GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

“Shattered” gets it half-right

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I just finished Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. We’ve been commenting on excerpts from it for weeks. This is my take on the book as a whole.

On the plus side: The subject is delicious. (Reading the story of Election Night was pure Schadenfreude.) Allen and Parnes, the authors, write fairly well. And they don’t blame “Russia, Comey and misogyny” non-stop. They report on actual flaws of the candidate and her staff, and how those flaws kept her from closing the deal with Middle America.

On the minus side: The book is overly-detailed. The authors do blame “Russia, Comey and misogyny” some of the time. In the end, they are liberals writing for liberals. They don’t admit the depth of Hillary’s flaws. For example, they never admit the genuineness of the scandals dogging her: the fact that she broke laws for which other Americans are serving jail time, that she obstructed justice, that FBI Director Comey really gave her kid-glove treatment, etc.

In short, Allen and Parnes miss the larger story of the Clintons’ corruption – and how, in 2016, half of America finally stood up to it and beat it back. Instead, they bury the reader in details about Hillary’s innumerable aides and the in-fighting that she encouraged.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. Some key ideas (probably known to you already): [Read more…]

What Deceit and Malice Look Like

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First, some stuff that sounds almost reasonable (if a bit histrionic). From Hillary’s Twitter stream on Oct. 24, 2016:

Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election. That’s a direct threat to our democracy.

Per the Daily Caller link above, she went on to say:

That’s not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage [ed: like herself]…

[Trump is] denigrating—he’s talking down our democracy. I for one am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our major two parties would take that kind of position.

And this is from Hillary’s concession speech on Nov 9, 2016:

Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans…

We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead…

…if we stand together and work together with respect for our differences, strength in our convictions and love for this nation, our best days are still ahead of us.

So far so good, right? But now from the new book “Shattered”:

That strategy [of blaming Russia, thus de-legitimizing the election – or trying to] had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

I added the emphasis – so that those who have eyes, may see.

Whoa…Hillary had a clue?

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More from the new book, “Shattered”.

Hillary to an aide during the general: “I know I engender bad reactions from people.” And during the primaries: “I don’t understand what’s happening in the country.”

She was right. But maybe she only had that one clue. Because there’s this: “She has blamed [FBI Director] Comey for…his decision during the campaign’s final weeks to re-open a probe into her email use as secretary of state…”

A clueful Hillary would, instead, thank Comey for misleading people on her behalf and holding back her strongly-deserved indictments.

Classic

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The Hill is dribbling out more of the book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.”

…members of the Clinton campaign reached out to [Bernie] Sanders aides in late September to share a script of an ad they wanted the Vermont senator to record.

In the ad, Sanders would tout Clinton for her education, healthcare and minimum wage proposals…

At the end of the script were the words: “I’m with her.”
“It’s so phony!” Sanders said. “I don’t want to say that.”

Sanders did not use the slogan in the ad.

…The ad was not used on television, but some of the shorter takes of Sanders were used online.

I’d love to see the full ad. I keep hearing that Hillary lost because Sanders voters stayed home (or some even went Trump).