Lanny Davis: The swamp personified

It’s been three years since we last took a look at Lanny Davis, the longtime Clinton family operative and inside-the-Beltway lobbyist and image-massager for several of the world’s worst dictators. When we wrote about him in 2015, Davis was a TV fixture, running from one cable-news studio to another in an effort to put a positive spin on the damaging news about Hillary’s e-mail server.

“Do you ever get tired of cleaning up after the Clintons?” Fox News journo Chris Wallace asked Davis at the time. Salon has called him a “well-known spinster…whom no one trusts.” Some more fun quotes about this creep: in 2012, calling him “a pitchman for warlords” who “carr[ied] the Devil’s water in Washington,” the Atlantic‘s Jon Lovett said that Davis “represents all that is wrong with politics today.” A 2013 piece in the New Republic began: “The last time we heard from Lanny Davis, he was doing what he does best: representing a dictator.” Among his clients: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbsogo, dictator of Equatorial Guinea, widely known as the “Auschwitz of Africa,” and the Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote D’Ivoire.

In short, to use a term that has gained currency since 2015: he is the swamp.

This July, after having kept a relatively low profile for quite a while, Davis resurfaced. News was that President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who is now the target of a federal probe owing to his role in Trump’s payoffs to former mistresses, had engaged Davis’s services. At the Federalist, David Harsanyi offered a timely reminder of Davis’s career history under the headline “Let’s Take A Moment To Remember The Corrupt Hackery Of Lanny Davis,” stating that “it’s going to be fascinating to watch a shyster like Michael Cohen be transformed into a hero of The Resistance.” Still, added Harsanyi, “America—even with all our transgressions—simply doesn’t deserve Lanny Davis. None of us do.”

Davis, explained Harsanyi, “can be properly described as a personification of the cliché, ‘everything that’s wrong with Washington.’ Cringingly slavish to those in power, a consigliere, fundraiser, surrogate, and cheerful liar, Davis was a perpetual presence on cable TV during the Clinton scandals. Few men in history have ever been able to summon his kind of loyalty in the pursuit of shameless, transparent deceit and corruption.” Well, caan’t argue with any of that.

Harsanyi emphasized how ironic it is that Davis, of all people, is now “preaching—without even a trace of irony—the value of integrity and honesty,” contending that Cohen, formerly a two-bit shyster and bagman type, “has turned a corner in his life, and he’s now dedicated to telling the truth to everyone.” After all, noted Harsanyi, Davis played a not unimportant role “in corrupting the value of personal responsibility, civility, and morality in our political culture. His unwavering defense of Bill Clinton’s corruption and extramarital dalliances (and possibly worse) is a valuable reminder of how we got to this place.” Yep.

“For years,” recalled Harsanyi, “Davis told America that what they were seeing and reading was not what was happening. After tapes emerged of the Clintons illegally soliciting donations from big-money donors at the White House in 1997, for example, Davis sprang into action, not only contending that there was ‘no suggestion that there was any solicitation for money’ — despite the fact that the tapes suggested exactly that — but that many of the big contributions of those who had attended the event and only days later donated to the Clintons were merely an ‘incidental’ occurrence.” Now, this same man who “handled” Bill Clinton’s so-called “bimbo eruptions,” “smearing women he surely suspected were telling the truth about President Clinton’s habitual womanizing” (and worse) is making the usual cable-news rounds striving to whip viewers into a rage over “the tapes of a president and his lawyer discussing how to hide an alleged affair.”

Harsanyi’s summing up is right on the money: “Lanny Davis possess a preternatural chutzpah that puts most contemporary partisan hacks to shame. We’re all worse off having him back.”

Posted on August 7, 2018July 28, 2018 by usefulstooges 0

Top ten useful stooges of 2015

We thought we’d wind up 2015 by revisiting some of the folks we’ve covered on this website during the last year. No, these definitely aren’t the ten worst human beings we’ve written about; they’re just some of the people whose activities during 2015 we found despicable in distinctive ways, and we thought that, as the year moves toward a close, they just might be worth looking at one more time.

Russell Brand Last year, the holier-than-thou British comedian came out with an inane book, Revolution, in which he celebrated Castro and Che Guevara, whose transformation of Cuba he presented as a model for the 21st century. This year, his image took a big hit when it was discovered that his line of sweatshirts – which he’d represented as being manufactured in the UK – were, in fact, made by laborers in Bangladesh who worked up to eleven hours a day for 25p an hour. Also, while he’d claimed that the profits went entirely to charitable causes, it turned out that only £1.37 of the take on a £65 sweatshirt was going to charity – and the “charity” in question was a trendy London café Brand opened in March.

