During his Sunday night interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon finally said out loud what many of us already knew: that Hillary Clinton is “not very bright.”

This was actually my favorite part of the interview because nothing is healthier for our culture than the truth, most especially a truth no one dares to speak out loud.

For 25 years, Madam Clinton has been in the public eye, and for 25 years we have been told time and again and again and again two whoppers: 1) Hillary is brilliant. 2) When you get to know her, Hillary is a warm, funny, vibrant real person.

We expect Democrats and leftwing activists to tell us this. What else are they going to say? My problem is that it has been the national media, those who pose as objective truth-tellers, who have been spreading and cementing this fable. It is those who wear the uniform of journalists who keep telling us that this bumbling, fumbling, tone deaf, two-time failure is, when you really get to know her, a dazzling personality wrapped around a super-smart brain.

Granted, I do not know Hillary Clinton. I’ve never met her, nor have I even seen her in person. Nevertheless…

COME. ON.

We are talking about 25 years in the public eye here, twenty-five freakin’ years of gaffes, whiffed opportunities, serial-humiliations, absurdly transparent lies, needless scandals, and epic fails.

The Hillary Clinton who clown-shoe’d her way on to the national stage 25 years ago with, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” (even though time has proved that is exactly who she is), is the exact same stunted-woman who, 25 years later, thought it was smart politics to attack half the country as a “basket of deplorables.”

Hillary Clinton’s public career has been one defined only by stepping on rakes.

From Whitewater to Benghazi.

From cattle futures to uranium.

From Travelgate to Emailgate.

From the “missing” Rose Law Firm billing records to 33,000 deleted emails.

From the speaking fees to the secret server.

From rape-denier to looting the White House.

From the Clinton Foundation to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

From “sniper fire” to “vast rightwing conspiracy” to “stayed at home and baked cookies” to “with a cloth” to Gandhi “ran a gas station” to “I ain’t no ways tired” to “dead broke” to, well, this.

This is not partisanship on my part. I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s brilliance. There is no question Chuck Schumer has plenty going on. Barack Obama is not the genius everyone says he is, but Barry’s still plenty smart. Even Nancy Pelosi has shown some true savvy.

Hillary Clinton is just dumb. Plain dumb. Not once during the quarter century that I have suffered under the oppression of her voice, her condescension, her awkward fumbles at being real, have I witnessed her porch lights come on. Not once have I said, There it is!

And all it would take is once.

I know what the rebuttal is: that dumb people don’t almost become president of these here United States. Let me respond to that in three ways…

1) No intellectually honest person will tell you Hillary Clinton would be where she is had she not married Bill. That is not a slam on women, plenty of whom have emerged from their husband’s shadow to distinguish themselves: Katharine Graham, Arianna Huffington, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, etc. Given a change of fate, we can see each one of these women succeeding in some way all on their own.

Hillary? No.

Senator Hillary Clinton? No way. New York has way too much political talent to waste on a stiff, awkward, brittle politician with zero people skills.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? All she did was log miles. Five years later no one, and I mean no one, not even her biggest supporters, can name a single accomplishment.

Democrat Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton? Don’t make me laugh.

2) If you trust me on nothing else, trust me on this. Having now served time in the worlds of entertainment and media, the dirty little secret of both is that naked ambition, driving persistence; unbridled, unscrupulous, shameless scraping and grasping allows many, many, many, too many marginal people to fail upwards.

Hillary Clinton might be a few clowns short of a circus, but she is pantsuited ambition personified. There is nothing she will not do to get what she wants, no person she will not destroy, no humiliation she will not suffer, no indignity she will not dignify. And going back to ancient Rome, the quality of naked ambition has always made up for so many others, including smarts.

3) The media. Hillary is a leftwing Democrat loathed by the media’s numero uno enemies: Republicans and everyday Americans. So of course the Sisterhood of the Andrea Mitchells and all those media metrosexuals who bow to feminist politics have propped her up over the years.

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To be clear, I am in no way saying that Hillary is a stupe. There is no question that in the same way Rain Man can count toothpicks, Hillary can booklearn. But native intelligence? Common sense? Being able to grasp a room, a situation, a people, a country? Yeah, no. She’s an idiot.

Without Bill, without the media, I think we all know where Hillary Clinton would be right at this very moment… Forever-tenured Professor Rodham sitting in a cluttered, smelly, Womyn’s Study office deep within the bowels of some Ivy League university; a bitter feminist still clinging to her one claim to fame, her time with the Watergate committee (before she was fired). In other words, she would be no one and nowhere , and even among like-minded colleagues, she’d be something of a joke…

Just like she is today.

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