Oh, but polls show this will feed into the narrative of a tightly controlled and untrustworthy candidate! A storyline voters will care about even less after they get a look at the dead-eyed sand gollums running for the GOP nomination with all that Koch and Adelson money.

Gah. Someone wake us up in 2017.

We’re not sure what this means. That reporters are heroes just like the never-identified Chinese man who stopped on his way home to yell at some tanks in Tiananman Square? That Hillary Clinton is a Communist dictator who will send tanks to crush dissent? Help us out in the comments, which we do not allow.

A hit piece about what? That Clinton’s clothes clashed with her navy Salvatore Ferragamo patent leather flats? Did the campaign also not provide snacks to reporters at the Gorham Holiday Inn? Newsflash, dudes: a year out from the Democratic convention and a full 17 months before the election, we can guarantee you that the vast majority of Americans do not give a tinned shit about whether some reporters were inconvenienced or disrespected by the Hillary Clinton campaign. But you can express your high dudgeon on Twitter, which is really the most important thing.

After all, we remember in 2008 when Barack Obama, during just such a meet-and-greet with the public, got himself crosswise with one Joe the Plumber. Who turned out to be not named Joe, and not actually a plumber, and whose story about the expense and high taxes of buying a plumbing company turned out to be total bullshit. But by the time anyone realized it, Joe was a wingnut hero and more than a few news cycles and John McCain campaign events got hijacked by his bullshit story. That was sure a shining moment for horse race political coverage. Everyone should hang about a foot from this cycle’s candidates in the hopes that they get one of those unscripted moments with an uneducated dolt.

For example, the editor of The Daily Beast took to Twitter to instruct his campaign reporters.

Clinton was in Gorham, walking along and pausing to chat with the civilians who lined the route. The media was there to take it all in and give us their important observations, like what kind of shoes this weird Non-Penised American chose for her stroll. (Navy Salvatore Ferragamo patent leather flats. Thanks for the scoop, Washington Post.)

Or, as Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post suggested, you could forget whatever banalities Hillary is spouting and instead of leaving to write a hit piece, your reporters could leave and go find some actual voters to talk to about what is on their minds. Then they can filter out the garbage and find important issues to write about.

Somewhere during the walk, some Clinton staffers broke out a rope and herded all the assembled media behind it, then kept marching, forming a sort of mobile holding pen about 10 or 15 feet away from the candidate. Ostensibly the point was to give Clinton a little space to chat with voters watching the parade. Which quite frankly seems reasonable to us. To the press it is “bad optics,” which in this case is code for “We’re not being catered to like we’re used to and our fee-fees are wounded.” So that became the story.

[ABC News]

The wingnut observations on Twitter were great too. Like this one:

Yr Wonkette is of two minds here. On the one hand, a free press is important to a flourishing democracy, yadda yadda yadda. On the other hand, a) We sort of like this all-out-of-fucks-to-give Hillary and b) the whining by the media was pretty hilarious.

On Saturday some nice elderly grandmother managed to set off a media conniption fit by using a rope to keep reporters away from her while she marched in a New Hampshire Fourth of July parade. Of course the grandmother was Hillary Clinton and New Hampshire is the most important state in the Union, at least until next February when we can go back to just thinking of it as that really cold shithole that isn’t Vermont. Hence the conniption.