Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online explores the media’s complicity in the recent scandal involving California Congressman Eric Swalwell.
It’s all over. Swalwell suddenly suspended his race for governor on Sunday night. And unless you were vacationing somewhere without Wi-Fi until this morning, you already know the reason why: because Swalwell — married with three children — has not only been credibly accused of being an insatiable lecher who preys upon Capitol Hill women like a one-man plague of locusts; he is also accused of raping one of his former staffers. …
… The allegations have not been proven, but if you can judge a man’s character by his friends, then Swalwell has none whatsoever — because he no longer has any friends, at least no public ones. That was not the case until recently: Swalwell had collected endorsements from 21 members of Congress and California’s most important labor unions (SEIU, California Teachers Association, etc.). Within 24 hours of the story breaking, every single one of them had rescinded their endorsement of his gubernatorial bid — almost as if they had been warned in advance that they might need to do so.
The real sport is now on: the spin game where partisans and operatives from every California Democratic campaign seek to blame the other ones for finally putting the Swalwell allegations out there to the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. …
… This is the core fact that we must always return to. Everybody knew Swalwell was an adulterous lech — except you. Swalwell’s name was being whispered through the Democratic grapevine on Capitol Hill by 2017 at the latest, when CNN almost surely mentioned him as the California representative cited by “more than half a dozen interviewees independently” for pursuing female staffers. …
… But whether the media reported on it or not, they knew. And now they really want us to give them credit for having known, but not told us. Over the weekend, one journalist after another poured forth smugly from the woodwork to tsk-tsk about Swalwell and casually aver that everybody knew and “rumors have swirled in DC for years” — without realizing what that says about them.
