Saturday, June 25, 2016

The Real Entitlements

[Likely Hillary Clinton presidential chief of staff Neera] Tanden made up a story about her not being at the DNC platform hearings for “any discussions” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. She made up that story when there was publicly available and easily accessible evidence to the contrary. When she was challenged about her made-up story, she doubled down. She suggested that the edited video gave a misleading impression about her presence there. She accused me of being a liar and demanded that I retract my lie. She never once admitted that it was she, not me, who was not telling the truth. She never once apologized to me for claiming to her 25,000 followers that I was lying.

[...]

If Tanden can act this way in the face of verifiable evidence that’s plain as day, and there for everyone to see, when the stakes are so low, is it completely implausible that she would act in a roughly similar fashion when the evidence is not so publicly available and not so easily accessible and when the stakes are much higher? When she has an even stronger and more self-interested reason for covering her tracks?

[...]

When someone commented on Facebook that they couldn’t understand why a powerful player in DC would be so obsessively monitoring her mentions on Twitter, particularly in response to a not terribly important person like me, Astra [Taylor, a documentary film maker,] made a shrewd observation:
This election has really shown the people who feel entitled to rule the country to be deeply narcissistic and not busy doing anything of actual importance — this is the liberal version of Trump reading all his press/mentions every morning and sending “corrected” copies back to the journalists.
Exactly. Never underestimate the narcissism—or amateurishness—of America’s ruling classes. While people like Tanden are in meetings with other important people, where God knows what or whose fate gets decided, they’re keeping their eye on their Twitter mentions, making sure no one’s looking at them cross-eyed, making sure they’re someone whom you don’t want to cross.

  Corey Robbin
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 10/19/16:  Tanden may not be the likely Chief of Staff in a Hillary administration any more.  Leaked emails have just come out that could block her ambitions.

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