Rotten to the Core - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Rotten to the Core
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Very little introduction is necessary here; the headline and sub-headline say it all. And in the interest of brevity, because we’ve a lot of ground to cover just in recounting a small sample of the ugly revelations continuously pouring out of WikiLeaks’ document dumps against the Clinton machine and the Democratic Party, we’ll just get right to it.

Because thanks to WikiLeaks and others who are doing the job the Democrats’ propaganda apparatchiks wearing the hats of the mainstream media refuse to do, we know what we’re getting in the event Hillary Clinton is our next president.

We know that the Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee control what’s written and said about the presidential campaign. So much so that Politico’s Glenn Thrush, who, recognizing how thoroughly he was whoring himself out to a corrupt political establishment when he allowed John Podesta to edit — or “approve” — an article he’d written about the campaign, self-identified as a “hack.” Thrush shouldn’t feel so guilty (are you kidding? Of course he should, and then he should leave the profession in shame!), as he’s hardly alone. Podesta’s emails are a treasure trove of collaboration between the Clinton machine and willing media stooges.

For example, there was the high-level “off-the-record” cocktail party the Clinton campaign threw for 38 influential reporters from 16 of the usual-suspect media outlets for the purpose of “framing the race” on April 10 of last year. Thrush and his Politico colleague Mike Allen said they’d attend, as did CNN’s Gloria Borger, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, and ABC’s Jonathan Karl and George Stephanopoulos, among others; NBC’s Chuck Todd and CNN’s Jake Tapper had the dignity to say no.

Or there was the discussion within the campaign around gaining earned media putting Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy in the right light back in January — something that proved difficult to do even with maximum cooperation. The discussion centered around Politico’s Maggie Haberman, who Clinton staffer Nick Merrill described as a good candidate to “place a friendly story” with. “We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed,” Merrill said.

Our readers already know about the debate question current DNC chair Donna Brazile got from CNN in advance — a revelation that Brazile, when later asked about it by Megyn Kelly of Fox News, certifiably beclowned herself. Brazile then claimed the emails in question were doctored, which like virtually everything else she says is a provable lie.

You likely already know about CNBC’s John Harwood and his embarrassingly subservient relationship with Podesta, including his bragging about mistreating Republicans at the primary debate his network hosted, but that’s not all. There was also the time when CNBC panelist Glenn Hutchins, an old Clinton apparatchik from the early 1990s, coordinated with Podesta on questions to ask Donald Trump when the latter appeared for an interview.

There are lots — LOTS — of other examples. The Clinton campaign’s coordination with the mainstream media in this cycle has been effectively total. One could be excused for suspecting that coordination is a key reason why it’s Trump, rather than another Republican who would have been more likely to win, carrying the Republican standard in the first place.

Your Democrat friends might tell you this isn’t an example of corruption but rather the body politic’s attempts to cleanse itself in the face of an existential threat from an unhinged Donald Trump. Your answer might be to bring up Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, for which she was paid millions of dollars — and the things she said in those speeches. Like her contention that she must have both a private and a public position on many issues to keep the rubes in the Democratic Party in line, or that she thinks environmentalists are essentially shut-ins and losers, or that she’s more or less a stooge of Goldman Sachs.

Or her foreign policy ideas, which look an awful lot like a recipe for endless, pointless war. She discusses a Syrian no-fly zone, which looks a lot like a formula for a war with Russia, despite recognizing it will kill lots of civilians and necessitate ground troops. Then there was her threat, in a 2013 speech, to “ring China with missile defense.”

Does that sound like a responsible candidate, lefties?

Of course, there is the Clinton Foundation — which WikiLeaks’ release of the Podesta emails shows is an absolute septic tank of corruption and ethical malaise. The Foundation’s own staffers said in an internal review that it was an ineffective and largely useless organization; that was covered up in a memo to Clinton machine bigwigs Podesta, Cheryl Mills, Chelsea Clinton, and Bruce Lindsey in 2012. Later, in 2015, Clinton Global Initiative honcho Doug Band took to howling to Podesta about the plethora of conflicts of interests Bill Clinton was engaged in while others in the Clinton machine were supposedly barred from having them. Band cut ties with the Clintons after referring to Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she’s doing because she, as she has said, hasn’t found her way and has a lack of focus in her life.”

Speaking of conflicts of interest, how about the Moroccan affair? Here was a classic example of the kind of pay-to-play corruption no first-world country could ever tolerate in its president. In case you haven’t heard about this, the corrupt king of that country pledged some $12 million to the Clinton Global Initiative on condition that Hillary would appear at a conference he was to host in May of 2015. But seeing as though the actual payment would come from OCP, a phosphate mining company accused of human rights violations, politically it was a hot potato for her to lend legitimacy to the Moroccans. And in an email WikiLeaks uncovered, the Clinton machine’s various cogs knew it.

Said Abedin in a November 2014 email to Podesta and Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, “No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI [Clinton Global Initiative] on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this.” In a later e-mail two months later, Abedin said “Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If hrc was not part of it, meeting was a non-starter.”

That sweaty $12 million would only come if Hillary got off that plane and gave the Moroccans her imprimatur.

“CGI also wasn’t pushing for a meeting in Morocco and it wasn’t their first choice. This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the [foundation’s] endowment and to support the meeting,” Abedin continued.

“It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months. She created this mess and she knows it.”

According to Vox, there’s a perfectly valid explanation for this. You’ll have to read it — if you do, you’ll know what happened to Baghdad Bob.

Scott McKay
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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator  and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It's All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
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