Bill Clinton’s Trip to North Korea Incites Media Malpractice

Statesman Bill Clinton continues to show respect for the Obama Administration and his wife Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in restricting his comments about his trip to North Korea to the rescue of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

But as Joe Conason notes in his post at Salon.com titled Clinton Derangement Syndrome, North Korean Strain, the usual practitioners of media malpractice are dead set on belittling Clinton’s recent achievement on the world stage, an achievement you’d think even the most deranged would want to celebrate.

Conason writes:

Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America -- a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.

But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about "Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton." Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton "hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home." Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that "the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton" (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton's mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was "some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy." And not for the editors of the Huffington Post, who posted a very strange headline -- "Bill Upstages Hillary ... Once Again" -- on an Associated Press story that didn’t mention her at all.

Analysts have long speculated on the sexual envy that may or may not predispose the syndrome’s sufferers to say these things. What seems clear, however, is that no matter what humanitarian acts Clinton may perform in his post-presidency, he cannot do anything without provoking such inappropriate and embarrassing outbursts. The result, of course, is that their remarks always reveal more about them than about their intended target.

And I personally continue to wonder why the likes of Huffington Post editors and assorted pundits and scribes intent on destroying Bill and Hillary Clinton seldom if ever find it appropriate to remind readers of the sexual indiscretions of the Kennedy boys, Newt Gingrich, MLK, Jr., Jesse Jackson, et all. And as for the spouses of the aforementioned, I’ve never come across a feminist diatribe condemning Jackie Kennedy for preserving her marriage to JFK; that particular criticism seems reserved only for Hillary Clinton.