PREGNANT MOTHER!" Past editions of the Jim-can't-stand-Chelsea-Clinton series: Chelsea Clinton's $1,083-Per-Minute University Appearance, her keynote address at SXSW, her awards for "Woman of the Year" and "Mom of the Year," the endless puff pieces, her conclusion that she "couldn't care about money on a fundamental level" . . . Look Who Just Joined Vladimir Putin's Payroll! Who in their right mind would go work for RT television, the Kremlin-funded propaganda network? Former MSNBC host Ed Schultz, that's who! He should fit right in, really: RT thrives on covering topics that make the U.S. look bad. Third-party candidates, after all, embody defiance of America's ruling political elite. Occupy Wall Street gave us images of NYPD officers pepper-spraying peaceful protesters and roughing up members of the press. Snowden must have been manna for the network, whose blanket coverage has included a widely circulated YouTube clip of reporters from CNN and the A.P. grilling a State Department flack over the NSA whistle-blower turned Russian asylum-seeker's First Amendment rights. Still, RT's journalists swear they're under no pressure to toe a party line. Well, except for the one that resigned in protest: Another member of state-funded Russia Today made waves on Wednesday -- not by standing behind Moscow, as the news network is wont to do, but by bucking it. From the anchor chair, Liz Wahl closed a show -- as seen in video which she later tweeted -- talking about the "ethical and moral challenges" she faces working for Russia Today, also known as RT. She spoke of being from a family who fled to America to escape Soviet forces during the 1956 Hungarian revolution, being the daughter of a U.S. military veteran and being the partner of a physician who works at a U.S. military base. "And that is why, personally, I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin," Wahl said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. "I'm proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth," she added. "And that is why, after this newscast, I'm resigning." You may recall Ed Schultz once threatening to burn down the NBC building if MSNBC didn't start including him in their promotional commercials. If he seems like a hostile lunatic, well . . . once again, he'll fit right in: RT also traffics in the type of fringe punditry that's found an audience across the U.S. media landscape. Its marquee anchor, the zany, histrionic Max Keiser, is a champion of 9/11 trutherism and financial apocalypse. Controversial commentators over the years have included people like the Russian historian who predicted that the dissolution of the United States was nigh, or the American one who believes the CIA is using unwitting citizens as guinea pigs to test dangerous drugs. One guest last year explained of the situation in Syria: "President Obama is acting on a British geopolitical plan to force a confrontation with Russia and China, a military confrontation of which Syria and Iran would merely be the ignition point." A match made in Heaven Moscow! Is Everyone Going to See 13 Hours This Weekend? Hmmm . . . is 13 Hours going to be the next American Sniper? The vast and underserved heartland audience that made such a smash out of American Sniper a year ago finally has some fresh red meat to call its own in 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Michael Bay's latest in-between-Transformers picture actually features just as much action as his giant toy extravaganzas, being an account of the waves of intense firefights that occurred at the American compound in Libya's second city on September 11-12, 2012. The big selling point of Mitchell Zuckoff's book about the incident, which cost the life of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, was its revelation of the hitherto unknown role special ops played in holding marauding local radicals at bay until all American personnel could be evacuated. But while this adaptation superficially goes out of its way to avoid being overtly political, its patriotic tenor is as unmistakable as its sentimentality. Even if an unmentioned Hillary Clinton has nothing specific to worry about in regard to the film's content, its mere existence will stir up fresh talk about her behavior regarding the incident, and there's no doubt that Donald Trump fans will eat this up more enthusiastically than anyone. If 13 Hours turns into a smash hit . . . how much does Hillary Clinton have to sweat new questions about Benghazi? ADDENDA: Awful news. Alan Rickman dead at 69. The man had his big break in his legendary performance as the villain in Die Hard at age 41, and it was his first film role. | 
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