Stella McCartney In June, flibbertigibbet clothes designer (and daughter of the immortal Beatle) threw an exceedingly high-profile party with the theme “Cuba Libre.” In the garden of her Manhattan townhouse, such guests as Alicia Keys, Liv Tyler, and Maggie Gyllenhaal sipped rum-and-cokes, grooved to the rhythms of a salsa band, and mingled with two guys dressed up as – we kid you not – Fidel and Che. McCartney’s explanation for this obscene trivialization of totalitarianism: “I simply wanted to have a fun party, and I think Cubans know how to do that.” Almost unanimously, the fashion media applauded what Women’s Wear Daily described as McCartney’s “nod to Cuba.”

Max Blumenthal The spawn of unsavory D.C. operator Sidney Blumenthal, young Max has made a career out of slandering Israel in particularly nasty ways while cheering on some of its most violent enemies. This year, in collaboration with Electronic Intifada and Al Jazeera contributor Rania Khalek, he co-wrote a long piece smearing several U.S. journalists for criticizing Putin – among them Liz Wahl, a reporter who’d recently quit her anchor job at the Kremlin-run TV “news” channel RT America because she was sick of serving up pro-Putin, anti-American propaganda. Writing in Commentary, Seth Mandel called Blumenthal’s attack job “a textbook example of character assassination.”

Lanny Davis In 2015, regular viewers of cable news saw a great deal of this shifty creep, a longtime Clinton crony and spinmeister who, during the current presidential campaign, has spent a great deal of his expensive time trying to extinguish the many scandals that have been swirling around Hillary Clinton. (During a March appearance on Fox News, Chris Wallace asked Davis, “Do you ever get tired of cleaning up after the Clintons?”) When he’s not engaged in this unenviable task, Davis keeps busy shilling for some of the planet’s most corrupt and brutal despots, including Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and Laurent Gbagbo of Cote D’Ivoire.

Gloria Steinem In May, the 81-year-old Ms. founder traveled to North Korea “to say we care by being physically present” because “conflicts are far more likely to be solved when people sit down together.” She then led a group of women on a “walk for peace” across the DMZ. The whole thing came off as a PR stunt to polish Pyongyang’s image. It didn’t help that the feminist icon stayed mum about the Kim regime’s treatment of women – and chose as her partner in this dubious undertaking one Christine Ahn, an open admirer of Juche ideology who routinely blames the U.S. and South Korea for North Korea’s problems.

We’ll get to the next five tomorrow. Happy New Year!

Posted on December 31, 2015December 5, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Strangers on a train

A rather interesting piece by Betsy Woodruff appeared in the Daily Beast on October 9. That morning, she recounted, one of her colleagues, Guy Benson, had been a passenger on the 6:55 A.M. Amtrak train from Washington, D.C., to New York. Sitting right across the aisle from Benson, as it happened, was Lanny Davis, the longtime Clinton spinmeister whose sleazy career we surveyed back in July.

Benson overheard a few juicy tidbits, which Woodruff passed on to Daily Beast readers. Davis, who was engaged in an unguarded conversation with a couple of unidentified companions, referred to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate from Vermont, as a “nut.” Said Davis: “There’s no way he can be nominated, ever.”

lanny-davis-and-hillary-clinton — With Hillary Clinton

Davis also declared that he was sure Vice President Biden would enter the presidential race – but he added that Biden’s bid would go absolutely nowhere. Why? Because, he explained, Biden is viewed in political circles as a “buffoon.”

There was more. Davis told his travel companions that candidate Carly Fiorina is “nasty” when she makes public statements about Hillary Clinton.

The chitchat wasn’t entirely about politics. Davis went on to express interest in watching the Showtime series Ray Donovan, leading one of his companions to say: “Oh yeah, it’s about a fixer.” The other companion added: “It’s like us if we had guns and baseball bats.” Fun crew.

ray-donovan-critique-série-saison-1 — Liev Schreiber as Ray Donovan

When the Daily Beast contacted Davis about his palaver on the 6:55, he walked his remarks back with his usual shamelessness – claiming, for example, to have “nothing but the highest respect for Bernie Sanders.”

In fact, Davis was remarkably lucky that the chitchat Benson overheard was as anodyne as it was. Imagine if he had been talking about other aspects of his career?

This is, after all, a guy who, in exchange for a million bucks a year, led the morally bankrupt – indeed, downright chilling – effort to whitewash the repulsive Equatoguinean dictator Teodoro Obiang in the international media. According to World Policy Review, Obiang has “killed or expelled more than one third” of his own people, as a result of which his country is widely known as the “Auschwitz of Africa.” Then there’s Obiang’s wastrel son (and presumptive successor) Teodorin, who “spent more on luxury goods during 2004-2007 than the [Equatoguinean] government’s 2005 budget for education.”

Yet Davis didn’t hesitate to pocket Obiang’s money (or, rather, his people’s money) for performing the disgusting job of covering all that up.

