You know there is another presidential debate around the corner because Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has all but disappeared from the news coverage. Will she face the presidential Donald Trump on Sunday or the unplugged one? Will the town hall environment stimulate Trump’s engaging and personable ways with the common folk or will he face-off with an antagonistic opponent that the Clinton forces have planted in the audience and start wandering through the weeds? So much to consider for Hillary, especially after enjoying a week of campaigning that seemed to resemble a very frightening Twilight Zone episode.
Did you catch her at the Haverford, PA town hall? Clinton was there to courageously face the cooing audience and answer any tough question that came her way. Problem is, none did.
But even though she was in no way challenged by the series of soft ball lobs, she still appeared like a batter who is just too anxious to swing her bat and she fumbled some of the easy queries with that toxic mixture of arrogance and sententiousness that so defines Hillary’s less than effervescent public profile. Yet even Hillary couldn’t miss when an eager 15-year-old – sounding more like a 25 year-old – demanded to know what the Great Woman was going to do about sexist fiends like Donald Trump and their assault on “body image” The young woman was none other than child actor Brennan Leach and her father is a Democratic state senator from Pennsylvania named Daylin Leach who “helped” draft the query.
Is it conceivable that Hillary planned this random question? Is Bill a womanizer? To suggest, as some Dem strategists have done, that we should take Hillary “at her word” is beyond polite expectations; indeed, it transcends reason. Take her at her word? What word has she not twisted and spliced beyond recognition?
Nor am I buying the suggestion that town halls are just political events and political events are just theater. Sounds like the truth might go missing somewhere in that equation.
Clearly, Clinton does not countenance surprises because she does not react well to the unexpected: in other words she is woefully inadequate at thinking on her feet. Moreover, she is a woman who cannot discern truth from lies, separate reality from fantasy or just doesn’t care where the facts begin or end anymore because the Hillary Clinton story an offbeat, left-wing version of the Horatio Alger story, where an embattled heroine takes on vast right-wing conspiracies and an entrenched sexist billionaire and wins.
But it’s one thing, to manufacture your own events; it’s quite another to lie about someone else’s. Clinton’s unbearably self-righteous condemnation of Donald Trump for allegedly belittling veterans with PTSD for not being able to take it was such a vicious masquerade, such outright and deliberate mendacity, that it belongs in Bill and Hillary’s lock box of dirty tricks and other campaign atrocities.
Any rational – or reasonably honest – observer of Trump’s interaction with the vets at this Henderson, NV rally could plainly observe and should have been able to clearly communicate that Trump was demonstrating his profound empathy for the plight of veterans; it required no spin. Even if Trump harbored a perverse and inexplicable contempt for veterans, it would have made no sense to display it in this context. You might as well have suggested that someone should go to church to proclaim his atheism and opposition to Christianity.
But Hillary has never allowed the obvious to get in the way of another disinformation whopper and she was demonstrating that it is probably the only skill – aside from trashing e-mail – which she has mastered in her political career.