How the hypocritical Elizabeth Warren hypocritically flip-flopped by not flip-flopping, my serious analysis

The headline:

"Elizabeth Warren says she has principles, and actually she adhered to them, but did she do it in the right way?" 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/akepqiYcrB— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) February 25, 2020

The lede:

Elizabeth Warren’s team in recent weeks explored ways to raise money from Silicon Valley donors without violating her ironclad fundraising pledge to not “sell access to my time,” Recode has learned.

WOW THIS RAISES SERIOUS SHADOWS AND CASTS MANY TROUBLING QUESTIONS…

Warren needs money to campaign in some of the country’s most expensive states on Super Tuesday, especially after disappointing results in the first three primaries that have given Bernie Sanders serious momentum. At the time of these talks, Warren was very close to going broke.

Warren’s wealthy backers in the Bay Area have long pushed for the candidate to relax some of her rules on fundraising to accommodate their interest in supporting her campaign. But over the last month or so, these supporters renewed their approach, engaging the campaign to see whether it would be willing to send out Warren endorser Julián Castro, for instance, to headline a fundraiser on her behalf. The campaign shut down that idea relatively quickly.

But other ideas, such as having a volunteer leader appear, the sources say, were debated more openly by the Warren camp. Talks between Warren’s campaign and organizers were serious enough that some donors expected the fundraiser to happen if both sides could align their schedules. Official invitations never went out, but organizers had told some pro-Warren tech donors about the event.

Ultimately, though, the scheduling issues and the hoops that organizers would have to jump through in order to meet the Warren campaign’s exacting standards sapped enthusiasm for a high-dollar event, and so organizers eventually pulled the plug. Without getting an enthusiastic yes from campaign headquarters, the idea is now widely considered dead, sources say.

So, to review:

• Warren made a commitment not to sell her time to big-money Silicon Valley donors
• Her campaign considered some events that didn’t clearly violate this pledge
• She didn’t do them even though she desperately needs the money
• The headline and lede just frames this as a waffling and hypocrisy anyway.

You can’t win, especially if you’re trying to run for president while being both liberal and female.

One advantage Trump has in this media environment is that because he has absolutely no standards of behavior or principles (unless “naked self-interest” and/or “the will to power” count) he avoids the endless hair-splitting “hypocrisy” attacks the media always considers fair game no matter how trivial or arbitrary.