On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made an audience of liberals gasp when he paraphrased prominent Democrat operative James Carville, a rabid defender of alleged sexual assaulter and former President Bill Clinton, while speaking at The Atlantic Fest.
“This is what’s degrading: ‘This is what you get when you go through a trailer park with a hundred-dollar bill,'” said Graham, when asked about President Donald Trump’s “degrading” treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford.
A collective gasp was heard from the audience, appalled by what Graham had just said.
And they should be appalled, since Graham was showcasing the Democrats’ past treatment of female accusers by merely paraphrasing Carville slandering Clinton accuser Paula Jones in the 1990s. Jones, who said she was sexually harassed by Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas, was eventually paid off $850,000 by Clinton to drop her lawsuit.
“If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find,” Carville famously stated in defense of Clinton.
Yahoo! News pounced on the remark and, by omitting key context, unfairly framed it as if Graham were saying this about Ford. After fierce backlash, the news network deleted the tweet, though it can be accessed via archive here and viewed by screenshot, below:
[[{“fid”:”38668″,”view_mode”:”default”,”fields”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Screenshot: Twitter Archive “},”type”:”media”,”field_deltas”:{“1”:{“format”:”default”,”field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]”:false,”field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]”:”Screenshot: Twitter Archive “}},”attributes”:{“title”:”Screenshot: Twitter Archive “,”class”:”media-element file-default”,”data-delta”:”1″}}]]
Other leftist media figures joined in on the false framing and feigned outrage over the comment — though, again, this was said by Team Clinton about an accuser:
While Graham might have been engaging in what some might call “whataboutism,” it’s clear that the media will do anything in their power to advance a narrative which is harmful to Republicans, even if it means lying. It’s also true that Democrats are finally upset about the treatment of a Clinton accuser, and it only took tricking them into thinking a Republican did it to come around!