MSM In No Rush to Reveal Hillary Flunked Bar Exam

Newsbusters.org ^ | June 1, 2007 | Mark Finkelstein

[George W. Bush]

MSM In No Rush to Reveal Hillary Flunked Bar Exam

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 1, 2007 - 08:26.

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ."

But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she revealed it, en passant, in her ghostwritten 2003 "autobiography." Note: according to that book, during the same period Hillary took and passed the Arkansas bar exam.  The pass rate in Arkansas was considerably higher than in DC.

I have to imagine that Hillary's failure comes as news to a good number of people. How does it jibe with Clinton's image as The World's Smartest Woman? And what does it say about the MSM that this fact has not been widely disseminated?

In any case, that revelation was far from the only unflattering thing that Bernstein had to say when speaking with Matt Lauer this morning to promote his new Hillary biography, A Woman in Charge. Let's preface this by mentioning that Bernstein is anything but a conservative hit man. The son of two parents with Communist Party affiliations, as he wrote about in this book, Bernstein is of course best known as Bob Woodward's WaPo Watergate investigation colleague. More recently, Bernstein has called for a Senate investigation of the Bush administration, and in the course of the interview this morning referred to the Bush presidency as a "disaster."

Among Bernstein's other comments today:

• "This is a woman who has led a camouflaged life, and continues to."
• Hillary's childhood was in "an abusive family situation. Her father humiliated and abused her mother. Her mother had a horror of a childhood."
• "Bill Clinton's closest advisers, like Lloyd Bentsen and Donna Shalala, were adamantly opposed" to Hillary becoming head of the healthcare initiative.
• At one point "Today" displayed a graphic with a quotation from the book: "As Hillary has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making, and packaged herself for the widest possible consumption, she has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self."
• "I think that she has developed an inauthenticity that is perhaps her greatest political problem. . . Partly because of her self-invented biographical details, she does come off as inauthentic.
• "There's not a sex act mentioned in the book. What is important is Hillary savaging the women that he was with. Forgiving Bill Clinton repeatedly through their married life, but not forgiving the women, which raises a very interesting question about her feminism.
• Bernstein speaks of Hillary's "rather disingenuous explanation of her vote on the war."

All in all, an unflattering portrait of Hillary, sketched by a man with no apparent axe to grind. And keep that flunking factoid in mind next time you hear Hillary condescend to President Bush or others.

Contact Mark, who somehow managed to pass the New York bar exam, at mark@gunhill.net

[George W. Bush]

You raise good points. I think the real damage here is that a very liberal writer has taken her apart in a very personal way. We see the college schoolgirl who wanted to be a radical but didn't quite cut it, her marriage to a philandering hillbilly, her lack of genuine academic merit in failing the DC bar, how she climbed to national prominence on her husband's back while persecuting women who objected to his sexual advances or who threatened to go public.

All in all, it makes of her a very petty person of limited intelligence and discipline but who has grandiose schemes to remake the world in her own dismal image and some half-baked ideas left over from the Sixties and a melange of European socialist thinking. The way she craves for crowds to adore her and never ask her a hard or unpleasant question is almost an obsession with her, again, speaking to how petty and ordinary a person she truly is. Her world does not really tolerate conflicting opinions well. And she can never be wrong. That is fundamental to her public persona.

She is nothing more than the Wife Of Clinton. Everything she is and has done amounts to that. Her primary qualification to be president is actually that she tolerated his philandering and helped cover it up while pretending to be a happy spouse. That's it. Her entire resume.

It is almost a royal succession with the Dims. The king is deposed but his loyal queen will ascend to the throne of the fair kingdom, currently ruled by some pretender to the throne (Bush) who has taken the country down a path of evil. It's like some sick medieval political intrigue. Personally, I'm ashamed that such a mediocre person whose entire merit comes down to who she married could be so close to being elected president. It's a sad day for our country when such unashamed royalism is on public display.

[gondramB]

>>”There’s not a sex act mentioned in the book. What is important is Hillary savaging the women that he was with. Forgiving Bill Clinton repeatedly through their married life, but not forgiving the women, which raises a very interesting question about her feminism.<<

I see this over and over from both men and women and I don’t get it. Its the spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend that cheated - they are the one who broke their word but most of the time much of the anger goes not to them but is displaced to the person they cheated with.

Very strange but very common.
I think it speaks more to an irrational view rather than anything about feminism.

[George W. Bush]

I know what you mean. But after she knew that he was bonking everything in sight, after 20-30 incidents, was it rational for her to blame those "sluts" who were after her husband or to blame him?

By liberal standards, there really isn't much excuse for it. I think you should think about it the way they do.

These two recent books are not anti-Hillary spiels from a rightwing author and publishing company. They're from liberal writers and liberal publishing houses. They will be taken much more seriously by the libs. And some people have forgotten some of this info as well. Some seem to think it was all about Monica and that she was Xlinton's only dalliance. They need to be reminded about the hundreds of women he slept with and what a perv he really is to have in the White House.

[gondramB]

>>know what you mean. But after she knew that he was bonking everything in sight, after 20-30 incidents, was it rational for her to blame those “sluts” who were after her husband or to blame him?<<

Rational isn’t the word I would use but it makes Machiavellian sense. If her ambition is to accumulate as power as possible...

She needed a vehicle to get out of Arkansas and she couldn’t have done better than Bill. And then she is resentful but can’t express it about Bill because it hurts her power drive so she takes it out on the women.

[varon]

I believe the late John Kennedy failed his bar exam , six times?? (I wonder how many times Jon-Jon’s uncle Teddy failed his?)

I think Uncle Teddy has passed every "bar examination" with flying colors ;-)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks SB.

[The_Eaglet]

Thanks for sharing this media analysis.

[Paladin2]

DC Bar Exams are obviously sexist. How hard is that to figure out?

[Paladin2]

“It’s not every man that can pass the bar.”

[Seadog Bytes]

*From the Washington Post...

” ...For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year. The self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet avoided all courses in mathematics and logic throughout college, despite his outstanding score on the math portion of the SAT. As was the case with many of his classmates, his high school math grades had dropped from A’s to C’s as he advanced from trigonometry to calculus in his senior year.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A37397-2000Mar18