The New York Times' TV critic, Alessandra Stanley, is under fire for her piece from Monday entitled "A Concession Wrapped in an Acceptance" where she claims, without providing evidence, that "plenty of viewers" saw Hillary Clinton's acceptance of her new role as Secretary of State as "the moment when Mrs. Clinton finally conceded the election for real."


The following is the reaction of Progressive blogger Matt Browner Hamlin, who has also blogged for the Huffington Post, campaigned for Chris Dodd and works for the SEIU:

[A]t no point in the time since June 7, 2008, has Hillary Clinton ever suggested that her concession of the Democratic nomination for the presidency was not "for real." Again, Stanley is making things up.

Media Matters' Eric Boehlert warns Stanley: Speak for yourself, Alessandra:

First off, my hunch is that most people assumed Clinton conceded the election "for real" when she, y'know, conceded the election in June. Or maybe when she endorsed Obama at the convention in August, or when she campaigned for him nationwide in October. But for The Village, it wasn't until December that Clinton conceded the election "for real."
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Note the "plenty of viewers" language. We've noted this media trend before. Almost nobody in the real world shares the media's Clinton obsession, so in order to couch it as news,  pundits simply pretend they're speaking for the masses, so Stanley goes with the "plenty of viewers."

Again it's just a hunch, but I think if you could find 100 people anywhere in the country who actually saw Clinton's SoS acceptance as her de facto election concession, then 95 of them probably work for elite media news orgs.

Meanwhile, Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler describes Stanley thusly:

Stanley is a pal of Dowd's; she often displays the same desire to force her own foolish dramas onto your most important news topics. And let's state the obvious: This group will never stop working this way, until widespread ridicule makes them stop. They live inside a sumptuous palace--and their flighty minds are full of dime novels. They're too dumb to see the world other ways. They'll insist on novelizing your news until they're finally stopped.

Atrios of the Eschaton blog honored the journalist with his "Wanker of the day" award.

Even Bloggers for Change, whose mission is stated as bringing Obama to power and "keep the Clinton Machine as muted as possible," protested:

Stanley, offering no examples of those "plenty of viewers," apparently forgot about Clinton's concession speech, her speech at the Democratic National Convention, or the following night when she moved that Barack Obama be "selected by this convention by acclamation." Apparently in Stanley's mind, none of those very public statements, nor the campaigning Clinton did for Obama, counted.

Contact Alessandra Stanley.

Update: Add the Washington Monthly to the list.

Have you ever seen those drawings comparing the size of Earth and Jupiter? The blue planet looks tiny. About as tiny as the number of "Obama supporters" who are allegedly angered by Obama's nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Unfortunately, conventional wisdom is trying to pull us on the wrong direction, in the form of myths regarding how Democrats feel about this occurrence.

The following is a far-fetched claim made yesterday by The New York Post's Kirsten Powers (Fox News' favorite liberal), in a whiny op-ed piece.:

The decision infuriates many Obama supporters. Pulling the lever for Obama was supposed to usher out the Clinton era of baby-boomer entitlement and drama.

Without going into the idiocy of the contention that after 8 atrocious years of Bush (domestically and abroad) voters had focused on Clintonesque "drama" and "entitlement" (two favorite terms used by Clinton haters), let's debunk her main claim:

Gallup polled 1013 adults on November 18th and found that 79% of Democrats were in favor of the idea of HRC being tapped for the job. A minuscule 12% were opposed.

A subsequent ABC poll conducted on November 23rd resulted in even more pro-Hillary numbers, as 88% of Democrats (and even 65% of Independents) responded favorably to her being appointed.

Independents who voted for Obama should approximate Democrats in terms of support for Hillary's appointment as SOS, considering that we have to allow for the fact that 44% of them voted for McCain (52% for Obama). If these 44% are filtered out of the equation (so as to discard voters who cannot be called "Obama supporters"), then the 65% of Indies in ABC and 57% in Gallup would explode to gigantic proportions.

Also note that the terms "Hillary supporters" and "Obama supporters" merged (excluding the irrelevant PUMA's) once Hillary Clinton threw her support to her rival back in June. On November 4th, a massive number of Democrats (Hillary supporters, Obama supporters, etc.) helped kick GOP butt. If that unity had not existed, Obama would likely not have carried Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and other states where Hillary reigned supreme during the primaries.

So there you have it. That tiny fringe is Powers' definition of "many".

Now that we have established that very few Obama supporters (Almost all Democrats + Obama-supporting Independents) disapprove of what Obama just did, let us move on to the second misleading claim, authored yesterday by a fellow TPM member who claimed:

Many of us wanted to be rid of the Clinton family and the Bush family.  For different reasons of course but the last thing I voted for was to see Hillary and Bill back in the White House or even near by it.  The same would go for any Bush family member.

Here, the clueless Clinton Darangement Syndrome patient attempts to equate Clinton's presidency, seen by 85% of Democrats (62% of all Independents) as pretty good or excellent, with torture-loving, Katrina-ignoring, one-of-the-worst-presidents-ever, George W. Bush. Furthermore, the CNN exit poll found that voters would have chosen Hillary over McCain by a whopping 52%-41% margin, proving that the Democrats would have united, regardless of their candidate, in their only goal: to get rid of Bush and the not-to-different John (McSame) McCain. And then there is, of course, the Gallup and ABC polls mentioned above. No wonder the writer does not back up his claim, nor does he elaborate on how much is "many".

Do not let the fringe and/or the punditocracy tell you what reality looks like. Hatred is eating away at their brains.

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