Hillary Clinton's Grammys Performance was Unbecoming of Her

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I’ve never been a fan of Hillary Clinton’s, yet I was still shocked that she would stoop so low as to mock Donald Trump at the Jan. 28 Grammy Awards, no matter what we all think of him.

She read a chapter from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Michael Wolff’s recently-published savage account of the president. It was the most classless thing I’ve ever seen her do.

First of all, she’s not an entertainer, but a supposedly serious political figure. This wasn’t “Saturday Night Live,” where such people routinely make fun of the president.       
   
How would Clinton like it if Trump read part of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, a 2015 book by Peter Schweizer.

Even Al Gore, who had every right to be far more angry than Clinton – in 2000 he most probably won the presidential election, and not just by the popular vote but also the electoral vote – never did this to George W. Bush, and there were plenty of opportunities.

None of previous defeated candidates even came close to acting this way – certainly not in a public forum televised to millions of people.

Had a student written something as demeaning as the excerpt Clinton read out, they would likely have been suspended from their school. Had I done something similar to a colleague in front of a class, I’d be fired, and rightly so. It would be considered bullying.   

Clinton clearly can’t get over losing to Trump. After all, her sense of entitlement was such, and her devoted fans were so enamoured of her, that she considered winning the presidency a foregone conclusion – especially against a man who would only be getting the votes of the “deplorables ” in “flyover” country.

Trump voters probably don’t buy most of the recordings showcased at the Grammys, nor do they go to many of the movies Hollywood liberals produce. So it won't hurt those bottom lines.

But it does demonstrate to these people that the whole entertainment industry has become a machine designed to mock and belittle them. Even those who think Trump is a buffoon, and they are many, won’t forget this slight.

And here’s irony: The woman who ran as a transformational feminist in 2016 is being increasingly shunned by her party, according to numerous sources. 

Some reports have asserted that the current news of harassment reminds many of Hillary Clinton’s past as an enabler of a serial abuser, her husband.  It now has also become known that in 2008, she shielded one of her campaign advisers from accusations of sexual harassment.

And of course, Bill Clinton’s own past behaviour embodies what is considered absolutely unacceptable by current standards; he would have been chased out of office by his own Democratic Party today.

So tone-deaf is Clinton that, as an opinion piece in the Jan 30 New York Times – a paper not exactly a fan of Trump! – pointed out, she read from a book that, without any evidence, insinuates that Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador, is sleeping with the president.

So it’s not difficult to imagine how Haley might have felt when she watched the Grammys.

“A prominent Republican woman is smeared,” writes the author, Barry Weiss. “The author who does the smearing is celebrated by all the A-listers, including the most prominent Democratic woman in the country, who herself has a history of giving a pass (or worse) to men accused of sexual assault and harassment.”

Pray for the fate of the American republic!