#SlatePitch: Kirsten Gillibrand In MAJOR SEX-SLAVE CULT SCANDAL (Correction: Pretty Much Every Word Of This Story Was Wrong)

Can passive-aggressive Gillibrand hit jobs get any dumber than this? Well, sadly, yes, but this is just astoundingly dumb, even in its cleaned up version. Let’s start logically with the correction, since it’s almost as long as the text:

This post originally misstated that Rutnik’s family had been influential for many generations. Rutnik married into a family that had been influential for one previous generation; his onetime mother-in-law Polly Noonan worked closely with powerful Albany figure Erastus Corning II. It was Corning’s family that had been influential going back hundreds of years. The post also misstated that Gillibrand’s father helped her get a job with Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaign, citing an Albany Times-Union story, which asserts that Gillibrand’s memoir says that she was not “on the inside track” with Clinton until a cocktail-party conversation between Clinton and her father. Other accounts, however, indicate Gillibrand came to Clinton’s attention by volunteering and fundraising for the 2000 campaign without any involvement by her father, and the memoir itself says that the cocktail party conversation happened after the campaign was over.

So, to review, the New York Post published an insane guilt-by-indirect-association story trying to smear Gillibrand by noting that her father had represented someone who was later revealed to be head of a coercive sex cult. Rather than observing that this story is a classic example of my friend Ken’s dictum that the New York Post is more a social menace than a newspaper, Mathis-Lilly passively-aggressively suggested that there was something to this, and to do so utterly botched multiple relevant facts.

When I was first reading it, the Slate piece was so stupid I thought it might have been at attempt to parody the Post. But to remove all doubt, Mathis-Lilly concludes with some asinine leftier-than-thou nonsense:

Gillibrand currently promotes herself, with a seeming eye toward 2020, as a bold next-generation progressive. But her political career began with work for such figures as Republican New York Sen. Al D’Amato and current Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, to whom she had family connections, and Hillary Clinton.

Give Jacobin this — when it published what is now the second-stupidest Gillibrand smear job it was at least explicit that Gillibrand’s association with D’Amato was…interning with him as a college student, rather than doing what a REAL PROGRESSIVE would have done and been born or moved to another state. The HIGHLY DAMNING connection to Cuomo, which he also omits for obvious reasons, was…working as a special counsel at HUD when Cuomo was secretary, before she was nominated to fill a vacant Senate seat by Cuomo’s predecessor. Clearly, this deep, long-lasting connection demonstrates that she and Cuomo are essentially the same person and Gillibrand’s consistently progressive record as a senator is a complete fraud. Similarly, the fact that when she was that age Elizabeth Warren was an actual Republican shows that she’s just running a long con in the Senate.

The only thing I can say in the piece’s defense is that it doesn’t tell the tale that Gillibrand unilaterally forced Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, and pretty much every woman in the Democratic Senate caucus to make the totally innocent Al Franken resign by giving a measured statement on the subject roughly 20 seconds before the rest of her colleagues did. I guess Mathis-Lilly is saving that for the follow-up.

…Helaine Olen has more. This particular smear is so dumb it’s easy to dismiss, but getting mainstream outlets to launder evidence-free conservative conspiracy theories was a major factor in Donald Trump winning the White House.