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John Hinderaker posts on John Dickerson who CBS has picked to anchor Face the Nation.
Bob Schieffer is retiring as host of CBS’s Sunday morning political talk show, Face the Nation. CBS has announced that his replacement will be John Dickerson, who, among other things, is both the political director for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. Dickerson, a graduate of Sidwell Friends, is a perfect 21st century Democrat. This is how Dickerson described his upbringing:
“In McLean, Va., in the 1970s, the suburban clusters had names written in script at the entrance gates, but my house was the only one I knew that had a name of its own. When my parents gave parties, it was my job to open the door, look each new arrival in the eye and say: “Welcome to Merrywood.”
The house, a 36-room Georgian-style mansion built in 1920, was veined with ivy and surrounded with old boxwood bushes that looked like broccoli when you flew over on the descent into nearby NationalAirport. Jacqueline Kennedy grew up there and Jack Kennedy worked on “Profiles in Courage” on the third floor.
Gore Vidal, who lived in what would become my brother’s room, put the house at the center of his 1967 novel “Washington, D.C.” …
My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the ’60s to the ’80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars and presidents.”Dickerson was a regular guest on Al Franken’s long-defunct Air America show. How far left is he? Ed Driscoll takes us down memory lane to this 2013 Slate piece: “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” …
More from Ed Driscoll. As Glenn Reynolds says; they’re not journalists, they’re partisans with bylines.
John Dickerson, replacing Bob Schieffer as the new host of Face the Nation, will continue the same level of objectivity that CBS has brought to viewers for half a century. In 1964, when CBS was one third of all television news, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr repeatedly smeared Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi. His successor, Dan Rather, blew himself up in spectacular fashion with RatherGate in 2004, as dissected by all those bloggers in their Pajamas, to coin a Website name. …
… Slate is what it is and some bloodthirsty Slate writer orgasmic over the prospect of Obama permanently pulverizing and destroying the GOP is as noteworthy as green on grass.
Oh, except after someone like Brit Hume connects the dots.
The author of this outrageous left-wing fever dream is John Dickerson, whom Slate describes as “Slate’s chief political correspondent”. What Slate leaves out of its little bio, though, is that Dickerson is also the political director at CBS News.
Dickerson is merely being Dickerson, and there’s no doubt he speaks for legions upon legions of those in the media today. …
Turning our attention to Hillary Clinton, John Fund says she has serious problems.
In the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement, a lot of commentators dismissed criticism of her or suggested it would boomerang against Republicans. Her former consultant James Carville accused MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of “scandalmongering.” On Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press, speaking to radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, expressed his skepticism of Republican efforts against the Clintons: “I look at sort of an obsession on the right of beating Obama and beating Bill Clinton over the years . . . is there a point where you do this too much?”
But clearly many voters disagree. A new Bloomberg poll finds approval of Hillary at 48 percent in the wake of her e-mail scandal. The poll finds 53 percent of Americans believe “she purposely withheld or deleted some relevant e-mails from a private account and home server she used while in office.” Just 29 percent of respondents think she is being truthful.
“Voters do think she is a strong leader — a key metric — but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems,” concludes Quinnipiac’s assistant polling director Peter Brown. His firm’s new polls find majorities in the swing states of Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia don’t believe she is honest or trustworthy. …
Charles Krauthammer writes on the “Marie Antoinette tour.”
See Hillary ride in a van! Watch her meet everyday Americans! Witness her ordering a burrito bowl at Chipotle! Which she did wearing shades, as did her chief aide Huma Abedin, yielding security-camera pictures that made them look (to borrow from Karl Rove) like fugitives on the lam, wanted in seven states for a failed foreign policy.
There’s something surreal about Hillary Clinton’s Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners. But what else can she do? After Barack Obama, she’s the best-known political figure in America. She has papal name recognition. Like Napoleon and Cher, she’s universally known by her first name. As former queen consort, senator and secretary of state, she has spent a quarter-century in the national spotlight — more than any modern candidate.
She doesn’t just get media coverage; she gets meta-coverage. The staging is so obvious that actual events disappear. The story is their symbolism — campaign as semiotics.
This quality of purposeful abstractness makes everything sound and seem contrived. It’s not really her fault. True, she’s got enough genuine inauthenticity to go around — decades of positioning, framing, parsing, dodging — but the perception is compounded by the obvious staginess of the gigantic political apparatus that surrounds her and directs her movements. …
Seth Mandel thinks Clinton is terrified of people and wonders if that will matter to voters.
If, as a child, you expressed fear of a certain kind of insect, or a dog or a cat perhaps, you were probably told by an adult to buck up because “it’s more afraid of you than you are of it.” If so, you might find it endearing to learn that the same could probably be said about Hillary Clinton. It’s true that she seeks to punish dissent, embraces Nixonian power lust and rule breaking, and is even willing to support amending the Constitution to trash free-speech protections if it means keeping a negative movie about her out of theaters. But as we’re learning this week, as creepy and destructive as her view of government is, she’s almost certainly more afraid of you than you are of her.
IJ Review has a fun side-by-side comparison of what happened when the entertainment-news site TMZ attempted to question Marco Rubio in an airport, and what happened when TMZ tried to corner Hillary Clinton in an airport. Rubio walked over to the cameraman smiling, and chatted for a bit about his campaign, music, and even gracefully handled a question about his wife being an ex-cheerleader. He never looked uncomfortable, or bothered by the questions.
The video of Clinton consists entirely of her walking away in silence, hearing but ignoring the cameraman.
You may think that if there’s any fear at play in that video, it’s fear of the media or of accountability. And that’s surely true. But Hillary’s campaign rollout is revealing that it’s a more generalized fear than that: the woman who wants to be the next president is terrified of people. …
According to Jonah Goldberg, Clinton is the candidate of yesterday. For proof he points out she was the only candidate who supported the war in Iraq.
… Personally, I don’t think support for the war should be disqualifying. And I have no doubt that most anti-war Democrats will nonetheless work through their cognitive dissonance and vote for Clinton. They hardly put up much protest when anti-war Obama selected Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, all of whom voted for the war, as his top foreign-policy gurus.
Perhaps this generational wave of post-Iraq Republican politicians says something interesting about the GOP? Likewise, perhaps Clinton’s support for the war — until she apologized in her 2014 memoir — says something about her? Reasonable (and unreasonable) people will differ on all that.
But Clinton’s support for the war underscores a broader vulnerability. Unlike her probable opponents, she’s truly a creature of yesterday’s battles. From the fight over “Hillarycare,” to the endless scandals of her husband’s administration, to the ugly brawls over the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton has been a partisan fixture of Washington at its most exhausting and ugly moments. A Midwestern road trip in a van dubbed “Scooby,” even one punctuated by burrito breaks, won’t make people forget that, nor will defensive outbursts from her supporters stop her critics from pointing it out.
And the NY Times reports Clinton was asked about her emails two years ago.
Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.
But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.
The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.
“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.” …
The Cartoonists have a lot of fun with the Clinton logo. Go to the WORD or PDF versions to see those.