On Tuesday's Deadline: White House on MSNBC, host Nicolle Wallace led a panel discussion of Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened, in which panel members gushed over and sympathized with the former Democratic presidential candidate's complaints about facing "misogyny" during her campaign.
Although Wallace and MSNBC analyst Elise Jordan have a history of being Republicans, they sounded very similar to the rest of the liberal media as they covered for Hillary's involvement in trying to silence women who had been harassed or assaulted by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. Wallace also recalled that she voted for Hillary Clinton for President.
After playing a clip of some of the more crass soundbites of Donald Trump from the presidential campaign, Wallace read a passage from Hillary Clinton's book defining "misogyny." She then went to Jordan, who reacted by glowingly praising Hillary's words, and even brought up a Joan of Arc reference. Jordan:
That was the best part of the book, in my opinion, and it's incredibly moving, and I think that everyone in the country who's interested in women and society in 2017 --
She then added:
I think everyone should read it. This isn't a partisan issue. One of my favorite lines she wrote that Joan of Arc had a lot of interesting things to say before she was burned at the stake, and was talking about how relatively new it was for women to have power and be in the spotlight.
And it just talked about the harsh microscope and the double standard that women face. And I think that she was in a tough position, but it's something we should all be cognizant of going forward and looking at how we evaluate candidates.
Wallace then griped:
The criticism is always -- after '08 it was, "Well, she didn't talk about being a woman." And after '16, it was like, "Oh, well, she didn't talk about how in the '90s Bill was bad to women." I mean, she just couldn't win on this question of being female.
Panel member Megan Murphy of Bloomberg Businessweek then chimed in:
She couldn't win on it, and I think it's really important to separate what actually happened to her. There's no question she was the victim of some extraordinarily hateful remarks, attitude, treatment, on both sides of the aisle, we should point out. Some of that behavior still continues today.
Wallace then turned to Democrat Jennifer Palmieri and suggested that Bill Clinton's bad behavior had just been about "infidelities" as she posed:
Jen, you and I talked all the time during the campaign -- I don't want to dime you out as one of my sources, but we talked about how there is no analog to a male candidate who is held responsible for his wife's infidelities two decades prior.
During the 2016 campaign, the broadcast network evening newscasts had similarly tried their best to avoid identifying any of Bill Clinton's behavior as "sexual assaults" or even "harassment" as they were forced to bring up the former President's past when Trump made an issue of it.
Palmieri even complained about media reaction to the Clinton email server scandal as she responded:
Well, there's no analog. There's no analog. I feel like in the campaign there was very ugly misogyny. There was irrational hatred of her. I mean, I would say, you know, we don't need me to spend a lot of time on it, but I would say the way the email story was covered was irrational.
Wallace soon admitted that she voted for Hillary Clinton as she complained about voters not wanting to vote for the Democratic candidate:
The question I heard over and over again -- and I heard this before the election, I heard this after they went out and interviewed Democrats who voted for Trump, was, "It wasn't that we weren't ready for a woman -- we weren't ready for that woman." Well, that woman was the only one on the menu, and I voted for her because I thought, "What's a woman going to do? Make it worse?"
As if all Democrats were obligated to vote for Hillary Clinton, Wallace further bemoaned:
I mean, our politics are so fractured -- they're so broken -- but there is still a lot of people who use the "that woman" excuse for not voting for her -- not just Republicans, but Democrats -- the sort of dead enders who hung onto the Bernie dream for months after it was mathematically possible (sic) for Bernie to be the nominee.
By the numbers, when Hillary Clinton won 48.2 percent of the vote, it was almost identical to the 48.4 percent that Democrat Al Gore won in 2000 -- the last time Democrats were trying to win a third consecutive term. Additionally, with the Green Party's Jill Stein's voters added, more than 49 percent of voters did, in fact, vote for a woman in 2016. So there's no mathematical evidence that simply being a woman cost Hillary Clinton voters that a male Democrat might have won.
In her response, Jordan went along with the smokescreen that Bill Clinton's behavior was merely about having consensual affairs with "mistresses" as she began:
Well, I think it was just so many years of public life and all of the conspiracies that were really just fine-tuned by the time that this election actually rolled around, and the punishment for Bill Clinton's sins that I think is incredibly unfair that she's supposed to be judged by something that she might have said or didn't say about a mistress. I mean, who's going to judge someone by what they say about your husband's mistress?
Wallace injected: "Right, she wasn't a human being except when she reacted emotionally to the fact that her husband cheated on her."
Jordan further complained:
Exactly. And you consider that second debate and the stunt that Donald Trump pulled, bringing all those women and weaponizing against Hillary Clinton before a presidential debate and the fact that there wasn't more outcry just over the decency that he, you know, that he had no sense of boundaries.
