Hillary [redacted] Benghazi [redacted] and “Hispandering”

Hillary [redacted] Benghazi [redacted] and “Hispandering”

While the Friday afternoon data dump is a hallmark of the Obama Administration, the release of heavily redacted Benghazi emails from Hillary Clinton on Christmas days scores points for sheer audacity.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Thursday released 16 pages of sensitive documents related to the 2012 Benghazi terror attack.

The documents, released ahead of the Christmas holiday, include mostly blacked-out emails and some press clippings about events in Libya after the attack on the U.S. embassy, which left four Americans dead. The event has become a central part of Republican criticism of Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State as she runs for president.

A few of the heavily redacted emails discuss the drafting of an assessment of the threat level before the attack occurred. Congress had requested the assessment in the months after the attack.

The emails are redacted so much that they are as black as lumps of coal. Via Mediaite:

The Hill offers the following analysis of what little print was left to view.

Several of the emails discuss the drafting of an assessment of the threat level ahead of the attack, which was being prepared for Congress in the months after four Americans were killed in the attack.

Other emails include periodic press clippings about the state of Benghazi in the years after the incident, which were meant to give staffers “situational awareness.”

It will be intriguing what Clinton defines as “situational awareness”, as it appears there is little of it in any environment she occupies. For example, the Clinton team is trying to “reset” a social media meme that generated a fun, new term: Hispandering.

The uproar started when a content strategist posted 7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your Abuela.

Her critics were not impressed. Soon, the hashtag #NotMyAbuela was circulating as a critique of what some saw as a tone-deaf move to pander to a powerful butmarginalized bloc of voters. Her critics pointed out that Mrs. Clinton did not grow up poor like their relatives, and was not separated from loved ones by country borders. Others just made their points with the magic of memes.

Mrs. Clinton is not the only politician who has attempted playful acknowledgment of Latino culture: Jeb Bush, a Republican contender whose wife is Mexican-American, sold a “guaca bowle” on his website, and supporters of Mrs. Clinton’s main challenger, Bernie Sanders, have long referred to him as #TioBernie on Twitter. (On Wednesday, Mr. Sanders’s campaign took steps to distance him from the hashtag.)

In Mrs. Clinton’s case, the Internet soon gave new currency to the word“Hispandering.”

I suspect we will see a lot more hispandering from Team Clinton before November, 2016…but not much truth.

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