Have you heard this one about Hillary?

The Daily Howler once again shows the sheer emptiness of the big-time press: Anne Kornbluth, a Washington Post reporter, who skewed her so-called news story quite deliberately to construct a negative picture of Hillary Clinton as a “filibusterer”; and a gaggle of pundits on the Chris Matthews show regurgitating the ancient and false story that Hillary, a Cubs fan in her youth, could not have been a Yankees fan, too, but was only pandering to New Yorkers while running for the Senate when she donned a Yankees hat and said she had always been a fan.. They snickered as they tossed that about in order to slander her as much as possible -- regardless of the fact that a decent reporter would at minimum know that in Chicago, by definition as a Cubs fan, she was required to hate the Sox and the Yankees usually beat the Sox; and that childhood friends interviewed many years before had confirmed her childhood interest in, knowledge of and ability to play baseball, including daily knowledge of Mickey Mantle’s and Roger Maris’s stats and familiarity with “her favorite quote” from Satchel Paige, “Don’t look back, someone might be gaining on you.”

Now here’s another test of the power of the right wing message machine: Did you know this particular slam against Clinton was simply false? Or had you come to assume that, like anybody running for office would do, she was, indeed, pandering to Yankees fans because she had been a Cubs fan, but dismissed it as meaningless trivia, as harmless a political gesture as kissing a baby? Or did you, like the supposedly knowledgeable news experts with still another gig on TV, assume the story of her “pandering” to be true, and did it also help form a piece of a worldview of Hillary as a triangulator supreme?

You can’t know everything. I didn’t know she actually, really and truly, was a Yankees fan when she was a kid in Park Ridge, Illinois. If I ever heard she was really a baseball fan at all, I had forgotten it. My money’s on the fact that, if you remember the baseball cap incident at all, which got extensive publicity, you didn’t know any of that, either, and had internalized the pandering storyline with visual reinforcement of her wearing the Yankees cap. The lesson: if it’s a negative you feel about any of the Democratic candidates, it may be grounded in reality and may be legitimate, but it also may be grounded in whole or in part in what you’ve been told, over and over and over by the right wing message machine via the gullible or complicit national media -- until the truth of it just comes naturally. Be wary of what you think you know about them, or what you think you’ve heard they said. In this case, verify, and do not trust.