The Mind of Hillary Clinton

Among the things I would never wish on you or anyone else: a day in the mind of Hillary Clinton.

Apparently, Hillary has thrust herself back into the news by attacking Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein as Russian assets. The ghost of Joe McCarthy is smiling.

Many candidates are attacking Hillary for her failure to keep her mouth shut. And for inserting herself into a political conversation that she should long since abandoned.

And yet, Matt Taibbi points out in Rolling Stone, Hillary is doing nothing more than repeating the theme that has animated the anti-Trump movement for years now:

Hillary Clinton is nuts. She’s also not far from the Democratic Party mainstream, which has been pushing the same line for years.

Less than a week before Clinton’s outburst, the New York Times — once a symbol of stodgy, hyper-cautious reporting — ran a feature called, “What, Exactly, is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?” The piece speculated about the “suspicious activity” surrounding Gabbard’s campaign, using quotes from the neoconservative think-tank, the Alliance For Securing Democracy, to speculate about Gabbard’s Russian support.

This was the second such article the Times had written. An August piece, “Tulsi Gabbard thinks we’re doomed,“ hit nearly all the same talking points, quoting Clint Watts, an ex-spook from the same think-tank, calling Gabbard “the Kremlin’s preferred Democrat” and a “useful agent of influence.” The Times article echoed earlier pieces by the Daily Beast and NBC.com that said many of the same things.

After Clinton gave the “Russian asset” interview, it seemed for a moment like America’s commentariat might tiptoe away from the topic. Hillary Clinton has been through a lot over the course of a career, and even detractors would say she’s earned latitude to go loonybiscuits every now and then. A few of the Democratic presidential candidates, like Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Yang, gently chided Clinton for her remarks. But when Gabbard (who’s similarly been through a brutal media ordeal) snapped back and called Hillary “Queen of the warmongers,” and Donald Trump followed by calling Clinton “crazy,” most pundits doubled down on the “asset” idea.

Neoconservative-turned-#Resistance hero David Frum blasted Trump for defending Stein and Gabbard, noting sarcastically, “He was supposed to pretend they were not all on the same team.” Ana Navarro on CNN said, “When both the Russians and Trump support someone, be wary.” An MSNBC panel noted, in apparent seriousness, that Gabbard “never denied being a Russian asset.” CNN media critic Brian Stelter tried to suggest Hillary only seemed wacko thanks to a trick of the red enemy, saying, “It feels like a disinformation situation where the Russians want this kind of disinformation.”

As though that were not bad enough, the radical American left is enamored with the Russian scum idea. This means, just in case you missed it, that Barack Obama was a Russian stooge, willing to do the bidding of his Kremlin masters. Only, don’t tell anyone:

Everyone is foreign scum these days. Democrats spent three years trying to prove Donald Trump is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is “Moscow Mitch.” Third party candidates are a Russian plot. The Bernie Sanders movement is not just a wasteland of racist and misogynist “Bros,” but — according to intelligence agencies and mainstream pundits alike — the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to “stoke the divide” within the Democratic Party. The Joe Rogan independents attracted to the mild antiwar message of Tulsi Gabbard are likewise traitors and dupes for the Kremlin.

If you’re keeping score, that’s pretty much the whole spectrum of American political thought, excepting MSNBC Democrats. What a coincidence!

We are, Taibbi continues, giving Donald Trump way too much credit. His candidacy was not a carefully calibrated political campaign. It was slapdash, put together on the fly by a man who never really imagined that he was going to win:

This witch-hunting insanity isn’t just dangerous, it’s a massive breach from reality. Trump’s campaign was a clown show. He had almost no institutional backing. His “ground game” was nonexistent: his “campaign” was a TV program based almost wholly around unscripted media appearances. Trump raised just over half the $1.2 billion Hillary pulled in (making him the first presidential candidate dating back to 1976 to win with a funds deficit). He didn’t prepare a victory speech, for the perfectly logical reason that he never expected to win.

But then, how did it happen that the great Hillary Clinton managed to lose to Donald Trump. Did you every suspect that she really wanted to lose, that she was afraid of the American presidency, that the office would expose her for the incompetent fraud that she has always been? Donald Trump could not have won without the connivance of Hillary herself. So, she got her wish, and is perhaps secretly relieved. After all, not being president allows her to travel the country and the world in splendor, shooting off her mouth, saying whatever is on her mind. And it ensures that she does not need to depend on her husband for behind-the-scenes guidance. Why not live on her laurels, laurels that she in no way earned, rather than risk taking on a job that would have been much too big for her feeble mind? 

Even if she had been doing it to advance the feminist cause, perhaps the cause is better served by allowing people to imagine her successful presidency than by showing herself to be a miserable failure in office.

I recognize that many oh-so-savvy commentators are convinced that Hillary Clinton will jump in the race at the last minute, the better to save the Democratic Party from ignominious defeat. But, would a rescue scenario begin with the dowager Duchess of Chappaqua trying to traffic in an absurd conspiracy theory? The net effect of her stupid suggestion might well be to protect her against any calls that she enter the race. Call it her insurance policy.