Littlejohn Clinton Attack Unravels

Daily Mail readers have been treated today to an extra slice of abysmally bad partisan attack-doggery from talentless and unfunny churnalist Richard Littlejohn, which you knew beforehand was going to be bad from the headline: “Why Hillary and Bill are the Mafia mobsters of US politics: She's dodged a bullet. But in a brilliant dispatch, RICHARD LITTLEJOHN reveals US voters' revulsion at stench of corruption that won't go away”.

US Election, Guv? It's on telly, innit?!?

If it has to be called a “brilliant dispatch”, the chances are that it will be anything but. And although Dicky Windbag dispenses a few insults in the general direction of Donald Trump, this is mostly an attack on Hillary Clinton. One might expect that, as Littlejohn lives in the USA, he might at least benefit from being closer to the action. But, sadly, he doesn’t.

From the word go, Dicky Windbag is misleading: “James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office, is the man who brought to justice the notorious mob boss John Gotti, the Teflon Don … So when he calls Bill and Hillary Clinton members of a ‘crime family’ it’s fair to assume he knows what he’s talking about”. What he isn’t telling Mail readers is that Kallstrom is backing Trump, so he would say that, wouldn’t he?

After rambling on about emails, Littlejohn goas after the Clinton Foundation, telling readers “There is compelling evidence - especially in a new best-selling book by investigator Peter Sweizer, called Clinton Cash … to support suspicions that the Foundation has been used to launder donations from unsavoury regimes”. Is that so?

Ed Pilkington of the Guardian noted that several claims in that book have already been shown to be false. He also notes that the book does not prove corruption on the part of the Clintons. Clinton Cash has been shown to be an appallingly unreliable tome.

I don’t usually quote Wikipedia, but this passage stands citing in full: “Several weeks after the book's initial publication, Harper Collins and the author made several corrections to the Kindle edition of the book. Schweizer corrected ‘seven or eight’ passages that were revealed to be inaccurate after the book was released. FactCheck.org found Schweizer's assertion that Clinton, as Secretary of State, could have stopped Russia from buying a company with extensive uranium mining operations in the U.S. to be false. PolitiFact found the assertion that Clinton changed her views on a nuclear deal with India in response to donations to her family's foundation to be false”. False. Inaccurate.

And the US media has moved on, which means, for Littlejohn, it is not the right sort of media: “it has been largely ignored by the Clinton cheerleaders in the mainstream media. I’ve been covering U.S. elections for 25 years and have never seen such partisan Press and television coverage. We moan about the perceived liberal bias of the BBC, but in America most of the media outlets make Pravda look impartial”. Bullshit.

Most US papers do their job with scrupulous impartiality, upholding the kinds of journalistic standards that the likes of Littlejohn abandoned years ago - if they ever had them in the first place. The best he can manage is to mention Trump’s sex pest notoriety only to tell readers they should “look over there” at Bill Clinton. Seriously. But he does tell us “Last night Florida was too close to call and has been carpet-bombed with TV ads and rallies by both candidates”. That’s because he wrote this drivel while sitting at home in North Vero Beach watching the box. What a complete and utter shower.