Hillary’s First Campaign Ad is Cringeworthy

Hillary’s First Campaign Ad is Cringeworthy

Hillary Clinton’s campaign released its first ad of the 2016 presidential cycle Tuesday, and boy is it cringeworthy.

Called, “Admit,” the thirty-second spot seeks to capitalize off House Majority Leader McCarthy’s recent ill-conceived comments about the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Check it out:

As you probably remember, during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, Rep. McCarthy said this before being cut off mid-sentence:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee—a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought…”

Of every angle available for their inaugural presidential ad, Clinton’s campaign thought it best to remind voters Hillary’s polling numbers are in the toilet (right next to her server) because of a Congressional probe that ultimately sparked an FBI investigation. So, um, yay?

Declaring the House Select Committee a tax-payer funded, campaign-killing, witch-hunt is kind of cute. Particularly considering that the media doesn’t even buy that line. Clinton’s continued insistence that her email ineptitudes were the product of a “partisan witch hunt” lead typically loyal press corps members to publicly refute her Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Claim redux:

• The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson: “Hard To Claim This Is All Just a Partisan Witch Hunt When the Justice Department Under a Democratic Administration Is Looking Into the Whole Email Mess” “It’s hard to claim this is all just a partisan witch hunt when the Justice Department under a Democratic administration is looking into the whole email mess. So, that doesn’t ring so true.” (NBC’s “Meet the Press,” 8/16/15) Robinson: “If Clinton now has political problems because of the e-mails — or, potentially, even legal trouble — it’s her own doing.” (The Washington Post, 8/17/15)
• The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza: “Hillary Clinton Is Trying to Make the E-Mail Controversy Political. But, Really, It Isn’t” “Hillary Clinton is trying to make the e-mail controversy political. But, really, it isn’t. … Without an aggressive push by Republicans, we might have never known about Clinton’s e-mail server. True. But now that we do know, trying to cast the story as nothing more than the same old partisan warfare misses the factual mark. By a lot.” (The Washington Post, 8/15/15)
• Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin: “They’re Dealing with this Issue with Spin and Misdirection” “They’re dealing with this issue with spin and misdirection rather than authenticity and honesty and openness, which is what the public would like, I think, with everyone. … And as long as their posture toward it is to deny and to spin, I think she’s setting herself for this to be a very long-running problem.” (CBS’ “Face the Nation,” 8/15/15)
• The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty: “It’s Impossible to Say this Is Just a Partisan Witch Hunt” “It’s impossible to say this is just a partisan witch hunt. You know, she was saying that about the Benghazi investigation on the Hill. You cannot say that when the F.B.I. is involved and when the department of justice, as we reported on Friday, has assigned the same prosecutor who prosecuted David Petraeus to this case.” (MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 8/17/15)
• Bob Woodward: “But, the other issue here is, for Hillary Clinton to go out, as she did, in recent days and say, this is politics. This is dirty politics. They’re trying to smear me in an unfair way, that dog will not hunt, at all. You have got Barack Obama’s government now investigating her and looking at this.” (MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 8/17/15)
• The Charlotte Observer: “It Was Clinton, Not the Right Wing, Who Sent and Received More Than 60,000 Emails While Secretary of State on a Personal Account” This wound is entirely self-inflicted. It was Clinton, not the right wing, who sent and received more than 60,000 emails while secretary of state on a personal account run through a private server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. That was a deliberate attempt to block the pesky public from ever nosing around in public records. Clinton deleted more than 31,000 of those emails, sitting as judge and jury over what’s a personal email and what’s not. Then she tried to wipe the server clean.” (Editorial, 8/18/15)
• Former Democratic Aide Julie Roginsky: “When You Do Something You Should Not Have Done in the First Place…You’ve Got Really Nobody to Blame But Yourself When the Firestorm Erupts” “Julie Roginsky, a former aide to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), told Fox News’s ‘Media Buzz’ over the weekend that the criticism Clinton had received was ‘deserved and it is entirely self-inflicted by Hillary Clinton…When you do something you should not have done in the first place, which is put your public emails on a private server, you’ve got really nobody to blame but yourself when the firestorm erupts.’” (The Hill, 8/19/15)

Emily Schillinger spokeswoman to Speaker Boehner said, “this is a classic Clinton attempt to distract from her record of putting classified information at risk and jeopardizing our national security, all of which the FBI is investigating.”

Exposing her use of a personal email account, home-brewed server, and questionable handling of classified information are only a few gems unearthed by the Congressional investigation into Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack during her tenure as Secretary of State thus far.

After mounting public pressure, Hillary begrudgingly apologized (sort of… we think… it’s hard to tell) for EmailGate. Is she now not sorry (again), because the VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY MADE HER DO IT!!?!

But hey, if Clinton wants to make the case that people don’t trust her because Congress exposed her questionable handling of classified information, along with 30,000 emails about yoga, then by all means — you do you, Hillary. You do you.

Follow Kemberlee on Twitter @kemberleekaye

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