2/12/2008

How Much for a Night with Chelsea?:
In just half an hour or so of searching, here's what the Rude Pundit came up with under the criteria "not exactly nice ways to talk about Chelsea Clinton" on Fox "news" over the last decade:

February 25, 1999 on Hannity and Colmes: Regular contributor Ann Coulter on Chelsea's view of one of Bill Clinton's "victims": "She's probably taken heart by his claim to Juanita Broaddrick that he's sterile. Those rumors about her looking nothing like him seem to be resurfacing again." So, just to make this clear: Coulter said that Chelsea would be happy if Bill wasn't her father. Like so many of her batsthit crazy statements, it went virtually unchallenged, and Coulter neither apologized nor was banned from appearances.

July 28, 2000 on The Edge With Paula Zahn: Zahn said, "Chelsea Clinton is leaving college in the fall to help her mom's political campaign. Is the first daughter showing her devotion to her parents, or is she merely their political pawn?" This was followed by an entire segment devoted to Chelsea's status as potential pawn.

April 15, 2002: Bill McCuddy in his "Foxlight" column: "Chelsea Clinton is hanging with a new homie. Here's a couple that paints an interesting picture — the former first daughter and Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs. That's right. They hooked up at a local New York nightspot recently and chatted for a while. Hey, between Secret Service for her and entourage for him, they both have a posse." It's okay if Chelsea has "homies" and if she "hooked up" with Diddy. "Hooked up" generally means "fucked," although the lingo has different, looser uses, much like "pimped."

February 23, 2007 on The Big Story with John Gibson: Regular contributor Dick Morris: "We have Hillary Clinton saying Chelsea was at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was saved because she ducked into a coffee shop [when] she was five miles away asleep in bed and the phone rang and a friend said turn on the TV." To the Rude Pundit's knowledge, Morris has never apologized or been suspended from appearances for saying that either Hillary or Chelsea lied about 9/11.

January 7, 2008 on The Big Story with John Gibson: Regular contributor Michelle Malkin: "Hillary dragged her mother out and Chelsea, to remind everyone, that she has a womb, that she is a woman, that she's a human being." Of course, Malkin saying that Chelsea went unwillingly onto the campaign trail and that Hillary is using her as a prop received no notice, and no apology or suspension was needed.

When former Fox "news" and current MSNBC correspondent David Shuster asked if Chelsea was being "pimped out in some weird sort of way," he was asking a legitimate question in a stupid, "lookie-me-I-so-hip," bullshit way, the uncomfortable reporter equivalent of Nixon saying, "Sock it to me." The question was as legit as asking Dick Cheney about his lesbian daughter when she was campaigning for a president that opposes her rights as an individual.

In context, yeah, MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been a dick about Hillary Clinton. And David Brock over at Media Matters, who helped blow Shuster's remarks from a little aside on one of the lowest-rated shows on television to big, bad sexism, has a lot of anti-Hillary karma to work off, Brock being one of the primary reasons that Clinton is such an unfairly reviled figure.

But the fact remains that Hillary Clinton agreed to a debate on Fox "news" despite all the not-very-nice things said about Chelsea (not to mention the "incredibly offensive" things spewed by Fox about Bill and her constantly). And she threatened to bail on MSNBC's debate, refusing to accept Shuster's apology and even Keith Olbermann's prostration. (The debate was canceled after Barack Obama agreed to another one on CNN.)

That means that she leapt at Shuster's remark as a way of keeping sympathy for her and her family in the news, a distraction from Obama's primary/caucus sweep this weekend. She used this Chelsea situation as a way to kick start some desperately needed fundraising.

And that, motherfuckers, is pretty much the definition of pimping.