Patterico's Pontifications

4/12/2017

Prepare Yourself for the Best Spring Read Imaginable

Filed under: General — JVW @ 10:31 pm



[guest post by JVW]

In less than one week, what is likely to be the most interesting read this spring — nay, make that for all of 2017 — will hit the bookstores. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes promises to provide us with a backstage look at the magnificently glorious implosion of the Once and Future Inevitable Next President of the United States of America, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, hdr22@clintonemail.com. Earlier today, The Hill ran an excerpt from the book that should have us salivating at the juicy gossip that awaits us. To whet your appetite, here are some great pulls from that excerpt:

Hillary was so mad she couldn’t think straight. She was supposed to be focused on the prep session for that night’s Univision debate in Miami, but a potent mix of exhaustion and exasperation bubbled up inside.

She’d been humiliated in the Michigan primary the night before, a loss that not only robbed her of a prime opportunity to put Bernie Sanders down for good but also exposed several of her weaknesses. [. . .] And now, Jake Sullivan, her de facto chief strategist, was giving her lip about the last answer she’d delivered in the prep session.

“That’s not very good,” Sullivan corrected.

“Really?” Hillary snapped back.

The room fell silent.

“Why don’t you do it?”

[. . . ] So for the next 30 minutes, there he was, pretending to be Hillary while she critiqued his performance.

Every time the Yale lawyer and former high school debate champ opened his mouth, Hillary cut him off. “That isn’t very good,” she’d say. “You can do better.” [. . .]

I’m sorry, but can’t all of you absolutely envision that entire scene, complete with the beta-males in her campaign walking on eggshells around her and Her Clintonic Majesty sneering and fuming as she rails at everyone in her orbit? And then some more:

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. [The typical cast of Clintonian schmucks] were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning — both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures — Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.

You haven’t buried this thing, the ruddy-cheeked former president rasped. You haven’t figured out how to get Hillary’s core message to the voters. This has been dragging on for months, he thundered, and nothing you’ve done has made a damn bit of difference. Voters want to hear about Hillary’s plans for the economy, and you’re not making that happen. Now, do your damn jobs.

“We got an ass-chewing,” one of the participants recalled months later.

My word, what I would have given to have witnessed those smug and entitled phonies and frauds being dressed down by King Sleaze His Loathsome Self! Can you imagine taking a verbal lashing from the likes of Bill Clinton and being so cowed that you dare not tell him where to shove his unsmoked cigar (no, Monica, I’m not talking about there)? Even as we quibble and kvetch about the mindless soap opera that the new administration is turning out to be, let’s all be thankful that this infamous band of horrible people were blessedly denied return access to the levers of state power.

Sometimes the pre-published excerpts from a book turn out to be the best bits, but I have a feeling there are going to be a lot more nuggets in this tome. Yeah, Jonathan Allen is an ex-Vox juiceboxer, but he does at least have the good sense to keep that item off of his amazon.com author page. Amie Parnes is something of a enigma, having no biography page at amazon or The Hill. The two of them collaborated on a book about Hillary Clinton two years ago that appears to be quite a bit hagiographical, but stories of abject failure tend to bring out the curmudgeonly cynic in all of us, so here’s hoping that this book is everything that I believe it can be.

Maybe we can do an online book club when it comes out.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

– JVW

24 Responses to “Prepare Yourself for the Best Spring Read Imaginable”

  1. Just ordered the book. Under the section of “people who bought this book also bought. . . ” I learned that there are some feminist academics who have apparently written whiny screeds on how the system did Hillary in by magnifying her very modest faults to something major. I almost want to read them, but I wouldn’t want those authors to get a dime of my money or a minute of my time.

    JVW (5de783)

  2. Just buy the book used on Amazon the author will not get a dime in royalties ;-0

    Daniel W Kauffman Jr (60e056)

  3. I may not like Trump, but I gotta appreciate that Hillary’s failure was even more embarrassing because of who beat her. But not only that, she lost a race everyone kept insisting she would win. I was absolutely convinced it was going to be a landslide in her favor, and I’m sure she was also not questioning her future as president.

