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?
