http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/miranda-devine-hillary-clintons-depl...IF you hadn’t realised that there was something not quite right about Hillary Clinton, then her Four Corners interview on Monday night would have set you straight.
She’s loopy. The former First Lady may as well have been wearing a tinfoil hat for all the conspiracy theories and excuses she trotted out for why she was denied her entitlement, the American presidency. The interview was a fascinating master class in delusion.
She’s not the first politician to lose an election. Nor is she the first to be consumed in defeat by a lust for vengeance and vindication.
But it’s been almost year since Donald Trump beat her fair and square, and, if anything, her analysis of “what happened” has become ever more unhinged from the facts.
Under Sarah Ferguson’s disarmingly chummy questioning, Hillary was looser than we have seen in other interviews. Yet, in the entire 45 minutes, there was not a moment of insight or self-awareness. She talked freely about her hurt feelings, but never acknowledged that she just might have been a terrible candidate. After all, how else could she have been beaten by the oh-so deplorable Donald Trump?
In order to explain the loss without shouldering any blame, she has had to invent the most elaborate excuses. She blames Putin, the Russians, Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, Nigel Farage, Fox News, Facebook, you name it.
She was “stalked” by Trump. She was “shivved” by former FBI director James Comey.
She also was betrayed by women, who should have voted for her in feminine solidarity, because, hey, it was her turn.
And she reserved special venom for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who she claimed is an agent of the Russians, “who does the bidding of a dictator”.
“’They wanted to hurt me and help Trump,” she told Four Corners.
Cue Twilight Zone music.
The interview was conducted in New York on October 4, conveniently one day before the New York Times published its bombshell story about the sexual atrocities of Harvey Weinstein, Hillary’s great friend and financial backer.
So she was spared uncomfortable questions about her benign toleration of sexual predators, not just Weinstein, but her husband Bill (a “hard dog to keep on the porch”), and Anthony Weiner, the jailed sext-pervert husband of her long time aide, sad-faced Huma Abadein.
Since Huma was standing behind her boss during the Four Corners interview, such a line of questioning would have been awkward, especially since Hillary and Bill had introduced Huma to the much older Weiner in the first place, with Bill even creepily officiating at the wedding.
The Four Corners interview also took place before Hillary had another of her mysterious falls. She is currently doing interviews in a moon boot after reportedly breaking a toe when she slipped while “running down the stairs carrying a cup of coffee”, a most unlikely vision.
And in another example of what a tangled web she weaves with her creative renditions of the truth, Hillary concocted for Four Corners a far-fetched excuse for why she didn’t stand up for herself like a strong feminist when Trump “stalked” and “loomed” over her during one of the election debates last year. After describing this outrage in her book, she has been embarrassed by criticism that she should have called Trump out.
So she claimed that, far from being caught off guard by Trump, “We practised him stalking me, which we thought he would do, and indeed he did,” she said.
Why would she say this? Because she couldn’t bear any criticism of her supposed passivity.
But as is obvious from the video, Trump never stalked her or loomed over her. She walked in front of him throughout the debate, provocatively showing disrespect for his territory.
She was the aggressor. She invaded his space, and, somehow, because he didn’t react, or scurry away, she’s the victim.
This is the essence of her destructive brand of feminism. When she fails, she casts herself as a victim of male badness, and then tries to implicate every other woman in her pathology.
Assange, who is still holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, didn't even wait till Four Corners had finished before tweeting her a taste of her own medicine.
“There’s something wrong with Hillary Clinton.
“It is not just her constant lying. It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement. Watch closely. Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen.”
He has a point.
Did she honestly expect a garlanded palanquin to whisk her effortlessly into the most powerful office in the planet? Did she think insulting half the electorate by branding them “deplorable” was a vote winner? Does she regard it as good politics to dismiss everyone who doesn’t agree with you as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it”.
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Does she believe identity politics is a recipe for harmony? Does she still think it was clever to plot to winnow down the Republican candidates until Trump was the last man standing?
The problem is not that her campaign was thwarted by dirty tricks. It was that her campaign was ill-judged from the start.
Winning office, and keeping it, is a prerequisite for politics or any worthwhile field of human endeavour. Competition, by its very natu