Some voters not be able to ‘hold their nose’ and cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton after the next Wikileaks release, thereby denying her a strong mandate, says Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford
Story Transcript
SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: Welcome to this edition of the Glen Ford Report on the Real News Network. In spite of various fact-based charges against Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of the alternate email server, and with conflict of interest charges against her involving fundraising for the Clinton Foundation, various media pundits and her campaign are doing their very best to protect her from any blows to come by way of more WikiLeaks. Let’s have a look at former CNN pundit and now DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile on Sunday being questioned about Clinton controversies by Martha Raddatz of ABC on this week. MARTHA RADDATZ: And Donna, back to those DNC emails. What is your concern here? Julian Assange has said there will be significant releases over the coming weeks, coming months. What are you most concerned about there? DONNA BRAZILE: We are victims. The DNC and now the institutions are victims of a cybercrime led by thugs. We know from the company that we hired, Crowd Strike, that there was Russian involvement in this to destabilize not just our institution, the Democratic Party but our democracy itself. So we have taken appropriate steps to ensure that we have the safest possible system. We are working with federal officials. But I have to–once again, the notion that we’re going to let some person put out personal sensitive information across the world, jeopardizing people’s privacy, and we’re interviewing him as if he’s going to have a smoking gun for October. The smoking gun is that we’re interviewing somebody who’s involved in a cybercrime and not calling him a criminal. PERIES: Now joining me to shed more light on these controversies and what does this do to discussion and debate about these issues in our society is Glen Ford. Glen is the Executive Editor of the Black Agenda Report. Glen, good to have you with us. GLEN FORD: Thank you for the opportunity. And we certainly do need more light, because these Democrats, Donna Brazile in particular in that clip you just showed, they are trying to shut out the lights. She went through this whole scene of being righteously upset and did not admit or acknowledge the fact that what WikiLeaks disclosed were, in fact, facts. What the Clinton campaign fears far more than Trump, they’re not afraid of Trump, Hillary Clinton is quite lucky to have an opponent like Trump because she is so unpopular that Trump is at least someone she can beat. But what they fear are facts and the threat of more facts. And so those who might produce facts must be slimed and great fog must be thrown up so that there can be no light on the facts that might make an onslaught into the public consciousness. PERIES: Now Glen, Donna Brazile isn’t the only one trying to protect Hillary Clinton from these kinds of attacks to ensure that she gets into the White House. What else have you noticed in the media? FORD: Well, Hillary Clinton has assembled a big, big tent. In fact, this is really an unprecedented year. There’s nothing strange about their being foreign policy elites on both the democratic side of the isle and the republican side of the isle. The democrats have their Brzezinskis and the republicans have their Kissingers. But there is an agreement among those democratic allied and republican allied elites about the basic proposition that the US is destined to and should rule the world. But this year because Donald Trump has broken the Republican Party and because the bipartisan foreign policy elites don’t trust Donald Trump to keep the US on a permanent footing, all of the imperial potentates, the think tank people, and the arms industry and everybody who has a stake in US empire and US domination of the world, they’ve all crowded into Hillary Clinton’s big tent. And that gives this campaign an extreme nationalist character as opposed to the Trump campaign’s inward looking white nationalist character. So the Hillary campaign now resorts to what we used to call McCarthyism and in general throwing up this fog of war. The corporate media is entirely in the Hillary Clinton big tent as well. And the leaders of that corporate media, the New York Times, they have a special responsibility to create more fog than anyone else. They have deployed some of their specialists in empire. Like Neil MacFarquhar who’s piece on Sunday tried to paint a picture of Russia as a superpower of disinformation. Of Russians nowadays spending their entire waking lives trying to spread lies about the United States and meddle in US elections. All of this preparatory to some WikiLeaks revelations coming out that can be linked to the Russians and thereby dismissed just as Donna Brazile tried to dismiss the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sander’s campaign as not a case of an internal Democratic Party. A very undemocratic thing to do. But somehow making the Russians star of this story. So they’re trying to inoculate Hillary Clinton to immunize here from the facts. Only the facts can in fact defeat her in November. PERIES: And Glen, the various media and of course here campaign herself and the DNC who are all trying to protect Hillary Clinton actually cannot defy the facts before us. Whether it’s related to the emails or what the Clinton Foundation actually received in terms of donations from people outside of the country. However, people do say that given the choice that we have right now, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we must hold our noses and vote for Hillary. And this is in spite of what WikiLeaks promises to releases over the next few weeks might actually compromise her even more. So first of all, what do we know about what is to come if we do know anything about what is to come in terms of WikiLeaks releases and the very good work that WikiLeaks has been doing in terms of making public things that we ought to know–what do voters do in November? FORD: Well, I’m not sure what the nature of the next batch of WikiLeaks will be except for it’s coming. Julian Assange has just said that the information will be significant. Hillary Clinton is not afraid of Donald Trump or winning the election based on those kinds of revelations. She’s afraid that people will not be able to hold their nose because the funk will just be too strong and that they won’t vote for her, people that they count on voting for her. Or that there will be more folks than they anticipate voting for the Green Party or for the Libertarian Party. Certainly, that kind of abandonment of the top of the Democratic ticket even in the face of victory could deny Clinton what she would like to call a mandate. A mandate to do what she already plans to do and especially a mandate in terms of foreign policy. PERIES: All right Glen, I thank you so much for joining us today and for your report and we look forward to you next week. FORD: Thank you. PERIES: And thank you for joining us on the Real News Network.
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