Meet the Press Panel Laughs at Defense of Hillary’s E-mail Shenanigans
By Patrick Brennan — March 29, 2015
Neera Tanden, who’s president of the Center for American Progress, a think tank closely associated with the Clintons, did her best on Meet the Press today to defend Hillary Clinton’s scandalous handling of her e-mails, but her co-panelists, and even host Chuck Todd, weren’t having it. Tanden whipped out Clinton defenders’ favorite weapons: trying to tie concern over Clinton’s practices to Republican overreach on Benghazi and making some reference to “the scandal machine,” as if the e-mail issue were a ginned-up controversy rather than genuine bipartisan outrage over America’s top diplomat keeping official records however she likes.
“The fact that we are obsessed with this scandal, et cetera, is the kind of thing people hate about Washington,” Tanden said at one point. I’m sure this line came at the recommendation of America’s very best spin doctors, but it gets the issue almost entirely wrong. People outside of Washington aren’t following this scandal nearly as closely as Neera Tanden and Chuck Todd are, but calling out a top government official for acting like she’s above the law — running a crucial part of government out of her New York mansion, ignoring record-keeping rules that ordinary federal employees spend a great deal of time complying with — is not the kind of thing people only care about in Washington. In fact, it’s behavior like Hillary’s, not the outrage surrounding it, that symbolizes what people hate about our governing elite.
Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Kathleen Parker certainly didn’t buy it, repeatedly pushing back on Tanden, interrupting her to correct misleading claims, and at times just laughing at the case she laid out. Eventually, it got raucous enough that Todd cut off the segment with a reference to desert rodents and optical devices that was almost surely incomprehensible to 95 percent of Meet the Press’s audience.
|
