Posted on 06/09/2003 8:20:04 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
The announcer at the top of ABC's Sunday night special, "Hillary Clinton's Journey: Public, Private, Personal," set the fawning tone: "An precedented journey from her childhood days where her values and dreams were shaped, to the campus years when she was swept away by politics and [over photo of her with Bill] passion."
The announcer presumed "everyone" is as excited about a Hillary presidential run as is, apparently, the ABC News staff: "And the question everyone is asking today: Could there be another Clinton White House?"
For Walters, bad things just seemed to happen to an innocent Hillary Clinton whom Walters repeatedly saw a the poster woman for victimhood: "You made investments in the commodities markets, you dealt in real estate -- Whitewater, you worked for the Rose law firm, all of which at the time you thought were very innocent. All these things came back to haunt you. Was there anything you could have done differently?"
Walters also fretted about how Hillary "had to cope with the health care fiasco, the suicide of Vince Foster and the emergence of a woman named Paula Jones."
The criticism of First Lady Hillary Clinton came not from what she advocated or did but, Walters contended, just from daring to have her own views: "You became First Lady like no other First Lady before you. You had your own interests, you got involved in public policy. No First Lady had done that without being severely criticized. Did you realize what you were getting into?"
Walters empathized with the toll of the scandal onslaught: "I can barely remember a week went by when one of you wasn't being criticized and investigated." But when Hillary answered with a whopper about how "everything that was thrown at me, everything that was said turned out to be without basis in fact," Walters didn't bat an eye and Clinton proceeded to complain about the "out of control, zealous prosecutor who was on a partisan campaign to undermine Bill and me and everyone else."
Walters even gushed: "I don't think people realize how strong your faith is."
After all of that fawning, Walters concluded the hour by fancifully speculating on the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton and First Husband Bill Clinton: "It's not beyond the realm of possibility that she would become not only the first First Lady to be elected Senator, but also the first First Lady to become President. And that raises an intriguing prospect: Bill Clinton as the first President to become a First Man or First Spouse or whatever. So much has happened to this couple that it seem s anything could happen. Stay tuned."
Now, some lengthier versions of the above-quoted highlights, at least as much as I had time to take down as ABC has not yet posted a transcript.
The June 8 infomercial in the guise of a news showed opened with Walters and Hillary Clinton on Washington's Mall with Walters pressing her about a presidential run.
The show then moved to a segment taped in Hillary's hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois where she shared how a bearded Bill Clinton at Yale "looked like a Viking" and she was attracted to his "beautiful hands" and "very long fingers."
Most of the program was based on an interview session taped inside the Clinton home in the Chappaqua section of the town of New Castle, New York.
Some of the questions and exchanges where Walters was the most supplicant:
-- Bad things just happened. "While your husband was Governor, you write that you were essentially the breadwinner in the family. You made investments in the commodities markets, you dealt in real estate -- Whitewater, you worked for the Rose law form, all of which at the time you thought were very innocent. All these things came back to haunt you. Was there anything you could have done differently?"
Clinton: "Well Barbara, of course all of those things were made into political issues and after all the years of investigation and all of the looking under rocks and all that was done, of course there wasn't anything wrong..."
-- Back from an ad break, Walters set up a segment by sympathizing with how Clinton had to "cope" with problems, as if she had nothing to do with creating them: "Hillary Clinton was never simply Bill Clinton's wife. She was always a woman with her own accomplishments and ambitions and in the world of politics played at the highest level that would both set her apart and set her up for constant scrutiny and attacks. She had to cope with the health care fiasco, the suicide of Vince Foster and the emergence of a woman named Paula Jones."
-- Walters proposed this very confusing historic premise: "You became First Lady like no other First Lady before you. You had your own interests, you got involved in public policy. No First Lady had done that without being severely criticized. Did you realize what you were getting into?"
If "no other" First Lady had done it, how were those non- existent First Ladies "severely criticized" for doing what they didn't do?
-- On the Paula Jones case, Walters' idea of a tough question: "Did you for a moment believe her?"
Clinton: "No, no. And, you know, when the judge threw out her case and said it was without factual or legal merit I think that about summed it up. But I'm not saying it's easy. Those were difficult days, but it was what I had to do." Without pointing out how the Clintons paid Jones something like $800,000, Walters empathized, as if Hillary were a victim when she was the prime instigator of an abuse of power in the travel office and had a role in creating the problems in the other areas cited: "I can barely remember a week went by when one of you wasn't being criticized and investigated. There was Travelgate, there was Whitewater, there was the handling of Vince Foster's death, there was the health care bill. There was everything. And I remember we did an interview in the middle of all of that-"
Clinton: "On a very cold January day."
Walters: "On a very cold, snowy January day. And I said to you then [jump to 1996 interview clip: "How did you get into this mess where your whole credibility is being questioned?"
Clinton: "Oh, I ask myself that every day, Barbara, because it's very surprising and confusing to me."]
Back to current, Clinton: "Now in retrospect, everything that was thrown at me, everything that was said turned out to be without basis in fact, but that didn't help at the time because we had this out of control, zealous prosecutor who was on a partisan campaign to undermine Bill and me and everyone else...."
-- Walters set up the look at Hillary's tale, about how she didn't know the Lewinsky story was true until Bill told her eight months later, by claiming Hillary wrote about it "very frankly."
-- Walters: "There is that picture that we all remember of you and the President and Chelsea, and the dog Buddy, walking into the helicopter when you were about to go off on a vacation to Martha's Vineyard, which I'm sure you had no desire to do."
Clinton, chuckling: "That's very true, that's very true."
Walters: "And you write that Buddy had a special role."
Clinton: "Buddy was the only member of our family who wanted to be with Bill, I think that's fair to say."
-- Walters: "I don't think people realize how strong your faith is, it goes all through the book. It must have helped you then."
-- Walters, not exactly challenging the VRWC premise: "If I ask you straight up: Was there and is there a right-wing conspiracy to destroy your husband's presidency, would you today say yes?"
Clinton agreed there is a "well-financed network," but it's not a conspiracy because it's in the light of day how the opponents "perverted the Constitution."
-- The final comments from Walters, a hope that maybe Senator Clinton will run for President: "Hillary Clinton's memoir ends with her last day in the White House. But I dare say as her journey continues, she'll have plenty of material for a second autobiography. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that she would become not only the first First Lady to be elected Senator, but also the first First Lady to become President. And that raises an intriguing prospect: Bill Clinton as the first President to become a First Man or First Spouse or whatever. So much has happened to this couple that it seems anything could happen. Stay tuned."
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaresearch.org ...
Hume: "So you've got this President, who'd been waving his wand at everyone who walked by for their entire marriage, and he does it in the Oval Office with an intern and she says that Starr's the one obsessed with sex? Hello?"
Must be everybody asking but me. She will never be President. Not even close.
A good, hard-hitting investigative reporter is usually a bit more gleeful when they get to ask a probing question. But Baba made it clear that she was a huge fan of all things Clinton. So any "insensitive" questions probably hurt Baba more than Hillary.
"Remember you fool, WE ARE VICTIMS of having stolen a thousand FBI files.
Now you agree it was a good thing we shared them with ABC and the DNC."
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