One of the funnier moments of the Democratic race started this week when MSNBC's David Shuster characterized Chelesea's lobbying of superdelegates as Hillary's campaign "pimping" her out.I happened to be listening to MSNBC while making dinner when this all went down and found it to be mildly chuckle-worthy, but nothing all that agregious.
Naive, exaggerated, disingenuous, self-righteous indignation enters on stage left.
The fit the Hillary campaign is throwing about in response to Shuster's (who has been suspended by the network) remarks, including calls for his dismissal and threats to boycott any future MSNBC-sponsored debates, makes one wonder if they were surprised to find gambling going on in Vegas a few weeks back.
While I had my share of issues with the first Clinton co-Presidency, the one thing I always admired about them was that they carefully avoided using the then-girl, Chelsea, as a campaign prop. She's now a grown-up and taking an active role in the campaign.
It's great that she's decided to do so, but with this role should come two things. First, she's been notoriously off-limits to the press. While there's certainly no law that says she has to speak to them, it would be a little bit more responsible of her to do so.
Second, and with the premise that the pimp line was out of line, the campaign needs to develop a little bit of a thicker skin about her. With all the embarrassment her skirt-chasing daddy and enabling mommy caused the country, they would be wise to stop lecturing the rest of us how to treat women with respect.
My only question is whether the campaign immediately removed all GE-made light bulbs from their offices.
2 comments:
The problem is not with the Clinton campaign, the onus here is clearly on MSNBC.
Since they've moved to the "let the newsreaders say what they want" format, they get so out of control with talking, things like this happens.
You're not sitting around a bar with your friends spouting off about politics, you're supposedly a professional journalist.
What makes this situation worse is, Shuster initially defended the comment. I've never been a fan of the Clintons or MSNBC, but Shuster should be fired and the Clinton campaign should shut out MSNBC until they do.
BTW, what's NOW's position on this?
They applaud the move.
http://www.now.org/press/02-08/02-08.html
I stand by my posted position that, while unseemly and perhaps suspension-worthy, it's not exactly the thing to fire someone over. People should get a little bit of a thicker skin.
While Shuster's comments certainly had a great deal of shock-value to them, it's not the only measure by which a network's news coverage should be graded.
Shall we start going down the path of suspending people for politely worded, loaded questions that express other potentially-offensive viewpoints?
Commentators Dobbs, vanden Heuvel, Buchanan and the entire staff of Air America come to mind...
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