2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHillary's unofficial foreign policy advisor: Then and Now
Sidney Blumenthal is named as the originator of Hillary Clinton's clandestine foreign policy enterprise. It is instructional to take a look back at Blumenthal in 2008. He tried to destroy Barack Obama, with the most vicious and ugly tactics.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html
Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term vast right-wing conspiracy used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And hes not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.
Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obamas character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they arent being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.
These attacks sent out by Blumenthal, long known for his fierce and combative loyalty to the Clintons, draw on a wide variety of sources to spread his Obama-bashing. Some of the pieces are culled from the mainstream media and include some reasoned swipes at Obamas policy and political positions.
But, rather remarkably for such a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal, a staggering number of the anti-Obama attacks he circulates derive from highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources such as the misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The American Conservative, and The National Review. To cite just one recent example, Blumenthal circulated an article taken from the fervently hard-right AIM website on February 18 entitled, Obamas Communist Mentor by Cliff Kincaid. Kincaid is a right-wing writer and activist, a longtime critic of the United Nations, whose group, Americas Survival, has been funded by foundations controlled by conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife, the same millionaire who helped fund attacks on the Clintons during their White House years. Scaife also funds AIM, the right-wing media watchdog group.
The Kincaid article that Blumenthal circulated sought to discredit Obama by linking him to an African-American poet and writer whom Obama knew while he was in high school in Hawaii. That writer, Frank Marshall Davis, was, Kincaid wrote, a member of the Communist Party. Supported by no tangible evidence, Kincaid claimed that Obama considered his relationship to Davis to be almost like a son. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote about meeting, during his teenage years, a writer named Frank who had some modest notoriety once and with whom he occasionally discussed poetry and politics. From this snippet, Kincaid weaves an incredulous tale that turns Davis into Obamas mentor.
much, much more at the link.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)FlatBaroque
(3,160 posts)thereby undermining Obama's directive, with how tightly she wraps herself in the Obama now. What a hypocrite and liar.