Of course she lied, but she did it so well!
That's the media reaction to Hillary Clinton's testimony on Benghazi, in a nutshell.
Because of the House committee's work, it is now clear that Clinton kept her emails out of the public record by using a private server.
If Rick Scott had done the same in Florida, newspaper readers in Miami, Palm Beach and St. Petersburg would be seeing their papers burst into flames in their hands as they picked it out of the flowerbed.
The media poses as the guardians of freedom, seekers of the truth, objective and nonpartisan.
Balderdash.
People died and Clinton lied. This won't be reduced to bumper stickers like the Big Lie that “Bush lied and people died,” but it is far more accurate.
It is also clear that she ignored 600 desperate requests for more security and then lied about the 9/11 attack on the U.S. embassy. The night of the attack she told her family and the Egyptian prime minister that it was an attack by terrorists and had nothing to do with an obscure video.
Two days later she was telling the American people that the attack was a demonstration against the video that got out of hand. She stuck with that story and had her agents promulgate it repeatedly.
Even after the committee learned the existence of the private server, she stonewalled, refusing to turn over the emails, claiming they had been destroyed accidentally (just like Lois Lerner's)!
Florida newspapers have a fixation on “government in the sunshine,” which means having virtually everything that occurs in a government setting subject to their prying eyes. Every year they have a self-absorbed celebration of this “sunshine” and preen themselves in print for their lobbying efforts on its behalf.
But when the person second in charge of the nation's defense goes off the record, possibly endangering national security, they care not a whit. One Florida paper timidly suggested that it might have helped “reignite suspicions about her honesty and candor.”
Instead of demanding answers, the media attacked the questioners.
AP analysis: “Hillary Rodham Clinton turned an 11-hour congressional grilling into a campaign call to action on foreign policy, using a make-or-break appearance before the Republican-led Benghazi committee to display a commanding, presidential presence under a barrage of questions.”
Translation: “You go, girl!”
The reason they abandon their core beliefs so readily is obvious.
They want Democrats to continue to rule from the White House. Anything else is secondary. Clinton is now the de facto Democrat nominee and Republicans are the enemy, as she noted recently.
Americans know from 25 years of experience that neither Clinton nor her spouse have any regard for the truth. It can be sacrificed for the “higher good” of having liberal elites in control of our lives.
But Americans now also know that the Clintons' scorn for truth and justice is shared by the Fourth Estate's dominant left wing.
Clinton may have “won” but the media lost -- big.
Lloyd Brown was in the newspaper business nearly 50 years, beginning as a copy boy and retiring as editorial page editor of the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville. After retirement he served as a policy analyst for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
