In the moments where former Clinton advisor James Carville wasn’t completely unintelligible in his Sunday morning appearance on ABC’s This Week, he was actively undermining the effort to defend Hillary Clinton’s controversial email practices.
Due to her stubborn refusal to amend her 2016 campaign rollout schedule, the former secretary of state still lacks a press shop and, as a result, has had to rely on surrogates like Media Matters founder David Brock, former Clinton counsel Lanny Davis, and political advisor James Carville to defuse this scandal in the press. Thus far, they have utterly failed in their mission.
Brock’s cartoonish defense of Clinton consists of unconvincingly insisting that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s email flap was similar, even possibly worse, than the scandal engulfing the former secretary of state who likely handled American national secrets on unsecure email servers. Davis has taken to engaging in yelling matches with MSNBC anchors, an indication of the extent of the Clintons’ bunker mentality on this scandal. Before this weekend, Carville might have been the most consistently cogent member of Clinton’s cadre of apologists. He surrendered that claim to competency on Sunday. (hat tip to The Weekly Standard for this clip):
“What this is, is the latest in a continuation, and if you take it all and put it together, and you subtract 3.1415 from pi, you’re left with not very much,” Carville began, perhaps as a courtesy to the members of his viewing audience on hallucinogenic drugs.
“And that’s — at the end of the day, so the Republicans can’t pass a budget, alright, we got another investigation, just like we had the Whitewater, just like you go through the file-gate, you go through travel-gate, you go through seven or eight different congressional committees,” he continued. “And you wonder why the public is not following this? Because they know what it is.”
If you’ve been able to follow this thought process so far, you might be a political flack-in-waiting. For the vast majority of Americans who do not routinely decrypt hyperventilating Beltway insider, this is indecipherable.
But Carville went on to bury his former boss when he reached just a bit too far for a partisan smoke signal that would ignite the passions of liberal Democrats.
“I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert rifling through her emails, which seems to me to be a kind of reasonable position for someone to take,” he said. “It amounts to — just like everything else before it, it amounts to nothing but a bunch of people flapping their jaws about nothing.”
Yes, rabidly liberal Democrats might agree that Clinton is right to try to avoid oversight from the congressional Republicans whom the American public determined should command the levers of legislative government, but that’s also an admission of illegality.
James Carville on @ThisWeekABC says he "suspects" @HillaryClinton used private email b/c she didn't want Hill oversight. Quite an admission
— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) March 15, 2015
Carville went on to indict the press for manufacturing this scandal and focusing on it so doggedly. He accused the political press of a virulent anti-Clinton bias, an indication of the likely fact that he did not hear himself confess that Clinton’s behavior was perfectly scandalous.
Team Clinton is going to have to ask their surrogates to stop helping, and soon. At this rate, Clinton’s backers are going to help her right out of the race.
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