{"id":279,"date":"2007-11-09T09:22:36","date_gmt":"2007-11-09T16:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=279"},"modified":"2007-11-09T23:14:57","modified_gmt":"2007-11-10T06:14:57","slug":"gratuitygate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=279","title":{"rendered":"Gratuitygate"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is interesting<\/a>.\u00a0 National Public Radio\u00a0interviews a waitress who served Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff at an Iowa restaurant.\u00a0 The waitress says she didn’t get a tip, and NPR, without checking with the Clinton campaign, airs the accusation.\u00a0 Clinton’s people rebut the accusation<\/a>, showing a credit card receipt for the restaurant tab and claiming they\u00a0left a hefty cash tip.\u00a0 The waitress, in a follow-on interview, maintains there was no tip.\u00a0 Not for her,\u00a0not for any of the other waitresses.<\/p>\n

Step aside, Vince Foster and Watergate!\u00a0 This could be the next great Clinton scandal . . . or so the media will play it.\u00a0 It’s a safe bet Tim Russert’s\u00a0flooding his\u00a0torpedo tubes as I write this (and I don’t even wanna know what Rush Limbaugh’s flooding).<\/p>\n

If you believe the waitress, one of three things\u00a0happened: Hillary or her staff lied about leaving a tip; the restaurant manager or another waitress\u00a0palmed the tip and didn’t share; a third party – another restaurant customer, perhaps? – swiped it when no one was looking.<\/p>\n

If you believe Hillary (and c’mon, can you picture\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u00a0or anyone on her staff being so bereft of judgment as to stiff a waitress during a campaign stopover?), things get more interesting.\u00a0 Was the waitress paid to say what she said?\u00a0 And if she was, who paid her?\u00a0 One of the Republican candidates, or one of\u00a0Clinton’s fellow Democrats?<\/p>\n

That’s the trouble with cash: the waitress can’t actually prove\u00a0she didn’t get a tip; Hillary can’t actually prove she left one.\u00a0 You can bet the next time a waitress accuses a candidate of not tipping, there’ll be a credit card receipt to show otherwise.<\/p>\n

Oh, and when did NPR start airing accusations without checking both sides?\u00a0 What if the waitress\u00a0had said Hillary doodled nooses and swastikas on her napkin?\u00a0 Would NPR\u00a0have aired that without trying to raise someone from Clinton’s campaign staff on the phone first?\u00a0 I’m starting to understand why so many people think NPR stands for Nice Polite Republicans.<\/p>\n

God, running for office is a nasty business.\u00a0 There has to be a better way to do this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is interesting.\u00a0 National Public Radio\u00a0interviews a waitress who served Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff at an Iowa restaurant.\u00a0 The waitress says she didn’t get a tip, and NPR, without checking with the Clinton campaign, airs the accusation.\u00a0 Clinton’s people rebut the accusation, showing a credit card receipt for the restaurant tab and claiming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}