MSNBC’s David Shuster: Defender of Clinton Family Honor?

[SoFlaJet]

http://www.observer.com/2008/msnbc-s-david-shuster-defender-clinton-family-honor


by Felix Gillette | February 13, 2008 |

It was a little before midnight on Tuesday, Jan. 27 that MSNBC correspondent David Shuster hit the “Send” button on a curt e-mail to Republican rabble-rouser Roger Stone.

Days earlier, Mr. Stone and others had filed papers with the I.R.S. to form a “527” organization dedicated to educating “the American Public about what Hillary Clinton really is.” The organization was called “Citizens United Not Timid,” i.e., C.U.N.T.

“Hey Roger Stone,” wrote Mr. Shuster in an e-mail to Mr. Stone’s personal Web site, the Stone Zone. “Why not put your own name on this?”

Mr. Stone was in no mood to take flack from an uptight reporter unable to take a joke. Mr. Stone felt the suggestion that he was hiding behind the site was ludicrous. After all, he had invited reporter Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard to sit in on the organization’s planning meeting.

The next afternoon, he responded. “Hey David Shuster,” Mr. Stone wrote back. “I in essence did when I let the entire planning meeting be on the record for a reporter.”

From there the confrontation fizzled, leaving Mr. Stone, weeks later, wondering what motivated Mr. Shuster to e-mail him about C.U.N.T. in the first place. Was Mr. Shuster working on a story? Or was he acting out of—irony alert!—indignation on behalf of Hillary Clinton?

It would be ironic because, two weeks later, while filling in on MSNBC’s Tucker program, Mr. Shuster himself used saucy language to refer to a lady Clinton when he suggested Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was “pimping” her 28-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who traveled extensively across the country with her mother during the early primary season.

Through an MSNBC correspondent, Mr. Shuster declined to comment for this story.

The next morning, MSNBC vice president Phil Griffin asked Mr. Shuster to apologize on “Morning Joe,” which he did. Later that day, MSNBC announced that they were suspending Mr. Shuster for an indefinite period. That evening, he offered a second on-air apology.

For the time being, Mr. Shuster remains on suspension, presumably holed up in a media-proof bunker somewhere in his native habitat of Washington, D.C. And the Clinton campaign has continued to portray Mr. Shuster and his colleagues as empirically anti-women and anti-Hillary.

[papau]

1. GE/NBC/MSNBC just like calling Hillary a "cunt" - so Schuster sends fan mail