Novak Keeps Recycling Thoroughly-Debunked Falsehoods About Hillary
March 14, 2007 -- 5:36 PM EST // //
Sometimes this gig can drive one into true depths of despair.
I mean, take a look at this latest from Robert Novak, in which he cheerfully recycles a storyline that's already been torn apart and revealed to be entirely, indeed comically false.
A quick recap: The other day, Novak wrote a completely bogus column saying that you knew that Hillary Clinton and her advisers were sweating about Barack Obama because she said in an Alabama speech that she'd been "privileged" to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak in the 1960s. Novak noted that she has said elsewhere that she was a "Goldwater girl" at the time, claiming that this contradiction showed that Hillary was "reinventing her past." He even suggested Hillary's advisers had invented the anecdote out of panic over Obama.
But as this blog painstakingly showed, Hillary wrote about exactly the same anecdote in her 2003 memoir, which was published back before Obama was a U.S. Senator. So how on earth could her advisers have invented it in response to Obama? They couldn't have, of course.
Yet despite the glaring mendacity at the heart of this storyline, here comes Novak again, recycling an even more cartoonish version of the same falsehood with impunity. In his Human Events column, which was just emailed out to subscribers, he goes further:
Sen. Barack Obama seems to have Sen. Hillary Clinton right where he wants her. Her campaign is constantly reacting to what he does.
Novak then recounts the anecdote about Hillary going to see King speak, and adds:
She and her handlers are so afraid of Obama that they were implying the existence long ago of a teenager in Chicago's suburbs who never really existed.
But, again, Hillary's 2003 memoir recounted the same episode. She wrote that though she was a Goldwater girl, a liberal Methodist minister named Don Jones invited her to hear King. From page 23 of the book:
I had only vaguely heard of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King...So, when Don announced one week that he would take us to hear Dr. King speak at Orchestra Hall, I was excited.
In this passage, she also spelled out very clearly that she was torn between the ideas of conservative and liberal figures in her life -- just as she said in the Alabama speech. So let's ask it one more time: If Hillary's advisers were so worried about Obama that they invented this story, how is it that she wrote about the same story back in 2003, before Obama was even elected to the U.S. Senate?
Again, maybe Hillary and her advisers are panicked about Obama. I have no problem believing that they are. But this Novak tale doesn't prove it. In fact, it doesn't prove anything at all, because it's thoroughly bogus. Novak just keeps makin' it up -- with impunity.
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