There has been such a deluge of politically and morally embarrassing material about Hillary Clinton on WikiLeaks in the last week that it might well be named WikiFlood. So how does the Democrat nominee keep that smug smile pasted to her face and continue to expatiate on the broad sunlit plains that she envisions for Clintonite America?
Quite simply she has the mainstream media in her pocket and she believes that ensures her political survival.
If the Clinton campaign headquarters is increasingly looking like a haunted house of political horrors where Hillary has become the embodiment of duplicity, deception and outright fraud, there is perhaps no more intrinsically evil trick of the Hillary machine than media manipulation. Yes, she preens before Wall Street tycoons while proclaiming empathy with the Bernie Sanders basement-dwelling brigade; she routinely compromises and violates national security while talking like a hawk; and she has the misplaced audacity to model a temperament that – given the many stories of her First Lady screaming tirades – would be better suited for a Jerry Springer segment than the presidency.
But you won’t easily hear of these disconnects because Hillary’s team has co-opted journalists, drawn reporters into her concentric orbit of control and generally harassed and bullied or cajoled and charmed the press corps to do her bidding and report the stories her way. The WikiLeak reports describe the storm trooper activities of the Correct the Record (CTR) superpac that regulates the media like presidential debate moderators work over Republican candidates. It might jokingly be described as a “press gang” in a fit of black humor, but it is more like a reconstituted troupe of Nixonian plumbers, willing to take a bullet for their leader and do what has to be done to win this election by successively strong-arming and wooing the media.
And you have to admit that it seems to be working. With the exception of Fox News and conservative-minded webzines like the one you are reading, the WikiLeak revelations have been as scarce as full-page advertisements in the New York Times. Sure the Donald Trump tape – released conveniently as the first installment of the Clinton papers emerged – created the necessary diversion for the left-wing media to ignore the WikiLeaks installments but even as the e-mails continue to unfold there is an abnormal silence cloaking the major media outlets.
So maybe it should come as no surprise that Trump is running into a news wall. It is perhaps beyond dispute that no presidential candidate has had to endure such uniformly negative news reporting and he’s getting it from news agencies around the world. Anti-Trump stories populate the front pages of European newspapers and Canadian news routinely dismisses Trump with this one from state broadcaster CBC: “Trump is free of civility ‘shackles’ and Clinton talks climate change.”
But you know, Hillary is missing something and that’s the social media. And this election is a tale of two media. John F. Kennedy might have been the first president elected by television and Trump could be the first to win via social media.
Quite simply, it’s the one form of mass communication that Hillary’s acolytes cannot twist with their grasping fingers because it source and power is so dispersed. It’s called the people.
Clinton wins every encounter with Trump on the front pages and lead stories of most of the traditional media. Conversely, she loses just about every battle on social media, where citizen journalists take on the fight against the deep-seated entitlement of politicians like Hillary.
Hillary, who grossly outspends Trump on television attack ads, casts arrogant aspersions at Trump’s overweening affection for Twitter. Meanwhile, she still maintains the outrageously passé and resoundingly flat stage management of having young women stand behind her when she speaks, carrying signs that read “Standing – With – Us.”
Clinton, despite assiduously planning to deep-six Donald Trump, has a recurrent habit of miscalculating, perhaps because she is so pathetically out of touch with the American people whom she pretends to cherish but most certainly despises, according to a WikiLeak remark from campaign manager John Podesta that is growing in notoriety. So overwhelming is her arrogance and hubris that she really doesn’t think her catastrophic failings as a political leader and a human being should be fodder for discussion.
The WikiLeak refrain began like a distant jingle of mild distraction but is becoming a throbbing chorus of reproof. With the third installment upon us, there is still time before election day to comprehend Clinton as she really is and not as her unblinking allies in the national media have depicted her.
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