Jennifer Rubin, Mitt Romney’s top media shill

Reading Jennifer Rubin in 2012 makes me almost nostalgic for the days when Jennifer Rubin’s writing was almost solely devoted to bloodthirsty vitriol against Arabs and any Americans who dared say a kind thing about Palestinians. Because the new Jennifer Rubin is something even lower than a reactionary columnist: Now she’s just a shill. A boring shill.

In Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post currently employs a semi-official Mitt Romney spokesperson. There’s not another prominent media figure who is more shameless about acting solely in the best interests of a presidential campaign. Bill Kristol is at this point a more intellectually honest commentator than Rubin has become.

Rubin started her career in commentary late, after a career as a lawyer for Hollywood studios. She parlayed her unwavering devotion to the Israeli government line into a gig with Commentary, and after the Washington Post fired Dave Weigel for having incorrect opinions, they hired her, thinking that picking up an unhinged neocon would appease the right-wingers. (It didn’t. Her sole political cause is Israel. She doesn’t give a shit about the rest of the Republican Party platform.) Her late arrival in political journalism and rather sudden ascendancy to one of its heights helps give her work that delightful “fuck you” tone, free from the careful careerism of your typical fresh-faced pundit, but it also made her a rather easy mark for the Romney campaign. Having started off skeptical of the former Massachusetts governor, Rubin’s now firmly in his corner, and all it really took was making her one of the few people able to get his campaign team to return phone calls.

Here’s Ben Smith last year on the warm relationship between Boston and Rubin:

She has also been intensely courted, winning a rare interview with the candidate [Romney] after a recent foreign affairs speech, and the warm ministrations of his staff, whom she describes as “very helpful” and “the most professional of the presidential campaign staffs, because they are the most experienced.”

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http://www.salon.com/2012/08/02/jennifer_rubin_mitt_romneys_top_media_shill/