Media buries story that DNC wanted to replace Clinton with Biden during campaign

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Wed, 08 Nov 2017 14:22 UTC

Just over a year ago, we were all told that the following video of Hillary collapsing into a van, because she literally couldn't support her own weight, was just a big 'nothing burger' being sensationalized by right-wing kooks for political gain. Rather than being caused by some serious ailment, the mainstream media eagerly assured everyone that Hillary's "medical episode" was just a reaction to the blistering 70 degree 'heat' on the beautiful New York Fall day.

But, it apparently wasn't just "right-wing kooks" who were focused on Hillary's health...according to Donna Brazile's new tell-all book, the interim DNC chair said she seriously considered replacing the Clinton-Kane ticket with a Biden-Booker ticket in the days following Hillary's "medical episode." Per the New York Post:

Silly, silly Donna Brazile. She's publishing a book detailing turmoil in the Democratic Party during the 2016 campaign, highlighted by her concern that Hillary Clinton was seriously ill and might need to be replaced by Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders.

In other words, the claim of allergies was a big fat lie. That prompted Brazile to contemplate starting the process of replacing Clinton, writing in her book that the campaign also was "anemic" and had "the odor of failure." She says she considered numerous tickets to replace Clinton and Sen. Tim Kane, and decided that Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) would be the best.

It's not clear how long she deliberated or how many people she talked to, but Brazile writes that Biden called her on Sept. 12th. In the end, she says she made no move because she couldn't disappoint Clinton's supporters.

Of course, the real story here isn't whether or not Hillary was really sick, anyone with a functional brain stem understood that the collapse above was not caused by New York's 70-degree Fall 'heat wave', but rather the unprecedented lengths that the mainstream media had to go to bury the single biggest scoop of the 2016 presidential election, namely that Brazile was, in fact, actively working to replace Clinton-Kane as the Democratic ticket.

The missed stories are not merely the result of mistakes or sloppy reporting. Brazile's book is a revelation in that it shows that many left-leaning journalists didn't so much cover Clinton as cover up for her.

Put it this way: How is it possible that the leader of the Democratic Party was talking to colleagues about trying to replace its nominee during the general election because of health concerns, and none of the thousands of journalists covering the campaign got wind of it?

It's not possible - if the media had been playing it down the middle and holding both candidates to the same standard of scrutiny. But big media missed a big story because so much campaign "news" coverage was tilted toward defeating Trump and electing Clinton.

Anything that could possibly suggest Trump was unfit for the Oval Office - bingo, front page, top of the broadcast.

On the other hand, anything that could hurt Clinton was downplayed or ignored. Nothing to see here, move along.

The NY Post continues...

The truth was dangerous, so the Praetorian Guard sprung to Clinton's defense. The NBC reporter, Andrew Rafferty, was mocked and insulted, first by the campaign, and then by journalists, including some MSNBC commentators who turned on their colleague as if he had violated a secret oath.

CNN joined the Clinton amen chorus and at the Washington Post, political writer Chris Cillizza denounced the topic of Clinton's health as "a totally ridiculous issue" and declared it a "sure-fire loser" for Trump.

"It's hard to plausibly insist, based on the available data, that Clinton is ill," insisted Cillizza, who is now at CNN.

Five days later, Clinton was unable to walk on her own and collapsed at the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan as she tried to get into a van. The campaign insisted she was just "dehydrated" until a short video of the incident aired, then admitted the candidate had been diagnosed with pneumonia days earlier.

Meanwhile, as we noted last August (see: HuffPo "Revoked Publishing Access" Of Journalist After 'Hillary Health' Story: "It's Orwellian...I'm Scared"), the Huffington Post actually fired one of their contributors for having the audacity to question Hillary's health...ironically, he was fired just two days before she collapsed in New York.

Of course, all of this should come as a surprise to precisely no one so we'll simply leave you with this Hillary flashback...

Comment: The funny thing is that Twitter Clinton-bots and so-called journalists took Donna Brazile's remarks about the possible replacement of Cheatery Clinton as meaning that "Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee", and so the pawns closed ranks around their queen in what was a transparent propagandistic damage-control move, i.e. a straw man argument.

As Glen Greenwald explains in his article Four viral claims spread by journalists on Twitter in the last week alone that are false:

Brazile - as a result of her stinging criticisms and accusations of Clinton, Obama, and the DNC - is currently Public Enemy No. 1 among Democrats in the media. So they seized on this headline to pretend that she claimed the power to unilaterally remove Clinton on a whim and then used this claim to mercilessly vilify her - the chair of Al Gore's 2000 campaign, last year's interim head of the DNC, and a long-time Democratic Party operative - as a deluded, insane, dishonest, profiteering, ignorant fabulist who lacks all credibility.

But the entire attack on Brazile was false. She did not claim, at least according to the Post article being cited, that she had the power to unilaterally remove Clinton. The original Post article, buried deep down in the article, well after the headline, made clear that she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated.

The Post then amended its story to reflect that she made no such absurd claim in her book, but rather noted that "the DNC charter empowered her to initiate replacement of the nominee" and that "if a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC." The Post then added this note to the top of the article:

© Washington Post

Journalists on Twitter spent hours yesterday mocking, maligning, and attacking the reputation of Brazile for a claim that she simply never made - all because a tweeted headline, which they never bothered to read past or evaluate, made them think they were justified in doing so in order to malign someone who has, quickly and bizarrely, become one of the Democrats' primary enemies.