By David Swanson
On Monday, July 17, 2006, at Fox News headquarters in New York City, Rupert Murdoch hosted a fundraiser breakfast for Hillary Clinton. Then he rushed off to a fundraiser lunch for John McCain, and Hillary rushed off to announce her unqualified support for Israel’s and Bush’s war policies.
Hillarupert Murdoclinton strikes some people as an unusual combination. I’m sure someone could create a funny cartoon out of that name and a merger of their two smirking masks.
Murdoch’s interest is in money, however, and not necessarily in an Oil Empire or a Second Coming – unless some really cool weapon or a blue dress is involved. He likes laws that allow monopolization of media outlets, and he likes high ratings. Hillary’s husband gave us the Telecom Act that drove monopolization forward. And nothing would create better ratings for Fox than lots of Hillary hating and Hillary scandals with her as the Democratic nominee for president.
The right-wingers don’t seem to quite understand this profit motive when they suggest that Murdoch has sold out because he believes Hillary will win the White House. Such an idea overlooks the power Murdoch and other media moguls have to determine who ends up in the White House, overlooks Murdoch’s lunch event for McCain, overlooks the likelihood that the Republicans will fix the election if need be, and overlooks the obvious inability of Hillary to win – even with a fair vote count. She’s despised by the left and hated by the right, and reporters find her unpleasant. She doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in DC in August of winning the general election, but she does have an excellent chance of winning the Democratic Primary.
That’s because people like Murdoch will tell all the Democratic primary voters that Hillary is the wealthiest, most viable candidate, the most responsible place they can pinch their noses and place their support. And many will listen and obey. Hillary is the corporate media’s designated 2008 loser. They know she can’t win, but they also know that they can tell the Democratic Primary voters that she CAN win, and that those voters will believe it. They know that voters are no longer citizens voting for their preferred candidates and counting on their fellow citizens to do the same. Instead, voters are amateur pundits pretending to calculate who’s “viable” by listening to who the media says is “viable” and arriving at the same conclusions.
Here’s a one-sentence paragraph about Murdoch’s Breakfast for Hillary as buried at the very end of a New York Times story on Tuesday: “At a separate event yesterday, Mrs. Clinton also won support from another onetime critic-turned-ally, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The New York Post, who was the host of a political fund-raiser for her in New York City.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/nyregion/18hillary.html
But when was he a critic, and what makes him an ally? And is he also a McCain ally? And do the majority of Americans, who oppose the war, have any allies?
Of course, they do. The media just doesn’t tell you about them. Here is Jonathan Tasini, who is challenging Hillary in the Democratic Primary in the race for the Senate seat she now holds:
http://www.tasinifornewyork.org
Jonathan favors ending the war, impeaching the criminals who started it, establishing single-payer health care, restoring the rights of working people in this country, and hurting Hillary’s chances at a presidential nomination.
Please take a moment now to stop Hillary by doing two simple things:
1. Give Jonathan a little money on his website
2. Write a letter to the editor about Tasini vs. Clinton and what a race like this means to this country
If you’re feeling especially ambitious, you can also call members of the media and ask them to find out who was at the breakfast fundraiser. We may be able to tell by examining next quarter’s FEC filings. Compared to Cheney’s energy meeting, that will be transparent government. But why should we wait? If elections are open and bribes are legal, we should be able to find out the names of the bribers.