Children of the Scorned

Just when you thought child exploitation wasn’t a good thing, along come the Democrats to prove you right.

Last night, Hillary Clinton was holding a Conversation with Families™ in the living room auditorium of Haverford, PA. She is qualified to hold that conversation because she has a legally binding contractual agreement with two other individuals with whom she can strategically be seen, at various public functions, interacting in a familial manner.

Actress Elizabeth Banks, who has made five appearances on ABC’s Modern Family which has the word “family” right in the title, was the host.

When they opened up the discussion to random, unrehearsed questions from the audience, Banks scanned the room and chose, at random, a random attendee who sat, randomly, in the first row. The girl spoke for women everywhere when she read from her card about what her own eyes see:

Hi, Madam Secretary, I’m Brennan and I’m 15 years old. At my school, body image is a really big issue for girls my age. I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look. As the first female president, how would you undo some of that damage and help girls understand that they are so much more than just what they look like?

As your own eyes can see from the video, the audience responded well to the Raucous Applause sign, although a few were slow to react.

More importantly for the campaign, Hillary affected surprise with aplomb at the depth and relevance of the young operative’s question. Those human lessons are really paying off: eyes wide, teeth bared, the Thank You, the Wow, the bobbleheaded head-bob, all delivered with the appropriately ridiculous amount of faux admiration to demonstrate that this question has been rattling around in her own Machiavellian skull for a while, has been on the tip of her forked tongue, but she just has not been able to articulate it as well as the campaign staffer who wrote it for young Brennan.

Hillary then stated for the record that she was so proud of the complete stranger “for asking that question.” Much in the same way that one can be said to be so proud of an unknown gardener “for clipping that hydrangea.”

Sadly, this wasn’t Brennan’s first foray into the seedy world of political toolery. In 2014, she was exploited by her own father, Pennsylvania State Senator Daylin Leach, in a television ad for his campaign. But this wasn’t just your standard “my Dad knows what it’s like to grow up living in a cardboard orphanage inside of a rusty-nail factory eating broken glass and ebola flakes every night from an electrified dumpster in the middle of an Indian burial ground, so now he’s fighting to hold ‘the banks and Wall Street’ accountable for not contributing enough to his campaign, fighting to keep guns out of the hands of telegenic, hoodied-up blond kids who roll with ethnically and gender-ly diverse teenage gangs, fighting to further Ponzi-fy Social Security for seniors wearing looks of shriveled concern on their grave faces, and fighting in a politically safe, non-defined way for ‘our kids’ because he’s the type of hero who doesn’t not fight for kids” campaign ad. Okay, it was:

Leach, being a laughably self-proclaimed Liberal Lion, apparently couldn’t run on his own recognizance and needed to lash his campaign to another political perpetrator. No doubt Leach wanted to associate himself with the original senatorial lion, Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy. Alas, Ted was, like so many Mary Jo Kopechnes, dead. So Leach was forced to settle for substitute skirt-chaser William Jefferson Clinton.

Pity Brennan. At 13, she’s made to stand in front of a TV image of a sexual predator and utter the line: “He seems like a great guy.” That alone should be grounds for immediate emancipation. But this is politics. Therefore, Clinton’s lechery will in no way factor into a campaign’s decision to freeze-frame him, into what is essentially a two shot, with an innocent pubescent girl, staring directly at her, presumably waiting for the day she turns 18-looking.

Don’t… stop… thinkin’… about… tomorrow, Bill!

One question remains. Which is more contemptible, a father willing to pimp out his daughter in service to his own political ambition, or one willing to do it in service to Hillary’s? The answer is irrelevant because the damage is the same in both cases: purity is exploited in the basest of pursuits by adults who should be ashamed.

Now, if you’ll excuse him, Leach has some of our kids he has to go fight for.