Ubiquitous Unanimity

Now that the New York Daily News has released a transcript of the interview between its own editorial board and Hillary Clinton, we can expect to see various mouthpieces of the Clintonite media empire scurrying to reach identical conclusions about the interview in cosmetically different ways.

Time set the tone for this forthcoming consensus last night by pronouncing Clinton a “wonk’s wonk.” 

We can therefore count on seeing that point of view echoed today and throughout the week in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post.

Those publications all fell happily in line when Clinton’s surrogates tried to convince us to regard her admission that she is not a “natural politician” as evidence of charming and vulnerable candor.

This is how the illusion of widespread consensus about Clinton is created and maintained.

In reality, people think of Clinton as a lying liar who lies. But media shills from The Los Angeles Times to The Guardian like to assure us, over and over again, that she is “fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”

It doesn’t matter how many real human beings respond to such puff pieces with scorn and derision. The people in the Beltway bubble don’t think the comments on such shill pieces indicate anything about public attitudes concerning Clinton. They seem genuinely to believe that as long as the Clinton campaign can get the right headlines into the newspapers and footage of the right distractions into nightly news broadcasts, it can displace the reality we experience firsthand with whatever narrative it chooses to promote.

The problem is that we aren’t interested in any of these clumsily coordinated pushes to achieve ubiquitous unanimity concerning Clinton in the media.

So what if Clinton is a wonk's wonk? No one doubts her ability to grasp fine nuances of policy decisions. More importantly, however, no one doubts that her purpose in paying such tremendous attention to policy detail is to find a talking point that she can use to distract the American people as they are fleeced by the donor class.

So when we hear, as we doubtless will, from major news outlets all over the country, that Clinton is boring to readers because she has too comprehensive an understanding of government policy, that assertion will only be half true.

Clinton's candidacy is boring. But it’s not because of her wonkishness. It’s because her media lackeys keep playing these games of distraction and narrative manipulation instead of confronting her glaring and deeply troubling inadequacies as a candidate. If someone forced you to play the same tedious game of charades since 1992, wouldn't you be a little bit bored by now?