I’m not Patsey the slave. Y’all keep whipping me and whipping me and you never give me any money or any way to do my damn job. I am not going to be your whipping girl!
This is the dramatic way Donna Brazile claims she chastised Hillary’s campaign “hacks” for trying to feature her in their version of 12 [Months] a Slave.
She details the frustrations and indignities of her sojourn in Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House. It will be published on Tuesday. But this quote, from a review in Saturday’s edition of the Washington Post, provides a telling insight:
Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was ‘anemic’ and had taken on ‘the odor of failure.’
In an explosive new memo Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the removal of Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City. …
Perhaps not since George Stephanopoulos wrote All Too Human, a 1999 memoir of his years working for former president Bill Clinton, has a political strategist penned such a blistering tell-all.
No doubt everything Brazile details about the Democratic Party (DNC) is true. It bears noting, however, that this is the same DNC Barack Obama commandeered to win two presidential elections.
This is why I am convinced that Brazile is just using the DNC as a foil for her disaffection and disillusionment with Hillary Clinton. Interestingly enough, the Post alludes to this with its analogy to Stephanopoulos’s dissatisfaction and disillusionment with Bill Clinton. Indeed, just as Brazile harbored mutinous thoughts about replacing Hillary with Biden, I suspect Stephanopoulos harbored the same about replacing Bill with Gore. But I digress …
The point is that one can draw a straight line between the dysfunction and dissension that attended Bill’s beleaguered presidency of the 1990s and that which attended Hillary’s beleaguered campaign of 2016. And the precipitating cause all along was the imperious presumptions of the Clintons and their enabling courtiers, not the infuriating bureaucracy of DNC.
Brazile betrays this fact by spending most of her memoir recounting – with as much righteous contempt as prosecutorial zeal – “Hillary Clinton’s secret takeover of the DNC.” Frankly, any reasonable reader would conclude that she was indicting Hillary for rigging the Democratic nomination process. This ranged from Hillary prevailing upon the DNC to schedule debates to maximize her advantage to treating staffers as little more than her personal aides. The latter led to the notorious scandal of Brazile herself feeding Hillary a question ahead of a CNN town hall debate.
Yet Brazile insisted on today’s edition of ABC’s This Week – hosted by none other than George Stephanopoulos – that she found no evidence of rigging. This reminds me of that infamous news conference, which then FBI director James Comey held on July 5, 2016:
He delineated all of the reasons Hillary should be indicted for using a personal e-mail server. Yet Comey insisted at the end that “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict her.
Not to mention that Bernie Sanders spent most of the Primary Season accusing Hillary of rigging the nomination process, but to no avail. And, whether she intended it or not, Brazile’s memoir has Senator Elizabeth Warren, herself a wannabe president, leading a chorus of progressive Democrats now accusing Hillary of the same.
In any event, I have written many commentaries damning Hillary (and Bill). They include “With Hillary, the Truth Depends on Catching Her in a Lie,” March 26, 2008, “Bill Clinton Loses Title as America’s First Black President,” May 13, 2008, “‘Hillary Is a Lesbian’?” February 19, 2016, “WTF: Bill Meets Privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch,” July 1, 2016.
But in “ABC’s Stephanopoulos Still Serving as Clintons’ Political Hack…?” May 17, 2015, I presaged Brazile’s lament and the Post’s allusion to Stephanopoulos.
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During the mid-1990s, I was one of many worker bees at the D.C. headquarters of the Clinton-Gore Re-Election ’96 campaign.
We all buzzed around trying to seem relevant to the political ambitions of the most powerful man in the world. Yet even I saw enough of the compromises and sacrifices (of self and others) Bill and Hillary Clinton demanded of staffers to become irretrievably disaffected and disillusioned. …
No writer evoked [this] disaffection and disillusionment … quite like George Stephanopoulos did (in confessional and redemptive tone) in his memoir All Too Human: A Political Education (1999). …
But, trust me folks, for every George … who can tell horror stories about Bill, there is a … Mary who can tell similar stories about Hillary. …
But nobody knows better than George their congenital sense of entitlement. This is why they see nothing wrong with spending more of the billions they solicit for their Clinton Global Initiative on personal expenses than charitable causes. It is also why they are now preparing for a coronation instead of an election in 2016. …
I shall vote for anyone but Hillary in the Democratic primary. If she’s the nominee (and that’s no guarantee), I’ll hold my nose and vote for her. … Only a black fool, with too little regard for or knowledge of Black-American history, would buy into the canard about not voting being a form of enlightened political protest.
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It was an open secret that Bill and Hillary felt entitled to realize their 2-for-1 presidential ambitions.
But, insofar as those ambitions are concerned, her loss to Donald Trump was the final nail in the coffin. Brazile’s memoir is just pouring dirt over it.
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