With friends like Hillary Clinton, who needs enemies?
The former secretary of state and first lady can’t go a full interview without making some snide comment about a Democratic rival.
It’s a PR strategy worthy of an evil genius, really: resurface some bad blood from when you were most relevant, just when you’ve got a new book to sell or TV series to plug.
Clinton spoke with the Hollywood Reporter ahead of the premiere of a four-part documentary series on Hulu, Hillary. And the defeated 2016 candidate was gracious about her primary opponent Bernie Sanders…except of course she wasn’t.
In the documentary, she says of the Vermont senator: ‘Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.’
This is, Cockburn imagines, viewing Sanders’s likability in comparison to Hillary’s, who was famously beloved by recently departed island-dweller Jeffrey Epstein and the hawkish foreign policy establishment that dragged the US into forever-war in the Middle East.
And well, as for those who want to work with Hillary, what about famed pot-plant masturbator Harvey Weinstein? The disgraced movie producer was, according to Ronan Farrow, offering Clinton tips on how to best Bernie back in 2016, which were gladly accepted by her campaign. Cockburn is impressed that Weinstein’s repertoire includes political consultancy alongside film production, groping and beating up reporters.
Bernie, you may recall, campaigned for Clinton after she’d secured the Democratic nomination. Hillary will be returning the favor in 2020, right?
Says Clinton:
‘I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, he seems to really be very much supporting it.’
Cockburn is hardly the best judge of character — you should meet his first wife —and therefore struggles to work out what’s worse: being mean on Twitter to people who lack the ideological purity of your favored candidate…or expressing ‘concern‘ over a reporter’s investigation into the most high-profile alleged sexual predator of the last decade?
The uproar prompts flashbacks to late last year, when Hillary accused another 2020 candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who endorsed Sanders at the DNC in 2016, of being the preferred candidate of Russian agents. Those comments came in an interview while Hillary was plugging her new children’s book The Book of Gutsy Women, co-written with her daughter Chelsea.
Nanette Burstein, the director of the Hulu documentary didn’t speak to Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump for her film, as she ‘didn’t want to relitigate the 2016 election.’ Clearly this is not a sentiment Hillary shares, as she perpetually embroils herself in the battles of yesteryear for a sharp, sales-boosting burst of media attention.
