The Blaming Finger Points…
…but having pointed, apparently never moves on.
Being a longtime news junkie and having followed — or perhaps better said, had Hillary Clinton inflicted upon me — for nearly 30 years, I’ve regarded her recent reappearance with some interest. To be sure, a little of Hillary goes a long way — ask the dead from Benghazi about that — but I still managed to watch the entire interview she granted at CodeCon in California.
Now one could ask why Hillary Clinton was invited to speak at a trade convention for IT professionals — while her experience in the area of e-mail administration and internet security is no doubt interesting, one can hardly expect her to speak candidly on the subject — but be that as it may, the event was nevertheless newsworthy so, having already subjected myself to an hour of her bilious cant, let the summary begin.
Hillary the Liar
As is the case whenever Hillary opens her mouth, the most noteworthy thing about the interview was what an inveterate liar she is. Unlike her husband, who always managed to leaven his lies with enough rougish charm to remain an endearing figure, Hillary delivers her whoppers with a harsh, grating air that manages to annoy even before the specific details of her shameless falsehoods have a chance to register.
And rest assured, shameless they are. At one point, heedless of the collusion Wikileaks revealed, Hillary blamed bad press for her downfall, apparently fully expecting that the establishment media — supine lackeys that they were — would simply ignore the investigation into her extralegal e-mail server.
Apart from the relentless dishonesty, the following points stand out:
- Clothing Choice — Right off the bat one notices that Hillary’s taste in clothing has changed slightly since the campaign, if anything growing worse. The knee-length Mao jacket is familiar — she wore similar ones during some of the debates — but wearing it over a pair of spandex Capri pants in an odd plaid pattern was a new and, frankly, unflattering touch. I suspect that, with the campaign being over, Hillary no longer has the budget for designer clothing and on-staff stylists. It shows.
- Chair — The next odd point was the choice of chairs. Aside from the garish lipstick red colored leather, the shape of the chair itself resembled some sort of therapy device, like something a person struggling with a degenerative spinal condition or a condition like MS or Parkinson’s would use. One wonders if, beneath her Mao jacket, there was some sort of electro-magnetic harness to help keep her posture upright.
- Popular vote ‘victory’ — I was actually shocked that Hillary had the self-control to wait until she was five minutes into the interview to bring up her 3,000,000 vote margin in the popular vote, given the obnoxious degree to which her partisans trumpet the constitutionally irrelevant number. One wonders why, if Hillary was so convinced of the sanctity of the popular vote as the One True Measure of political legitimacy, she didn’t mention it during the actual campaign; until the end, all I remember hearing from her was an utter certainty that they were going to carry FL, NC, PA, MI and WI, thus wrapping up an Electoral College landslide before 10:00PM EST. The fact that the interviewers — Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — didn’t follow up on this point speaks poorly of their diligence.
- Blaming the DNC — “I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean it was bankrupt. . . . Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.” (The DNC for its part, has strenuously denied such accusations). Given her family’s history though, this is an especially graceless accusation; the Clintons spent more than two decades using their various endeavors — the Clinton Foundation/Clinton Global Initiative, Center for American Progress, various senatorial and presidential campaigns (and now her new PAC, Onward Together) — to reroute traditionally Democratic funding streams into their own pockets, so blaming the DNC for Hillary 2016’s shortcomings is a bit like the mugger kicking his victim in the teeth after he’s stolen their wallet.
- Bashing her one-time patrons the Saudis — Hillary had the nerve to intone Grave Concerns over the threat posed by the KSA, quite rich given the tens of millions of dollars her family has accepted from them over the years.
- Claiming that the media was conservative — As touched on earlier, Hillary devoted considerable time complaining about the media, even going so far to chastise the ever stalwart New York Times for their coverage of her e-mail travails. Also, domination of the national and social networking media isn’t enough; Hillary expressed considerable ire for local TV stations and their penchant to sometimes veer off script and present issues of interest to their actual viewers (The horror, the horror!). Hillary’s answer to this peril is to exhort Silicon Valley billionaires to purchase local TV stations, thus inserting themselves even more intrusively into our information stream. To this end Hillary singled out Amazon founder and CIA contractor Jeff Bezos for special praise over his purchase of The Washington Post (Saving “a treasure” in Hillary’s estimation).
- ‘Muh Russia!’ meets the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy — Not content to let the ‘Russian collusion’ pot bubble and boil, Hillary saw it necessary to draw in, of all people, the Macedonians. Summaries can do little justice here; as convoluted as the account is, it’s worth quoting Hillary at length: “And I think it’s fair to ask… Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with? Because the Russians historically in the last couple of decades, and then increasingly, you know, are launching cyber-attacks and they are stealing vast amounts of information and… they were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running, y’know there’s all these stories, about y’know, guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites, and you know I’ve seen them now, and you sit there and it looks like you know sort of low level CNN operation, or a fake newspaper. So the Russians, in my opinion and based on the intel and counter-intel people I talk to, could not have known how best to weaponize that information unless they had been guided [by colluding Americans].”
- Misogyny — Did anyone really think Hillary wouldn’t play the Woman Card? Anyone?
The reaction to Hillary’s performance at CodeCon was universally negative:
[Hillary’s] public statements since defeat have been malignant little masterpieces of victimhood-claiming, blame-shifting and unhelpful accusation. They deserve censure.
Many Democrats noted that Clinton — just like her opponent Bernie Sanders — had access to the DNC’s data from the outset of her campaign. Therefore, they said, if there was trouble with the data, her staff would have known long before she won the Democratic presidential nomination. David Radloff, the co-founder of the Democratic data and analytics firm Clarity Campaign Labs, tweeted: “Used DNC data on numerous campaigns this year, well managed, efficient, accurate. Real question is who’s feeding Clinton bad info and why??”
Even Hillary’s erstwhile allies at Time Warner/CNN found it all a bit hard to take:
Of course, all of Hillary’s toxic traits have been common knowledge for years (if not decades). Best to leave the last word to the one who deserves it most, the man that saved us from the dismal specter of a Hillary Clinton presidency, President Donald Trump, who summed up Hillary quite succinctly during one of their debates: