Hillary Clinton’s advice didn’t age well, but her hypocrisy is aging beautifully.
The former secretary of state who lost her presidential race to Donald Trump in 2016 amid a cloud of an FBI investigation into her own disregard for classified documents is offering President Joe Biden advice on running for re-election amid the cloud of a special counsel’s investigation of his handling of classified documents.
Unfortunately, she did it before Biden’s disastrous news conference on Thursday.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Wednesday, conducted prior to Thursday’s release of a report by special counsel Robert Hur that all but declared Biden mentally unfit to stand trial, Clinton acknowledged that Biden’s age is a “legitimate issue,” but said the president should “lean into” it. “I talk to people in the White House all the time, and you know, they know it’s an issue, but as I like to say, look, it’s a legitimate issue,” Clinton said.
“It’s a legitimate issue for [former President] Trump who’s only three years younger. So, it’s an issue.”
Yeah, well, the problem with that for Democrats is that no one really questions Trump’s mental competence.
If he wasn’t sharp, he would have sunk long ago under the incessant attacks of the past eight years, and especially of the past four. No one needs to be a fan of Donald Trump, at 77, to acknowledge the obvious: That in public appearances, his mental and condition is far superior to Biden’s.
And Hillary knows that. The fact that she’s forced to acknowledge Biden’s liability, even to a friendly network like MSNBC, is an indication of how dire a problem Biden’s physical and mental limitations pose — both for the Democratic Party as a political matter, and for the country as a whole as a matter of security and prosperity.
Of course, Clinton didn’t acknowledge the real truth behind what she said. She tried to couch it in some blandishments about Biden’s record and his “campaigning pretty vigorously” across the country.
Is Biden mentally fit for office?
(After three years in office Biden’s record is atrocious — at home and abroad — and Hillary has to know it. As to him “campaigning pretty vigorously, that depends on how you define “vigorously.”)
Then, she got down to the advice:
“I think Biden also should lean into the fact that he’s experienced and that experience is not just in the political arena. It’s like, the stuff of, you know, human experience,” she said. “I think he should be willing to really pull that out … and I think he should kid more about it.”
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It actually got worse, when Clinton said Biden should highlight his “experience not just in the political arena. It’s like the stuff of, you know, human experience.”
“Character,” Wagner said.
That’s almost a laugh-line right there, given what the revelations from Hunter Biden’s laptop have shown about the “character” of the Biden clan, from “the big guy” and his 10 percent cut on down. (Hunter’s prostitutes come off with more integrity.)
The problem for Hillary is that she offered this advice on Wednesday.
It was only one day later that the special counsel report was published, painting the president as a doddering incompetent who can’t even remember when he served as vice president, or when his son, Beau, died.
Given that it was Biden’s time as President Barack Obama’s vice president that made him the Democratic leader today, and that Biden brings up his son’s death at pretty much every opportunity (even when it’s grossly inappropriate and he gets the details wrong), those are pretty damning comments.
Even worse was Biden’s news conference Thursday night, when he went on national television and showed the country he really is a cantankerous old man who has no business being in the White House.
His reference to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico was not only insulting to both men, it was also not in the least reassuring to citizens of the United States or of the world who expect the American president to be at least lucid when it comes to foreign affairs.
Meanwhile, Hillary’s hypocrisy showed it hasn’t lost a step.
The same woman urging Biden to “lean into” hasn’t leveled with the American public in more than 30 years on the national stage.
She arrived at the White House with husband Bill, full of vim and vigor and designs to transform the American health care system — behind closed doors.
After Hillarycare bit the dust — and gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time since Eisenhower was president, she made a big deal about being an international figure for women’s rights. A speech she made on the subject in 1995 in Beijing had liberals swooning so much, “Andrea Mitchell Reports” was doing a segment on it literally 20 years later.
But a lot of women who’d crossed paths with Hillary already knew how she felt about women’s rights, and the rest of the country would find out over the coming years when it learned about women who resisted her husband’s advances (like Juanita Broaddrick). or women who succumbed to them (like Monica Lewinksy.)
Hillary was never honest about any of it — blaming it all on a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” aimed at her and her husband.
Her record as secretary of state in the first Obama administration was no better when it came to honesty with the American people. No one who followed the news then could forget her utterly callous references to what actually brought about the deaths of an American ambassador, a State Department worker and two security contractors in Benghazi, Libya.
“What difference at this point does it make?” she asked memorably, as National Review recounted at the time. She might have realized how that sounded because she added, “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”
But the truth was out there.
Those are just a few examples of Hillary’s behavior over the years, and there could be countless more, but the point is, her advice to Biden about age — to lean into your liabilities — is something she has never done.
Hillary counseling Biden to make his age a strength would be like her making a campaign ad out of Rose Law Firm records, or running on her chronic abuse of her husband’s accusers. It would be like her campaigning on the rampant dishonesty she displayed while running the State Department and afterward.
Hillary Clinton is a heroine to the leftist media like MSNBC, and always will be to a certain brand of Democrat, but the 2016 race between her and Donald Trump showed her for what she really is: An elitist from the left brimming with contempt for the “deplorables” that make up half of her own country.
Her advice to Biden didn’t age well at all. But her hypocrisy is timeless.
