The AP Leak and Hillary’s Victory Night

On June 6th, 2016,  a modern political heist was viewed by thousands of Americans on the Internet in real time.

The moment I saw the AP’s “breaking story”, via a Zero Hedge post, I had a sinking feeling in my heart, the kind I get watching burning skyscrapers crumble into their footprints. A crime of the political season was taking place. In a few minutes, the MSN spin machine would wash the dirt away and declare the crime “official.” I wrote the following notes the night of June 7th, unable to find the Californian primary results that were supposed to matter. California is, of course the primary where, years ago, Bobby Kennedy pulled off a surprising win and was then shot to death. California has had special primary baggage ever since (indeed, Clinton made a strange reference to Kennedy in a previous campaign), and was perhaps the perfect place for the DNC and willing assistants at AP and other media allies to pull a full blown heist in under twenty minutes.

Whoever did this timed the act to make California’s vote moot before the day of the primary. According to the newswires, this was an astonishing success.

The first post that appeared from AP was around 8pm on June 6th, the night before  the primaries. AP’s article was then shared on Zero Hedge. The full  AP “story” has apparently disappeared down a Memory Hole, but you can read it here.

This article was brazen propaganda, and something new:  A declaration of fait accompli victory the night before a single June 7th primary vote was cast.

The AP story is peculiar.  The theme is past tense and capital-H Historic — the final confirmation of the first woman presidential nominee ever. It reads like it was written by the Clinton campaign itself, or a DNC lackey; it certainly does not read like the product of a neutral news organization:

“Campaigning as the loyal successor to the nation’s first black president, Clinton held off a surprisingly strong challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. He mobilized millions with a fervently liberal message and his insurgent candidacy revealed a deep level of national frustration with politics-as-usual, even among Democrats who have controlled the White House since 2009.” Keep in mind this is a day before the CA primary.

According to AP, this pre-primary “victory story” was based entirely on anonymous interviews with some or many “Super Delegates”, all of whom apparently whispered their secrets to loyal AP operatives.

I knew that within the seconds the AP meme would spread to CNN, Fox News, ABC/NBC/CBS, the New York Times, and Washington Post, as indeed it did. Within an hour it was everywhere.

This was a new variety of sleazy campaign tricks for a political candidate, and a propaganda coup for the AP.  Why not just leak a proclamation of something, let the wires pick it up, and then, voilá, declare victory the night before?

Late night on the 6th, The New York Times, Politico, Huffington Post and various other Clinton supporters, many with established financial and PR interests in the investment (I mean candidate) were smugly proclaiming victory. Very interestingly, the talking points raised in the AP “story”, and similar prose in the New York Times and Politico, re-appeared, in very similar language, in Hillary’s “Acceptance Speech” the next night.  The agitprop wasn’t subtle: This is the First Woman President; this is Historic; Sanders had done a good job “mobilizing millions”; that, hey, it was tough for those tough but loveable Bernie-Bots to lose; but the Democrats must forget the differences between Sanders and Clinton and “Come Together, Right Now”. (Incredibly, a HuffPo editorial brought a deceased John Lennon into this fiasco.)

The next afternoon, Hillary’s campaign declared “History Made” on her Twitter feed, and prepared to present the speech. She’d won New Jersey, you see. Not a single vote from California had been counted.

Hilary Clinton’s “Victory Speech” the evening of June 7th was quite a performance: planned, big-time, with the usual ugly color scheme typical of whitehouse.gov presentations.

There was a pre-game, so to speak, for a few minutes.

There was no way to tell how many people were in the mid-sized auditorium, but at least half seemed to be stacked up behind the podium. A young woman sang The Star Spangled Banner, as though this were Inauguration Day, seven months in advance. The people behind the podium began to wave little American flags – doubtlessly dispensed by a patriotic gnome backstage. The lights dimmed – this was show business after all. Over loudspeakers come the voices of unknown supporters, interspersed with “classic” quotations from that great successor of all humanitarians, Hillary Clinton.

The lights came up and The Great Leader beamed in what appeared to be a joyous emotional orgasm, but Hillary’s eyes were peculiar. Behind the smiles I heard the voice of a woman who, upon learning that Gaddafi had been ritually murdered, happily exclaimed “We came, we saw, he died”.

Her demeanor displayed a forgone conclusion:  Hillary Clinton is already the President!

Then there was a bit of a letdown – Hillary started to speak and the microphone was off.  A sound person attempted to find a fader on a mixing board. Then there was a scream of feedback, but Hillary didn’t even wince. She knew. This was her moment. The sound stayed bad for the entire thing; the engineer couldn’t balance the levels. With all of their Clinton Cash, between the chintzy flags and bad sound (not to mention previous choice of IT professionals for private servers) this was a typically cheap public Clinton production: Hot dogs, not caviar, for the troops.

