In response to Hillary Changes Story on Rapist Defense, Claims She Had No Choice:
Boy, you can tell this whole “Hillary Tapes” thing really struck a nerve. She’s taking a huge chance by attempting to brazenly rewrite history, and… well, hope nobody actually listens to the tape and hears her laughing with glee about the bitterly effective defense she mounted on behalf of that rapist. Or is the new story going to be that she didn’t have any choice about laughing, either?
She would have been a lot smarter to just let it go, since she’s slipping out of the news penumbra and into merciful darkness anyway. Her followers bought some books, nobody’s reading it, the rollout campaign was a gaffetastic disaster… a smarter politician would either nurse her wounds and try again later, or do something huge to generate some good news, stat. Maybe a big donation to a broadly popular, squeaky clean, completely not-Clinton-linked charity… but no, she’s got to triple down by prattling about how she already donates so much of her immense income to charity, specifically the Clinton charity. No rake buried in the tall grass of her biography will go unstepped-upon, I guess.
It will be truly fascinating to see if any or all of this stuff sticks to Hillary, perhaps enough to spook the Democrat donor class and make her nomination a lot less “inevitable” than conventional wisdom currently holds. I tend to think it’ll stick – and her damage-control efforts suggest her advisers think so, too – because it strikes directly at the heart of the identity-politics and liberal-populist messages she planned to run on. The non-stop comedy that ensues when her supporters are asked to name one of her “achievements” makes running on her resume problematic, and nobody’s going to run as Barack Obama’s third term, so what’s left but the FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT! narrative plus her personality cult?
And will it occur to those big-money Democrat kingmakers that Hillary’s personality cult exists almost entirely among the media? Say what you will about the Obama phenomenon, but he really does (or at least, did) have a full-blown coast-to-coast cult, and while they’ve said and done a lot of crazy stuff, they also had the useful habit of showing up at the polls to vote for him. Who’s really all that excited for Hillary Clinton, beyond people who get paid to write down what she says?