I like to think that I’m a careful reader, but I missed the
forest for the trees on Shattered – Inside Hillary
Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, the
new, highly publicized book by Jonathan
Allan and Amie Parnes.
I read every word, including the Introduction and Author Notes, but missed the book’s obvious salient feature, its veritable raison d’être, which
my wife Caroline (an acute and very careful reader) pointed out to me: Shattered
is clearly
and simply a Barack Obama-directed hit job on Hillary Clinton.
Everything in the book preceding its coda
chapter entitled “I’m Sorry” is intended to depict the Obama presidency as a Golden Age scheduled to be followed by a perpetual rippling Obama/American legacy, which Hillary Clinton destroyed through her gross political incompetence, charmlessless, and
utter lack of charisma. Following a lugubrious authorial litany -- "She had let him down. She had let herself down. She had let her party down. And she had let her country down" -- the chapter actually concludes with the pathetic spoken apology: "Mr. President, she said softly. I'm sorry." It is clear from the text that this humiliating,
self-abasing statement by Mrs. Clinton could only have been
reported to the authors by Barack Obama himself or someone acting at
his express direction. Nasty!
The substantial remaining balance of Shattered's juicy, quite
mean anecdotes about the Clinton campaign's mismanagement and fecklessness are obviously and clearly unsourced revelations/disclosures by various
Obama administration Praetorian Guards planted inside Mrs. Clinton's continually malfunctioning-on-steroids
I'm With Her campaign machinery, i.e., a coterie of troll-hominids uniformly described by the authors in People magazine/Daily Mail-type prose of the kind more usually applied to better-looking (and possibly worthier) types, as opposed to the parasites, leeches, and toadies comprising Shattered's main dramatis personae. (Who was it
who said that politics is show-business for ugly people?)
That being said, Shattered
is a useful photorealist portrait of Barack Obama’s chthonic mean-spirited nature and the venom and bile of his lackeys and
henchmen. If only Obama (as the Wall Street Journal styles him and all presidents, i.e., sans honorific; heaven forfend that any disrespect to the soi-disant great man should be interpreted by the reader) had devoted some of
his energy into actually improving the American economy and making the United
States more secure in the world and less time
staring into the mirror and droning on perpetually reciting endless first-person self-encomiums. But he
wasn’t that kind of president and he isn’t that kind of man.
Shattered is
poorly edited, contains a great deal of unnecessarily crude and vulgar prose, and
bears unmistakable signs of being rushed into print to capture maximum early news cycle dollars. But it also imparts information that is
worth knowing. I believe the book is more likely to make you hate politicians and
political types than anything else you are ever likely to read. Its most
improbable result was to make me feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Seeing her
stabbed in the back like this in front of the whole world elicited
sympathy, even from a non-admirer.
Personally, I believe we all owe Mrs. Clinton an enormous debt of gratitude for burying Barack Obama’s legacy full fathom five. Move On, indeed. Move on.
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