Painting a Picasso

People are so easily distracted by the latest shiny object, and that’s why stories like this work so well. Via the Washington Post’s PostPartisan column:

One of the best practitioners of the political dark arts used to refer to the kind of story that appeared yesterday about Hillary Clinton using a personal e-mail account instead of an official one while at the State Department as a “Picasso.” By that, he meant a masterpiece of his craft: placing, without fingerprints, negative stories that wind up on the front pages of a major newspaper and command the political news cycle for a few days. These stories are often months in the making and, at best, reinforce or create a new negative narrative about the target. So it is with this latest story on Clinton and e-mails. For Clinton-haters and skeptics, it underscores a pattern of deception and rule-breaking and threatens to become a chronic annoyance for her eventual candidacy. What e-mails are missing? What’s in them? A congressional investigation, anyone?

There’s another interesting wrinkle to this story for those who follow the game within the game of political campaigns. Who might have been the source of the story? Which master of the craft of opposition research? Well, I don’t know, but you don’t have to be an expert in forensics to suspect the campaign of Jeb Bush. Bush, after all, released all of his e-mails from his years as governor of Florida, which seems less curious now. And his campaign communications director, Tim Miller, perhaps the best in the Republican Party, is the former head of the factory of Clinton opposition research, America Rising. If that’s the case, the story could be a signal that Bush’s campaign knows how to throw a fastball up and in.

I knew it was an oppo dump, it had all the signs. And I figured it was Jeb Bush, trying to distract from the fact that he only released a carefully vetted version of his own private emails. So there you go. And, as Digby wrote:

Now having said all that about 90s style political gossip pretending to be news, may I also say that there are many legitimate stories to be done about Clinton. This may even turn out to be one, although it’s already moved well beyond what the facts at hand should allow. She has a very long record and some very cozy relationships with power and money that deserve to be hashed out. Her record in the Senate on foreign policy and National Security should be examined in detail. Nobody says she is above scrutiny and it’s the media’s job to do it. But to breathlessly report a story which was clearly planted by the Republicans with the express purpose of drawing out these lazy “character” stories is pathetic. Nobody wants to hear that any more than they want to sit and listen to “You Oughta Know” while watching “Friends” reruns. Believe me, it was bad enough the first time. Get a new song.