    I had a friend in college who worked in DC the same time I did, but for Hillary (I worked for a committee at large that was controlled by Republicans). She made her staff cry… of course there’s only one reason anyone on the hill works for someone who treats them that way: ambition over self-respect.

    I’m more than happy to see the author get some money out of this. I can’t wait to read it and I want to encourage more of these books. It’s time for some from the Obama administration too.

    Dustin (ba94b2)

  4. Now, which candidate was the more terrible, ugly, hateful person? To me it was a tie, and given that I’d go with the one who had less objectionable ideals.

    On a scale of 1 to 10, where a “1” equals Blofeld, the candidates were a 2 and a 3. What it showed was that letting TELEVISION NETWORKS have control over the nomination process was a truly bad idea.

    Never again.

    Kevin M (25bbee)

  5. It proved the republican party has no leaders.

    mg (31009b)

  6. Thanks for the smile.

    Ed from SFV (3400a5)

  7. Ed from SFV
    I apologize for my irrational comment towards you, prior to the election. I Lost my head and opened my mouth.

    mg (31009b)

  8. mg – Many thanks for your gracious apology.

    Ed from SFV (3400a5)

  9. what kind of spineless syncophant continues to work for people who treat them like that? Oh, yes, (at the risk of being Spicered) all those who worked for Hitler. Spineless, mindless, dangerous people. I guess if you quit or spoke up, you end up like Seth Richards. Now, this may be a “tell all book” but will just be salacious. Where are those who will tell the truth about the CRIMES of the Clintons? and not in a book but to a grand jury.

    SD Harms (84960b)

  10. Hillry has blood on her hands, lots of blood: Vince Foster, Waco, Fast and Furious, Libya, Benghazi, Syria, Isis.

    She’s A rabid dog, crazy, sick in the head, mean and evil b*tch who can’t control her scumbag of a husband so she takes out her pain and frustration on everyone around her, while at the same time parading around delusions of grandeur.

    Her constant string of failures are always someone else’s fault. After all, the smartest woman in the world just couldn’t strike out every time she get up to bat.

    ropelight (194a2b)

  11. Mean, spiteful, straight razor totin’ woman.

    You couldn’t pay me to read this book, JVW. Not when I already have “Blood of the Vampire Dead”, “Mistress of Snarling Death”, “Fiances for the Devil’s Daughter”, “The Shrieking Pool”, “Death Mates for the Lust-Lost”, and “The Dogs of Purgatory”, in one convenient Megapack on Kindle Unlimited.

    nk (dbc370)

  12. And you left out this portion of that debate prep incident:

    Hillary’s eyes narrowed into icy blue slits. As she crouched down, the slit on the outside of her right pant-suit leg gaped open. She drew the opened straight razor out of the top of her knee high. As she powered out of the crouch, Sullivan’s eyes widened in terror, but he was too frozen with fear to even put up his hands. The waning Bronx light flashed off the blade of the razor as Hillary rested its edge against his Adam’s apple. “Are you telling me I don’t know how to drive my point home, feller?”, she rasped.

    nk (dbc370)

  13. Kind of like Gerald Seymour.

    narciso (d1f714)

  14. I don’t have enough interest in the Hillary to borrow this book from the library, much less spend money on it.

    kishnevi (49c60a)

  15. I don’t have any use for either one of last years candidates and I mean really no use, but I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at Hillaryquarters when the Pennsylvania results came in and all those geniuses realized that the Dems they sent across party lines in the primary because they thought Trump would be the easiest Repub to beat didn’t come back.

    Flatiron Fred (5a4596)

  16. I don’t see how anybody can accept this book as the truth. It’s coming out of the Clinton campaign and doesn’t appear to tell anything really bad – or at least illegal, or even anybody thinkinbg about it. You mean nobody thought that maybe she was hiding corruption? Or that she was telling patent lies? And if the sources don’t say that, how can you trust them?

