More Chum For The Sharks

(Posting will be sporadic to nonexistent after today into next Tuesday, by the way - it got kind of screwed up today also, for reasons beyond my control.)

I’m sure many of us know by now that, upon receipt of the over-17,000 pages of scheduling details concerning Hillary Clinton during her days as first lady, the item our corporate media zeroed in on immediately (in the person of Brian Ross, often a respectable journalist who was positive execrable here) was this (Atrios linked here to the Ross post along with appropriate commentary from CNN’s Jack Cafferty)…

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives.

…

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky's infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House.

ABC, the network that also brought us “The Path To 9/11,” is thus now entitled to a great big “Bronx cheer” and a free lifetime subscription to The National Review.

And as for the “who” and “how” of the release of the documents, the New York Times tells us here…

The documents’ release on Wednesday came in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in January 2006 by two reporters for The New York Times, Don Van Natta Jr., and Jeff Gerth, who has since left the paper. They researched and wrote a 2007 biography of Mrs. Clinton. Officials of Judicial Watch, the conservative watchdog group, followed up with a lawsuit last year.

(The Gerth and Van Natta, Jr. book was widely panned, by the way.)

As far as Judicial Watch is concerned, this tells you that they have been rated as “poor” among comparable charitable organizations by Charity Navigator, meaning that they “fail to meet industry standards and (perform) well below most charities in its cause.”

There’s a lot more to be said about how Charity Navigator rates organizations, I’ll admit, but the revenue growth figures for Judicial Watch are both negative numbers, which is probably an indicator of how much money they spend making headlines versus how much they actually “advocate (for) high(er) standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life.”

Interesting, then, given the group’s supposed emphasis on ethics and morality, that they would falsely allege that Barack Obama is affiliated with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that was the subject of a raid by Colombia into Ecuador last month and which has received a designation as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department (a lie dutifully repeated here by Flush Limbore, of course).

And as if that isn’t absurd enough, they sued Freedom’s Watch for trademark infringement last year (I just love it when one group of right-wing hatemongering zealots dukes it out with another).

All of this really illustrates how our corporate media integrates itself seamlessly with the basest elements of wingnuttia in this country. And of course, given their recent “reporting,” I’m sure ABC will continue to scan this archived information (which, in fact, is pretty dry stuff) to give us more “breaking news” of Hillary’s other coincidental appearances during more alleged infidelities of her husband.