Two failed bids for the presidency notwithstanding, it looks very much like Hillary Clinton is intent on making a bid to be the Democrat candidate for president in 2020.<\/p>\n
That is possibly the only reason why she continues to scour the world for opportunities to gain publicity, instead of accepting that she was beaten fair and square in the 2016 elections and retiring from public life.<\/p>\n
Clinton was on the Australian ABC TV channel on Monday night, getting a soft interview with the normally ferocious Sarah Ferguson which ran for all of 50 minutes. The programme in question, Four Corners, is said to be devoted to investigative journalism. Well, on 16 October it was anything but.<\/p>\n There was no billing and cooing between Clinton and Ferguson but when one has said that, one has said it all.<\/p>\n Clinton wrote a book, titled What Happened<\/em>, that came out in September, but she has been doing the interview circuit for some time now, with the first long face-to-face encounter being in June.<\/p>\n Every time, she trots out the same excuses for her loss: former FBI director James Comey, Russia, WikiLeaks, misogyny and sexism. Madame Clinton was never to blame.<\/p>\n Despite numerous bids to drive home the narrative that Russia was the villain behind Donald Trump’s ascendancy, nobody as yet has found conclusive proof that the men from Moscow had anything to do with the result of the election. As the US often does in elections around the globe, the Russians attempted to have a bit of a go. But they had no impact.<\/p>\n Clinton’s favourite word for a while has been “misogyny”. The word means a hatred of women. How she can argue that men who are married and have daughters of their own possess this trait is puzzling; if they did hate women, why would these men continue to live with them?<\/p>\n The one thing that Clinton refuses to even countenance is that she was not a fit candidate and ran a poor campaign. She was beaten to the candidature by a black man in 2008; that says a lot about her ability to carry even her own side of politics. The second time, in 2016, she was beaten by a man who was openly racist and sexist in his utterances. Despite this, she could not even win a majority of the vote among white women.<\/p>\n Comey was investigating Clinton’s use of a private email server to manage her email during her stint as secretary of state; he said there was no case in July and then, shortly before election day, said he was reopening the case. Just before the election, she was exonerated. Clinton claims this was another reason she lost.<\/p>\n And then WikiLeaks: Clinton claims\u00a0 the whistleblower website “stole” emails from the Democrat National Committee and released them just as a tape showing Trump in a terrible light had emerged. The truth is that WikiLeaks releases whatever it can, as soon as it can; that has been its method of operation since it was set up. And it does not steal; others leak material to it. Indeed, it had flagged for days that it was about to make a big disclosure before releasing the DNC email stash.<\/p>\n If WikiLeaks can be called a thief, then journalists qualify as thieves too. They regularly receive material which has been obtained by any Tom, Dick or Harry and report on it if it is in the public interest. Why, even I used an email from WikiLeaks to write a story<\/strong><\/a> about how Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt drafted a detailed plan for Clinton’s re-election. So am I a thief? Hardly. This is just more bluster from Clinton.<\/p>\n Ferguson, who has a justified reputation for being a good journalist, was a sad shadow of herself when interviewing Clinton. She had not done her homework;\u00a0 the award-winning journalist Robert Parry has written article<\/strong><\/a> after article<\/strong><\/a> putting paid to the claims that Russia had anything to do with Clinton’s loss. But Ferguson seemed unaware that there was any creed in life apart from that which Clinton was pushing.<\/p>\n Clinton claimed that the DNC emails were exfiltrated by an outsider, despite plenty of evidence<\/strong><\/a> that they were copied by an insider and never transmitted over the Internet. Once again, Ferguson let this go through to the keeper.<\/p>\n Four Corners, which normally puts a decent investigative report to air, only served to boost the ego of a woman who is yesterday’s news, by someone who clearly thought that getting her mug into the picture would boost her image. In that, Ferguson made a bad call.<\/p>\n Did Clinton pay for the interview? Or was it my taxes and yours that were wasted in this useless exercise?
(Here is a forensic account<\/strong><\/a> of the lies that Clinton told about WikiLeaks during the programme.)<\/p>\n