BEING A CLINTON APOLOGIST IS A HARD LIFE: At the Politico, veteran center-left media critic Jack Shafer writes, “From the outside at least, being a friend of the Clinton’s looks like a demeaning occupation. You defend them, you defend them some more, you lie down in front of tanks for them and then—when you least suspect it—they reverse gear and betray you:”
[Hillary] also used the ABC News interview to apologize for previous, inadequate attempts to explain her conduct. “I really didn’t perhaps appreciate the need to do that,” she said. But even in this minor act of self-criticism, Clinton reflexively added the qualifying word of “perhaps” to pave an escape route should she need to abandon the apology six months from now. “I take responsibility,” she added, which is politician-speak for, “Now, will you leave me alone?”
You can decide for yourself how sincere these devious and dissembling comments by Clinton are. What interests me is how dramatically this turnaround ditches the surrogates who rushed to the airwaves and to defend her conduct. In early March, when the story broke, Clinton defenders (and intimates) David Brock, Lanny Davis, Maria Cardona, Jennifer Granholm, James Carville and Karen Finney advanced with absolute certainty that the Clinton email/server story was, in Granholm’s words, “just a nothing burger.” Brock’s pro-Clinton advocacy organization Correct the Record called the email affair a “manufactured controversy” and a “tempest in a teapot.” Carville called the email dispute “made up” and Clinton a victim of a double standard (“Colin Powell does the same thing. Jeb Bush does the same thing.”). About the emails, Davis said, “All preserved. And if deleted you know they can be found.” Cardona had so much faith in Clinton that she said, “I don’t think she needs to say anything more until she actually announces her campaign.”
Clinton has now conceded on national TV that the email story is not quite a nothing burger. It’s actually a Royale With Cheese—maybe a Double Royale With Cheese and Pineapple. Nothing was “manufactured” and indeed, yes, some of the emails were deleted. In recognition of these facts, will these Hillary loyalists volunteer to return to the TV chat shows to acknowledge their errors? Better yet, will the shows revisit the issue to illustrate how Clinton’s proxies attempted to roll them? Nah, but it would make great TV, wouldn’t it?
As Mark Steyn likes to say, “When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: ‘Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.’”
But then, some friends are more willing than others to serve as kamikaze crash test dummies. Which brings us to this fun blue-on-blue attack starring David Brock pounding his highchair that the New York Times has “a special place in hell” due its being an anti-Hillary “megaphone for conservative propaganda”…despite endorsing Hillary in 2008 and being court stenographer to her husband’s administration.
Please, please Gray Lady, take Brock’s advice and move even further to the left. Make de Blasio and Bernie Sanders look like members of the VRWC – you can do it!