Excerpt – Sharyl Attkisson’s ‘The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote’
by SHARYL ATTKISSON
BreitBart.com
28 Jun 2017
The following is an excerpt from former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s recently released book, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote:
THE BIRTH OF FAKE NEWS: THE CLINTONS AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
If you ask people to identify a coming of age for the modern-day smear, it’s amazing how many political insiders—both Democrats and Republicans—consider it to be the Clinton era. It’s impossible for any outsiders to know exactly how the Clintons became adept at engineering smears to deflect from their controversies
One of the earliest smear campaigns perpetrated by the Clintons began even before Bill announced he was running for president, when Hillary was busy devising a preemptive strike against women rumored to be involved with her husband. According to journalist Carl Bernstein in his biography A Woman in Charge, Hillary reportedly sought to get sworn statements from women Bill was rumored to have slept with. It was said that she wanted to convince the women to swear they had no relationship with him. She was correct to anticipate trouble.
In 1992, Bill was steeped in his election campaign when salacious claims began to surface from more than a half dozen women who said they’d been victims of his sleazy advances or improper sexual behavior, or that they’d carried on illicit affairs with him. Myra Belle “Sally” Miller, Miss Arkansas 1958, claimed she had an affair with Clinton in 1983 and was later threatened by a Democratic official not to go public.
“They knew that I went jogging by myself and he couldn’t guarantee what would happen to my pretty little legs,” Miller alleges the official told her. Clinton vigorously denied even having met her. The media largely ignored her claim as unreliable.
They weren’t so quick to brush off the allegations from another accuser, Gennifer Flowers. Flowers alleged she met Clinton while she was a TV reporter in Little Rock in the 1970s and carried on a twelve-year affair with him. In a palpably awkward appearance on the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Bill and Hillary denied the accusation, with Hillary proclaiming, “I’m not sitting here some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Flowers would later allege in a sexual harassment suit against Bill that Hillary had devised a “war room” during the 1992 campaign dedicated to smearing, defaming, and harming her and other Clinton enemies. In subsequent years, critics would come to call Hillary—who portrays herself as a committed feminist and women’s rights defender—the architect of the first real “war on women.”
Though Hillary has repeatedly denied any effort to disparage or harm her husband’s accusers, former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris has another view. He says he still finds Hillary’s actions repulsive all these years later. “What really turned me off was what I call secret police, when [Hillary] hired this fleet of detectives to go around examining all of the women who had been identified with [Bill] Clinton,” Morris told Breitbart News in 2014. “Not for the purpose of divorcing Clinton. Not for the purpose of getting him to stop. But for the purpose of developing blackmail material on these women to cow them into silence . . . that had a Nixonian quality that I hold against her.”
The deputy chair of Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Betsey Wright, labeled allegations against Clinton as “bimbo eruptions.” As more women emerged, the campaign against them was nicknamed the “nuts and sluts” defense, borrowing a term apparently coined years before by attorney and feminist Susan Estrich.
For Gennifer Flowers, Nuts and Sluts meant she got stamped as “trailer trash” and a “saloon singer.” Clinton surrogate James Carville coined his now-infamous slur about her: If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find. But it turned out, Flowers had the goods: audio recordings proving her relationship with Clinton, and she called a news conference to make them public. Later, under oath in 1998, Clinton finally acknowledged he’d had sexual relations with her.
The Rest…HERE
