'Democratic Party machine, not fake news, caused Clinton rout'

US Democrats are wrong to lay the blame on fake news for the crushing defeat their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, suffered at the hands of Republican candidate Donald Trump on November 8,  according to Myles Hoenig, an American political analyst and activist.

Some Democrats, including President Barack Obama, have argued that  Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump, the president-elect, because of the spread of fake news online against her in the run-up to Election Day.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump, rejected the claims, saying that “a little self-awareness would do for a team that is blaming everybody but themselves for this.”

“What are the Clinton campaign, the DNC and the White House saying? ‘Clinton, a stellar candidate ran a stellar campaign but fake news brought her down’? Other than news that Bill Clinton had a black child, what fake news was really put out there against her?” Hoenig asked.

“Stories abound regarding the corruption within the Clinton Foundation, her emails, etc., and although no charges have been pressed against them, for a variety of reasons, all have been journalistically sound.”

Hoenig said, “It’s the role of a journalist to ‘make burgers out of sacred cows’ and that the Clintons were such easy targets with so much ammunition for the media, most things that came out were negative because, well, frankly, she was a very negative candidate.”

“Trump wasn’t spared. In spite of all the free air time the media gave to him, rarely was any of it positive. If there was any ‘fake’ news on him, it didn’t matter as he won the election. James Carville once said, ‘winners grin; losers spin,’” he added.

“But let’s look at what is fake news out there that has had a major impact not just on campaigns but everyone’s life in general. I would also classify fake news as any news item written or spoken for the purposes of persuasion when there is little evidence to back it up,” he stated.

“Remember the Maine? We went to war in the Caribbean in 1898 over a manufactured attack on a ship in the Havana harbor,” he said.

“Skip to the Gulf of Tonkin. An imaginary attack on an American warship gave the Johnson Administration the justification for the bloody, imperial war against the Vietnamese people,” he stated.

“The latest Houthi attack on American military ships in the Persian Gulf is now quietly being attributed to a radar glitch, yet it justified in the American press the need to join Saudi Arabia in its slaughtering of the people of Yemen,” the analyst further said.

“Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction. As President Bush later joked about not finding any, nearly the entire industry used this fake news as evidence of the need to engage in regime change in Iraq and turn the entire region into a war zone and propping up Takfiri terrorists, ISIL and others,” he noted.

“So all this talk about fake news doing in the Clinton campaign is only a dodge for the real reason for her loss. She represented status quo. She represented corruption at the highest levels of government and party. She represented business as usual,” he added.

“That Sanders and Trump would catch on like fire, filling stadiums while Clinton couldn’t fill a school’s gym during the campaign, ought to have awaken even the effective Democratic party operatives to the fact that their candidate was not likely to win,” he continued.

“Yes, she won a plurality but with both of them garnering such low numbers relative to past elections, the Democrats had no one but themselves to blame,” Hoenig concluded. 

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