And let’s not forget another reprehensible African dictator and Davis client, Laurent Gbagbo of Cote D’Ivoire. After losing the 2010 presidential election, Gbagbo, instead of stepping down and allowing the winner to be inaugurated, did two things: he started murdering and “disappearing” his opponents – and hired Davis to go on CNN and other cable networks and tell the world that he was, in fact, a man of peace. Davis didn’t hesitate to front for this creep, either.

That Amtrak exchange, then, was small potatoes. Very small potatoes. Davis should count himself exceedingly fortunate that Guy Benson overheard such remarkably innocuous stuff, given the utterly loathsome, morally bankrupt nature of Davis’s “work.” And Benson – and Woodruff – should be kicking themselves for not having lucked into the far meatier, more damning material with which Davis might have inadvertently provided them – and which might have brought him down at last, removing at least one ball of slime from the Beltway swamps.

Posted on October 16, 2015October 16, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

Following Lanny Davis’s slime trail

Yesterday we started following the slime trail of lowlife Lanny Davis, whose longtime role as shameless spinmeister to the Clinton family, it turns out, is the less unsavory of his two main jobs. The other: shilling for some of the world’s most nefarious despots.

Among Davis’s clients: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbsogo, dictator of Equatorial Guinea. In April 2010, Obiang, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea with an iron fist since a 1979 coup, hired him for a million bucks a year (plus expenses) – allegedly to help formulate and introduce human-rights reforms but really, it soon became clear, to help whitewash the Obiang regime in the international media. Justin Elliott, who has done a yeoman’s job of covering – and exposing – Davis in Salon, wrote in January 2011 that Davis had made a “direct promise” to “a reporter” (presumably Elliott himself) “that political prisoners in Equatorial Guinea would be released”; Elliott noted that no such release had yet taken place.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photo during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with, H.E. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo President of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea and his wife, Mrs. Constancia Mangue de Obiang, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, or promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House. — Obiang and wife with the Obamas

What kind of government does Obiang run? Well, according to a 2010 report by the U.S. State Department, Obiang’s regime was guilty of “unlawful killings…torture of detainees and prisoners…life-threatening conditions in prisons…arbitrary arrest, detention and incommunicado detention…restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly…violence and discrimination against women,” among many other offenses.

Elliott, citing this litany of transgressions, additionally pointed out that according to Human Rights Watch, Obiang’s son Teodorin had actually “spent more on luxury goods during 2004-2007 than the government’s 2005 budget for education.” In 2012, a World Policy Review article reported that Obiang had “killed or expelled more than one third” of his country’s population; that under him and his immediate predecessor – who was also his uncle, and whom he eventually overthrew and executed – the country “became known as the ‘Auschwitz of Africa,’” in which more people were killed by them, proportionally speaking, than were killed by the Nazis in all of Europe; and that under Obiang’s family of “kleptocrats,” who’ve “devoted three decades to siphoning off Equatorial Guinea’s wealth into their pockets,” the great majority of the nation’s people have not only been terrorized but impoverished.

None of which, apparently, deterred Davis from taking money from this creep to help polish his international image.

Then there’s Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote D’Ivoire since the year 2000. After losing his bid for re-election in late 2010, the brutally dictatorial Gbagbo refused to leave office; instead, to quote Elliott, he “mount[ed] a campaign of organized violence against the opposition.” Gbagbo did something else, too: he hired Lanny Davis. So while this autocrat’s henchmen were busy murdering some members of the opposition and “disappearing” others (who were presumably dispatched by death squads), Davis got to work “assuring the American press that his client, Gbagbo, opposed violence.” And while the UN was formally accusing Gbagbo of committing “massive” human-rights violations, Davis was on CNN insisting that Gbagbo, innocent as a lamb, was calling on the legitimate winner of the election, Alassane Ouattara, “to join him on [sic] putting the arms down” and holding talks.

Alas for Davis, the Gbagbo gig didn’t last long: his paymaster was soon deposed, arrested, and charged by the International Criminal Court with murder, rape, persecution, and “other inhuman acts.” All told, Davis’s job with Gbagbo lasted only 12 days: he registered as a foreign agent for Ivory Coast on December 17, 2010, and resigned on December 29.

The lesson, we suppose, being that even the most unprincipled and hardest-working hustler can’t win ’em all. But you’ve got to hand it to Davis: he never allows himself to be discouraged by adversity. Or, for that matter, by shame, or conscience, or remorse. By all indications, these concepts aren’t even on his radar. No, he’s always ready, it seems, to go out there in the media one more time and get to work defending the indefensible.

Well, these days he’s hard at work defending the Clintons. Given the alternative, that’s probably a cause for celebration.

Posted on July 2, 2015June 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

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Tag: Teodoro Obiang

Lanny Davis: The swamp personified

Top ten useful stooges of 2015

Strangers on a train

Following Lanny Davis’s slime trail