Fresh off her 11-hour testimony at the Benghazi hearing, Democratic presidential candidate front-runner Hillary Clinton sat down on Friday for her first one-on-one interview with none-other than the most leftist show possible – MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. If anyone had any doubts how far left the show is, Maddow herself admitted Clinton:
“I’m a true-blue liberal, and I’m allowed to say that –OK?”
As if we didn’t already know that.
This was probably one of the most softball interviews Clinton has done since she announced her presidential bid. Not only do you have the host actually come out and tell the interviewee where she stands, but it honestly sounded like two girlfriends meeting over drinks to catch-up. This was intentional – it was just another way for MSNBC to try to humanize Clinton.
For instance, when discussing Benghazi, both women chuckled about how crazy the Benghazi committee was as well as certain people within the Republican Party. Maddow brought up the fact that Clinton didn’t have the nomination and yet “there was already a sitting Republican member of Congress from Alabama, Mo Brooks, who says that he is ready to impeach you on the first day of your presidency.”
Clinton quipped, “Isn’t that pathetic...It’s just laughable…“It’s so totally ridiculous.”
“It’s amazing,” Maddow concurred, “but that is where the Republican Party is.”
Madddow went on to detail some of former President Bill Clinton’s measures back in the 1990s – such as breaking his promise to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military, signing the Defense of Marriage Act and signing into office severe anti-crime laws that ended in unfair sentencing and imprisonment for minorities. When Clinton tried distancing herself from her husband, saying she didn’t “excuse” them, but rather tried to “explain” them, Maddow gladly helped her out:
And so I know that you and President Clinton are different people, and I know that...you're not responsible for what he did as president...
Apparently that makes everything OK.
Noting that the Republicans may have a valid point by highlighting just how bad the situation in Libya was, Maddow implied that the ouster of Muammar Khadafi from power by Libyan rebels resulted in massive and violent chaos, created a power vacuum which ultimately led to the dangerous conditions in Benghazi on September 11, 2012.
For her part, Clinton went into a long diatribe on the complications of Libya, and why she wasn’t ready to “give up” on the country, and that she thinks they have to make more of an investment in Libya.
Maddow then confronted Clinton on her old acquaintances and colleagues, specifically Sidney Blumenthal, and whether or not the public will be seeing them for a round two of a Clinton presidency. However, before she raised the matter, Maddow actually apologize beforehand, saying, “I hope it doesn’t sound mean.” Are you kidding?
Trying to appear chummy, Clinton said it wasn’t a mean question and compared her friends over the years to the “old Girl Scout song - you know, ‘make new friends, but keep the old; some are silver, the others are gold,” and told Maddow that she has an “ear for those who are more aggressive in my defense than they need to be or should be.”
Responding to Vice President Joe Biden’s decision not to run for president, Clinton replied, “Well, bless his heart.”
Certainly sounds like there’s no loss between Clinton and Biden.
In another attempt at making Clinton seem warm and fuzzy, Maddow asked what her mother, Dorothy Rodham, would have said about Thursday’s “grueling” 11-hour hearing. Clinton responded that her mother would have been “appalled at the whole spectacle”:
I think at the end of it, she would have ...breathed a big sigh of relief, because she was someone who lived a really tough life, and she knows that everybody gets knocked down in life, and the question is whether you get back up, or whether you allow yourself to be...knocked out. And that's the way she raised me.
