In comments caught on tape nearly ten years ago, Hillary Clinton expressed regret to having supported elections in the Palestinian territories and thought it would have been better had the U.S. rigged the results.
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win,” she said.
Clinton made the remarks on September 5, 2006 in Brooklyn during an interview with Eli Chomsky, a reporter with the The Jewish Press.
The paper decided not to report the comments at the time because they didn’t think it was “newsworthy.” Judging from the reaction of the mainstream media to the comments even today, they were probably right. Having a presidential candidate caught on audiotape regretting that she didn’t do more to steal the vote away from a few million Palestinians has not exactly outraged our press corps or even many pro-democracy advocates. The revelation has been met with relative silence.
More revolting and newsworthy to our guardians of truth and freedom were comments made eleven years ago by the other presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in which he used certain vulgar terms for parts of the female anatomy. The graphic nature of his advice on how he picks up women was just too lewd and nasty to pass up.
The mainstream press’ reaction to the discovery of this tape eclipsed every other news item for nearly a week. It was as if they had discovered the missing 18 1/2 minutes of the Nixon tapes. Now this was newsworthy, but not Hillary Clinton caught on tape casually discussing how she regrets having not done more to rig the Palestinian election.
Americans are not accustomed to hearing their political leaders talk about rigging elections either here in their own country or abroad. That is something, so we’ve been told, that the U.S. simply doesn’t do. We’re the good guys and would never fix elections. We believe in democracy, liberty, self-determination, free and fair elections, and have sacrificed blood and treasure ostensibly promoting and protecting those ideals.
But here we have quite likely the next president of the United States on tape telling us how she regrets allowing the Palestinian election to be open, fair, and free of international meddling and rigging. Perhaps our mainstream news media now simply covers only those stories that focus groups tell them will generate the highest ratings.
Why cover stories, even if they are pertinent to helping us judge the character and temperament of our candidates, if they will not bring in the viewers and raise the ad revenue? Better to stick to the tried and true; the salacious, sex-tinged, gotcha tapes that tell us nothing more than rich millionaires use their wealth and power to hit on beautiful women.
But the mainstream media reaction to a comment from a presidential candidate on regretting not fixing an election? Booooring.
Had such comments come from our new international villain Vladimir Putin on, oh lets say, the elections in the Ukraine, the reaction among our press corps might be dramatically different. Maybe then such comments might be considered “newsworthy.”
