Her march to the nomination looks more like a limp.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Kentucky primary by over thirty five points. On Tuesday night, against a much easier opponent, she struggled to squeak out a victory. The meager win, combined with her loss in Oregon, can hardly inspire confidence in her followers.
The once-expected coronation of Hillary looks more like an embarrassing limp, and once again she needed her husband, who campaigned vigorously for her in Kentucky, to push her across the finishing line. “So, I want you to vote for her and I want you to drag some of your friends kicking and screaming to vote for her,” said Bill Clinton at a campaign stop a few days ago in Frankfurt, Kentucky. Such desperate pleading for her only underscored the coming enthusiasm gap in the general election.
Bill’s tactless reference to her wan support was also a reminder that he may prove as much a liability as an asset to Hillary’s campaign. For now, she has no choice but to make use of him, drawing upon the political touch that she lacks. She even promised Kentucky voters that she would put Bill “in charge of economic revitalization.”
It came out this week that Bill’s idea of economic revitalization includes using his “charitable” foundation to benefit his gal pals. According to the New York Post, he leaned on officials at the Clinton Foundation to send $2 million to a suspected mistress who runs an energy-conservation firm. Naturally, mainstream media outlets took no interest in this story. Nor did they care about a subsequent report that Bill had flown on the convicted pederast Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” more times than previously known. Over twenty times, and sometimes without his security detail in tow, Clinton joined his boon companion on trips to Epstein’s private island, known as “orgy island.” Evidently, Clinton didn’t want his pesky Secret Service detail to spoil their fun.
The New York Times, which views Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women as too trifling a matter to report, busied itself with the supposed bombshell that Donald Trump once “debased” a date. Except he didn’t. The woman in question, Rowanne Brewer Lane, has repudiated the story, saying that the Times falsified the meaning of her comments. “They told me several times and my manager several times that it would not be a hit piece and that my story would come across the way that I was telling it and honestly, and it absolutely was not,” she said. “They spun it to where it appeared negative. I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump, and I don’t appreciate them making it look like that I was saying that it was a negative experience because it was not.”
The Times is known for issuing the most laughably minute corrections, such as when it gets the time wrong for the rising and setting of the sun. Recently, to the amusement of Mediaite, the Times informed readers that a story about Muslim theologians got the Snapchat handle wrong for one of its sources: “Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about a theological battle being fought by Muslim imams and scholars in the West against the Islamic State misstated the Snapchat handle used by Suhaib Webb, one of Muslim leaders speaking out. It is imamsuhaibwebb, not Pimpin4Paradise786.”
But don’t count on any correction to its story about Brewer Lane. Never mind that the paper led its story on Trump’s “mistreatment” of women with her fictitious debasement. Perhaps the paternalistic Times feels that Brewer Lane lacks the self-awareness to understand the gravity of the microaggression that she suffered.
Another woman mentioned in the story, Barbara Res, whom the Times grudgingly acknowledged had received a promotion to the head of construction by Trump at a time when such promotions were rare, essentially complained that he didn’t treat her with kid gloves. So Trump can’t win. It is apparently now a feminist microaggression to treat your head of construction like one of the boys.
I happened to run into one of Res’s former colleagues in New York City a day or so after that story appeared. He laughed at her sudden sensitivity. “She talked like a truck driver,” he recalled. “She was as crass as anyone else.”
Res says that she is planning to vote for Hillary, whose blunt manner, though not her politics, is a bit like a truck driver’s too. Against Obama in 2008, Hillary threw back beers in rust-belt states like Indiana in the hopes of defeating an effete community organizer, and to a certain extent that posturing worked. But it is not working anymore. In 2008’s more crowded and difficult field, she won Kentucky by almost 250,000 votes. Last night, she elbowed out an aging socialist by less than three thousand.
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