Matt Drudge and Hillary Clinton: A History
An inverse relationship seems to exist between the length of time since a Clinton has orbited the White House and the power held by the mythology of Matt Drudge. However, there's a chance that the Drudge watercooler could start up again if his lucky charm decides to run in 2016.
As Drudge was quoted in New York Magazine in 2007,I need Hillary Clinton. You dont get it. I need to be part of her world. Thats my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism I have Hillary.
Matt Drudge
And when Drudge links to stories about Hillary Clinton, the Internet often returns the favor by writing about Matt Drudge. The Washington Free Beaconreminded usof the beginnings of Clinton and Drudge's long saga this week, by diving into old documents from when he broke the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998. Hillary Clinton's friend, Diane Blair, wrote a note to the first lady back then asking,"Do we take Matt Drudge seriously?" During her 2008 run for the White House, she decided to, and reporters and commentators responded in kind. The question now is whether both will take him seriously again in 2016. Below, for posterity, find the long history of writers writing about Drudge writing about Hillary Clinton.
June 19, 1998, The New York Times:"People often wonder how the great social observers of the past would dissect the madness and the inanity in Washington today. How would Mark Twain skewer Kenneth Starr on Larry King? What would be left of Matt Drudge after Evelyn Waugh got through with him? And surely, the ideal chronicler of Hillary Clinton would be Edith Wharton, who sat in her own grand white house writing about women strangled in a cat's cradle of tribal constraints and pieties. She wrote about women forced to narrow their lives or disguise their natures or choke down indignities because of double standards. She wrote about the awful ironies that crushed women's dreams."
Sept. 16, 2000, The Washington Times: "The flap began earlier this week when Internet gossip Matt Drudge announced on his Web site -- http://www.drudgereport.com -- that the New York Times was "sitting" on the story of Mrs. Clinton's overnight guests because the newspaper did not want to give ammunition to Mr. Lazio in Wednesday's debate between the two Senate candidates."
Sept. 17, 2000, Slate: "Is Matt Drudge good for the Democrats? Not intentionally, of course. But look at who benefits, objectively, as the Marxists say. Last week, Drudge discovered that the New York Times hadn't published a story it had been working on, a story about donors to Hillary Clinton's campaign being rewarded with overnight stays at the White House and Camp David. So Drudge posts an item on his well-read site chiding the Times for sitting on an anti-Clinton report. What happens? The White House goes on full alert, as other news organizations begin to chase the story. The account dribbles out through a variety of outlets, including Fox, a conservative TV network far easier for Clinton supporters to dismiss than the Times would be. When the Times finally prints John Broder's piece about the overnights, it runs in the B section, below the fold, with the headline Mrs. Clinton Denies Visits Rewarded Gifts. The news by this point isn't the overnights, it's whether there was a quid pro quo for them; the first three paragraphs detail the official denial that there was. And the paper has its back up--a prominent paragraph denies Drudge's report that the Times had been suppressing the story. What if Drudge didn't exist (or if he had just done nothing when he learned of the Times piece)?"
Nov. 6, 2000, The American Prospect: "Yet with e-spin, it often seems that for every success on the part of a campaign, there's a comparable blunder. In August, Florida Governor Jeb Bush's office was accused of 'bigotry' and of being 'anti-Semitic' after a staffer accidentally e-mailed out a Bible verse to reporters instead of Bush's schedule. (The verse read in part: '[Every] spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist.') And in a more serious slip-up in May, the Hillary Clinton campaign inadvertently sent out the e-mail addresses of hundreds of reporters at the top of an update on the First Lady's travel plans. Matt Drudge got his hands on the list and put a story about it on his Web site; before long, other sites advertised the whole list. Soon, reporters were getting blitzed with hate e-mails from right-wingers lurking in the FreeRepublic.com neighborhood of the Internet. One such message, reported in The Washington Post, read: 'Since Hillary Klinton was nice enough to publish all your e-mail addresses, us in the right wing conspiracy wanted to drop each of you a note to say that you're all slime.'"
Feb. 2, 2001, The Washington Times: "'There's no fingernail polish on the nails. There have been Senate sessions without even any lipstick. It's pushing it to the Janet Reno, Donna Shalala crowd,' opines Internet scribe Matt Drudge, who weighed in on Mrs. Clinton's style crisis in a recent column. 'Even Patty Murray is more glamorous than Hillary," giggles Mr. Drudge, on the phone from his Miami newsroom. "It has Washington completely buzzing out.'"
March 5, 2007, Wonkette: "This is a conveniently context-free video clip of an audio clip of Hillary Clinton speaking supposedly before a southern Black church. You might notice that she's talkin' funny. Which is all well and good when beloved character actors or presidents do it, but when politicians do it, they're pandering. Or something. Anyway, Matt Drudge said this was important. So listen to it over and over again and start quoting it to your friends at happy hour. Now you're in the gang of 500!"
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