“Hillary Clinton today accepting full responsibility for the election loss, except for the part when she blamed Comey, Putin, Wikileaks, misogyny, and the media.”
—-CNN’s Jake Tapper in his show intro yesterday, referring to Hillary Clinton’s comments at the Women For Women lunch in New York while being interviewed by Christiane Amanpour.
Bravo, Jake.
What prompted Tapper’s stinging irony was Clinton ‘s first one-on-one interview with a journalist, CNN anchor ( and fan) Christiane Amanpour, since she lost the 2016 election. The setting was a Women for Women International event in New York. Clinton discussed the 2016 election, and framed her answers regarding the stunning loss with this…
“Of course. I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot, and I am very aware of the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had.”
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it does.
For Hillary, throughout the interview, made it abundantly clear that she blames others for her loss and is bitter about it, saying such things as..
“I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off. And the evidence for that intervening event is I think compelling, persuasive and so we overcame a lot in the campaign”
and…
“[Putin] certainly interfered in our election and it was clear he interfered to hurt me and helped my opponent.f you chart my opponent and his campaign’s statements, they quite coordinated with the goals that leader who shall remain nameless had.”
Clinton also blamed the mainstream media—you know, the one that overwhelmingly did everything in its power to make her President— claiming that none of the debate moderators asked her and Trump to elaborate how they intended to create jobs. And, naturally, being before an audience of women, she received only knowing nods as she claimed that anti-female bias played a part in her loss.
The problem is that “taking responsibility” means accepting blame, fault, guilt, culpability, and liability for what has happened. If you claim, as Clinton did in the interview, that absent these various malign factors she would have won, then it is meaningless for her to say she takes responsibility for the loss. Hillary did the same thing in the Benghazi hearings. She simultaneously said that she accepted responsibility for the incident, but that she wasn’t in charge of security for the compound, so she couldn’t be blamed.
Since this is Hillary—a Clinton, after all—she was spinning as well as lying. Her assertion that she was never asked about her job plans was quickly rebutted by CNN, which produced the transcript of the very first debate, in which moderator Lester Holt asked both candidates about jobs in his first question. She also pointedly ignored her party’s own assessment of the reason for her loss, according to the study it commissioned by the Global Strategy Group. That report concluded that about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost too many voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump, and it wasn’t because of Comey, Russia or missing debate questions.
[Regarding the latter: it has to be said that this excuse is too much, even for Hillary. During the debates she had no trouble or compunction about saying whatever she wanted to say whether it was responsive to the question or not. “I wasn’t asked” is a a laughable excuse, and would be even if she wasn’t asked about jobs—but she was.]
Two last points:
1. Amanpour didn’t have the guts, integrity or professionalism to call out Hillary for her contradictory assessments of the election and false statements. A partisan female journalist handling a softball interview in front of a partisan female crowd is not journalism. It’s promotion. Just think: Hillary’s campaign asked for Donald Trump to be fact-checked during the debates!
2. Hillary announced that she was part of the “resistance.” The candidate who furiously attacked her opponent for saying that he might not accept the results of the election now openly allies herself with those hard-left proto-totalitarians who refuse to accept the legitimacy of President Trump and the results of the American democratic system. That, in the final analysis, signals the real reason Hillary Clinton is responsible for her loss. She has no integrity, seeks power for its own sake, and she couldn’t fool all of the people all of time.
Ethics Alarms 
Whatcha wanna bet that Christiane Amanpour and Hillary Clinton sat down person-to-person at least once to rehearse this interview and also whatcha wanna bet that the general questions were predetermined and agreed up on before that rehearsal.
It looked more like a rehearsed performance for a group of like minded people than an interview.
Christiane Amanpour’s handling of the situation should come as no surprise, given the thorough debunking she got here in 2015, which spawned a banning and a contest that won someone a DVD.
Tex. And thanks, I haven’t send it to him yet…
From her wiki page: “Amanpour is married to American James Rubin, a former US Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton administration and an informal adviser to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to President Obama.” And: “Amanpour shared a house on the East Side of Providence with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and some of his friends while he was attending Brown University and she was attending the University of Rhode Island.”
She essentially a Democratic operative.
She is
Do not assume that individuals have the same political ideologies just because they are married and even if they did it doesn’t make them a operative of the Democratic Party.
When someone is a spokes person for the Secretary of State that certainly makes that someone an operative of the Secretary of State but it does not make them an operative of the Democratic Party.
When someone is an informal adviser to then Secretary of State Clinton and then President Obama that makes that someone an operative of the Secretary of State and the President but it does not make them an operative of the Democratic Party. Remember the purpose of an advisers is to think independently of the ones they are advising; hive minded clones and sycophants are not advisers, they’re kowtowing sheep.
Don’t assume that just because someone shares a house with someone that they share the same political ideologies and even if they did it doesn’t make them a operative of the Democratic Party.
Would I call Christiane Amanpour an operative of the Democratic Party “maybe” but it’s much more likely that I’d call her a hive minded political tool of the Democratic Party – a sheep.
Z: Operative. Sheep. Same difference.
I disagree about professional pol couples. I think Carville and Matalin are the exception that proves the rule. I also think when it comes to the Clintons, it’s like being in the mob. You’re either with the Clintons and all in, or you’re against them. And that includes spouses, particularly if both spouses are in the political or media (but I repeat myself) complex. Power couples are different from normal couples. They have a singularity of purpose normal couples don’t. See, eg., the MacBeths. Or the Clintons.
I think Ben Rhodes and his brother at CBS are the most pernicious example of this unholy kind of family stuff.
Cheers.
And HRC only does interviews with loyalists and former employees. And I’d hazard to guess that if you were HRC’s spokesperson when she was Secretary of State and you thought of yourself as a State Department spokesperson and not HRC’s spokesperson, you’d be out the door in a suburban New York minute.
What about Justice Thomas and Ginny?
Am not up on them. I do see that Daily Joe and Mika are now engaged.
And once you’re a Supreme, if you’re married, are you really a power couple? There’s no more power to be gotten. Who’s more unimpeachably powerful than a Supreme? There’s nowhere higher to go. Your only threat is the Grim Reaper.
Jack,
You called it:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html
If you’re interested, the original article can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B93OSp-qpqngSFNPa29TeWc5UW8/view
I think at this point HRC can do any softball interviews she wants. Good for Tapper for calling out her BS, but I see no problem with the interview itself.
Slight non sequitur… Did anyone else groan a little bit when Barack Obama endorsed Macron in the French election? Happened just a little while ago. Apparently the Irony of a ofrmer Democratic POTUS attempting to influence the Presidential Election in another country is lost on some people.
That was my reaction too.
Good catch, and of course wildly hypocritical.