Hillary Clinton is no victim

Hillary Clinton’s familiar lackeys are back at it, blanketing the airwaves, flawlessly flacking for the country’s innocent-in-chief, defending her against her secret server misstep. So what if she used her own email? Others have done it!

Lanny Davis (columnist and contributor for The Hill), Jack Quinn and other Friends of Hillary came out swinging this week on cable, pronouncing Clinton a victim of media mishandling. Again.

Can we just cut the crappy talking points? Clinton is anything but a victim. They know it, she knows it and we know it.

And apparently so does James Carville, the always provocative strategist and card-carrying posse pal. Finally. Just as we’ve heard enough of the victim routine, one of her best defenders tells the truth: She put her emails on a private server for political expediency.

{mosads}Carville is the first one to portray Clinton for who she really is: A woman in charge and on a mission. On ABC’s “This Week,” he told George Stephanopoulos that he thinks Clinton used her private email to keep pols’ paws off her communiques.

“I suspect she didn’t want [Texas Republican Rep.] Louie Gohmert rifling through her emails,” he said. “Which seems to me a kind of reasonable position for someone to take.”

This doesn’t seem to jibe with Clinton’s explanation. She came out grudgingly last week, nine days after news of the secret server broke, saying “convenience” forced her to set up a server and use her own email to conduct business as secretary of State (effectively bypassing the official State Department computer system.) Oh, and she deleted thousands of “personal” emails. No biggie.

Up until Carville opened his trap Sunday, that’s been the official explanation assigned to her apologists who berate the media for “double standard” coverage. C’mon, former Secretary of State Colin Powell did it! He used personal email for Very Important Communication. And Quinn, Democratic adviser, noted on CNN that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) did it too, citing Ed O’Keefe’s reporting in Sunday’s Washington Post:

“Jeb Bush used his private e-mail account as Florida governor to discuss security and military issues such as troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants, according to a review of publicly released records.”

A quick trip down memory lane reminds us that Clinton’s looped victim audio track has been playing for 20-plus years. She was a victim of her husband’s philandering. She was a victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And most recently, in a one-on one interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, she claimed that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Victim. Victim. Victim. You know what a victim is? It’s someone who tells a story that their lives are awful as a way to get attention and adoration. Read any self-help book on the shelf and it’ll tell you that’s the kind of attention you don’t want. The goal is to attract people who love you for who you are. Not for how you’ve suffered.

So maybe Carville is onto something. Her haters are gonna hate. And her supporters are going to love her even more for standing against the “vast right-wing conspiracy” and admitting what everyone already believes: She wanted control.

Clinton is a calculating political animal who has a very good chance at being the first Madam President. So why are her stewards selling the victim song and dance? Do they want a victim standing up to Kim Jong Il? They need to listen to Carville and drop-kick the tired “poor Hillary” narrative they’re spewing on every news outlet in America. It ain’t selling.

Ashburn is an award-winning Washington-based reporter and TV analyst covering media and politics.