I can’t report on the Speech, because I record sounds myself, and there are some voices that really grate on you. When Hillary gets that self-righteous bullhorn going, we must follow Dante and abandon the wife of the boy from Hope. However, one can observe the aesthetics of the thing. The narcissism of our current Great Leader is well documented, but Hillary is something else. She took credit for many vague successes and appropriated the triumphant struggles of everything from feminism to the civil rights movement. And she promised her followers, without a hint of $300,000 G-Sachs irony, hey, we’re really gonna go after those big banks. Best of all, Hillary talked “street”: “I’ve got your back,” she thundered. With enough drinks in them, the audience, along with Beltway cronies getting tanked right now, might actually believe this.

Reflecting on the above, I wonder if Trump even has a chance. He’s got a million topics to grill Hillary over (Iraq, an FBI indictment, Benghazi, Libya, Syria, targeting victims of her husband’s sexual harassment, etc.). Every American should read Roger Morris’ “Partners in Power” (1996) and learn about dozens more. “Crooked Hillary” is no mere libel — there are public records of too many things.

But in spite of Trump’s talent for hard debate and asking politically incorrect questions, I wonder if Trump is a mere amateur compared to this Clinton Cosa Nostra. The Clintons not only have their cash, via the Clinton Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Soros, and other banks and philanthropists, but they also have the willing support and love of all the media who participated in the heist last night – from the BBC/ABC/NBC/CBS, to Politico and the Huffington Post, etc. The Clintons have powerful friends who will control the echo chamber.

For millions of Americans of all shades of political grey, and for the democratic process in this country, the Clintons and AP showed complete contempt.

It’s interesting to speculate on some Clinton protegés who might end up with high ranks in a Hillary Clinton administration.

This week, Victoria Nuland was speaking to some Senators about some kind of alternate world in which the evil Russians are winning the propaganda wars over issues like “U.S. Assets in Ukraine.”

To the average American, such topics make little sense. The average American is concerned with obtaining or keeping a decent job, or receiving another paycheck of any kind. Many worry about the next couch to crash on. Russia is far away and generally not considered important business, certainly not to anyone with a life who’s trying to survive.

Victoria Nuland, political mastermind that she is, was actually telling the Senators what a shame it is that Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, et al, cannot compete with Russia Today (RT).  Nuland was among the masterminds who helped engineer the tragic civil wars/coups in Libya and the Ukraine.

[Off topic: If I could address the Congress on behalf of millions of American viewers: perhaps it’s not that RT is the perfect propaganda machine; perhaps instead RT is a) aesthetically more interesting than CNN, b) insults the viewer’s intelligence way, way less than CNN.]

State department types, along with the CIA and other Responsibility to Protect-ors,  are encouraging NATO allies to conduct “war games” and stir up anti-Russian sentiment in the likes of Latvia, while installing missiles right up to the Russian border. Provoking the Russian Bear seems insane and pathetic to most people, and I wonder if anyone outside a drunk tank inside the Beltway takes it seriously.

(Paul Craig Roberts has described this crazy rhetoric here).

Neo-liberal neo-cons like Victoria Nuland are the folks who may well get the keys to the castle in a Hillary presidency. Not only do neo-cons behave irresponsibly;  they are often arrogant and ignorant, a particularly bad combo in foreign affairs with a nuclear state like Russia which is armed to the teeth. Consequences, to the neo-cons,  are for the little people. As Nuland said, “f*ck the EU!”

There were still no California results on midnight of the 7th. The DNC, one assumes, had all night to process and perhaps fix any, ahem, “unfortunate” outcomes. They did such a great job suppressing voters in Arizona, Kentucky, Nevada, and New York, the DNC certainly can’t call itself unskilled in this line of work. Indeed, later news stories reported this to have been the case in California.

So-called left-liberals made a real stink over voter suppression when the Bush-era Republicans did it.

I hope the Sanders campaign will continue their difficult and noble struggle. Unfortunately, Sanders supporters will face the cops in DNC-run Philly, along with probable armies of paid provocateurs.  Still, despite the help of generous friends like the AP, the Clinton campaign in 2016 will be no cakewalk. There are too many scandals; we are living in strange and interesting times.  Finally, I don’t see Hillary’s support numbers planting flags on Mount Everest any time soon. The Clintons had to pull off this 24 hour California fiasco to silence a 74 year old Socialist Senator from Vermont, who fills real venues with really impassioned supporters, most of whom actually believe in something more than power, money, and the Clinton’s patron saint, Machiavelli.