    Even if some things are true, maybe it is also hiding things.

    For every anecdote I want to know the sources and how it fits, or doesn’t fit, with everythinbg else, and if the anecdote contains some assumption about the truth that really doesn’t seem to jibe with reality, I want the whle thing analyzed. What are they trying to say, and why, and what concession to the truth did they make maybe?

    Sammy Finkelman (db2a13)

  17. ropelight (194a2b) — 4/13/2017 @ 4:17 am

    Hillary has blood on her hands, lots of blood: Vince Foster, Waco, Fast and Furious, Libya, Benghazi, Syria, Isis.

    Now, wait a second. Vince Foster probably had blood on his hands, and that’s why he went to the Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan and tried to blackmail him for money to pay for a lawyer, whixh he thought he would need after the fired FBI Director, William Sessions, went public (Foster thought he would) with his complaints about how his water cannon plan was rejected in favor of tear gas and how he was kept from the scene at Waco – meanwhile forgetting all about diplomatic immunity.

    The Waco fire was caused by Bill, not Hillary. And maybe political consultant Ed Rollins.

    Fast and Furious? That was run out of the BATF and the FBI, in the Department of Justice. What did Hillary have to do with that? Directly, I mean.

    Libya. What about Libya? Now the thing was, she never gave her best advice.

    Benghazi? She didn’t dare to contradict the CIA, because she couldn’t afford to have it found out who really had conspired to kill the Ambassador – probably Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then head of Saudi intelligence, and if he went down, she might go down with him.

    ISIS? That’s Russian propaganda.

    The only way Barack Obama created ISIS was by killing all of Baghdadi’s superiors. He never killed Baghdadi because probably all the intelligence that enabled him to kill the rest was coming from or for Baghdadi! And yes, Qatar efforts to help the wrong Syrian rebels was tolerated for some time.

    Sammy Finkelman (db2a13)

  18. Yep. Even with the (many) annoyances associated with the current occupant of the Oval Office, it doesn’t take much reflection on the loathsomeness embodied by Clinton, Inc. to decide that we’re still way better off trying to nudge Trump in the right direction in areas where he’s messing up rather than regret the outcome of the election. We’ve been through sixteen years of the media doing their utmost to paper over the myriad flaws of Democratic presidents in the last quarter century–we certainly didn’t need four to eight more years of that effort being directed on behalf of an even more appalling Democratic president.

    M. Scott Eiland (1edade)

  19. Hillary was so mad she couldn’t think straight.

    Perhaps because at times she swings both ways?? Or is it just hot flashes of temperament… surely she must be past that period.
    ______

    Why does that short, ugly, fireplug constantly have the urge to remind America of the middle 1970s. Gas lines, disco, pantsuits, pet rocks, double knit, leisure suits, 8-tracks, the Betamax, Three Mile Island, the Pinto, the Gremlin, the Pacer… Tony Orlando. Cher. Ugly bra burners Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug… and oh, did I mention double knit pantsuits… here’s a hot flash for ‘ya Hillary– it was a totally suck decade. Please Mawdie, just go away. Your show’s been cancelled.

    “And don’t call me Shirley.” Dr. Rumack – [Leslie Nielsen] ‘Airplane’ 1980

    DCSCA (797bc0)

  20. You know how this story ends Doncha, it’s the Russians, Blackwater and the fbi At fault

    narciso (31232b)

  21. Well, if little vignette depicted here is accurate you can bet there are plenty more out there. And a bunch of sharp knives waiting. When Kamala Harris starts her Obama clone run it’ll be fun to see how many of them surface.

    Flatiron Fred (5a4596)

  22. There is a report now that Huma Abedi is trying to market for $2 million a book that would supposedly tell the truth about what went on between her and Anthony Weiner, and also about the Hillary Clinton campaign for president.

    Sammy Finkelman (0c3646)


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