On the Hannity show last night, Sean Hannity all but asked Karl Rove to smear Hillary Clinton. And Rove obliged. Despite the blowback he received when he recently “just wondered” if Clinton had suffered secret brain damage as the result of her 2012 concussion, he must have felt it worthwhile enough to go through it all over again. Only this time, Rove blamed the whole thing on Bill Clinton.
It began with Hannity playing a clip of Hillary Clinton commenting on attacks from the likes of Rove – as the lower third of the screen blared, “HILLARY UNVEILED.”
In the audio clip, Clinton said on NPR, “I am so used to these people. They’re like a bunch of, you know, gamers. They are trying constantly to raise false canards… plant false information. And that’s what they do.” She went on to say, “They don’t want to have a real debate” on substantive issues like tax policy, growing the economy, climate change and clean energy. “They want people to get diverted and totally off subject,” she said.
As if to prove her right, Rove went off on her – and wasted little time diverting the subject, while pretending he was “only” responding to her comments:
I believe we ought to have a robust debate with Hillary Clinton over her absence of policies. She doesn’t have a plan to grow our economy. She doesn’t have a plan to reform our tax code. And her record, when it comes to foreign policy is abysmal.
That was it for substance – and, of course, it was all Hillary’s fault that there was none under discussion. Then Rove moved in for the “Hillary is hiding health issues” smear:
She has a problem with the fact that I said she had a serious health incident and that I thought that that would be a bigger part of her personal calculation than most people anticipate. If she’s got a problem with that, then take it up with her husband who went out and declared to the country something that we didn’t know: that this health incident was so serious that she had to spend six months of really hard work to overcome the after effect of it.
Now, if she’s got a problem with it, go argue with her husband! Because he told us something that we didn’t know. Her State Department PR apparatus said, “Oh, no, no, no. No problem. She’s over this in 30 days." … And then she showed up with these fractal glasses that you have to have to wear if you’ve got vision problems as the result of a traumatic concussion.
… I repeat, it was her husband, the former president, who went out and said, “Oh, you didn’t know how serious this was. It took Hillary six months of really hard work to overcome it. And I’m proud of her.”
That’s something that we, the American people, didn’t know.
Predictably, Hannity did not challenge a word.
Watch the deceit below via Media Matters.
