Any cop can tell you the scenario: wife-beater beats up wife, bruised up wife calls the cops, cops come over, and then wife decides she really loves her abusive husband and turns on the cops instead of the wife-beater, refusing to press charges, wasting the cops' time.  Pathetic co-dependency works like this, and some states have actually made it a crime to back off from pressing charges and refusing to cooperate in the prosecution of obvious abusers.

Then there's Hillary Clinton and her adoring co-dependent press, the relationship of whom was amply described by Amy Chozick in her fawning, unintentionally interesting new book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling.

Since I'm not on any reporter list for advance free books (most reporters are), I am still awaiting the copy I ordered in the mail.  But the reviews in National Review and Power Line pretty well tell us all we need to know about how the press groveled and toadied to Clinton even as she abused its members, meaning she got good press and her abusive campaign was falsely depicted as a smooth-running operation, while the Trump campaign was supposedly always in "turmoil" and "chaos," as Power Line's Paul Mirengoff observed.

What stands out to me in this is how abusive and paranoid Hillary and her close circle of aides really were to the press.  Chozick gushed and gushed about how "luminous" the drunken, disheveled, clearly sick candidate was as she stumbled through her campaign stops, lost her shoes, fell into coughing attacks, had on-camera seizures, took long bathroom breaks during nationally televised debates, and occasionally got shoved into a van like a sack of potatoes by the Secret Service.  Something was way wrong with her, and the press covered for her, seemingly howling for the Hillary minions to "beat me again."

As National Review's Kyle Smith observed:

With reporters like these, who needs flacks?  Chozick is such a Hillary fangirl that in the book she continues to protect Clinton's ruthless, nasty, paranoid band of aides by granting them anonymity.  It has since emerged (though the name isn't given in the book) that it was longtime Clinton henchman Philippe Reines who once told Chozick, "I didn't know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you," a line from the movie Thank You for Smoking.  (The line is used literally in the movie, but Reines and Chozick were not romantically involved.)  Chozick cloaks Reines's identity by referring to him only as Original Guy.

Would Chozick protect a Donald Trump aide who made such a vile and sexist comment?

And don't think it was just Hillary's creepily paranoid aides (the ones who recoiled in terror among each other at the prospect of having to tell Hillary Clinton she lost the election) in this, either.  Leadership flows from the top, and Hillary was at the apex of that abusive relationship.

Remember this?

Hillary Clinton in her new book pounds The New York Times for its coverage of her email controversy during the 2016 presidential campaign.

"The Times, as usual, played an outsize role in shaping coverage of my emails throughout the election," Clinton wrote in "What Happened," which was released Tuesday.

"To me, the paper's approach felt schizophrenic."

Schizophrenic?  Schizophrenic, you see, is having a split personality, adoring and fawning over her on one hand and writing the actual news on the other.  Hillary clearly expected solely the fawning.  She wanted the press to see her the way she saw herself, and never mind where the facts led.

Hillary was setting the tone for those aides, commissioning them to be wife-beaters to the press, and the press just kept saying, "Beat me more."

Any questions as to why the public, which should be the press's top priority instead of Hillary, no longer trusts the press?

Photo credit: Bark via Flickr, Creative Commons SA 2.0.