It’s already widely regarded as Hillary Clinton’s worst moment yet in the two debates, and it’s going to get worse. After Bernie Sanders’ expected tirade against Wall Street and their political donations. Hillary climbed on a high, high horse indeed to play a 9/11 card against Sanders. After huffily insisting that Sanders was trying to “impugn my integrity,” Hillary then insisted that she gets lots of Wall Street donations because of her hard work in rebuilding after the terrorist attacks that hit Twin Towers. Oh … and women donate to her too, or something, Hillary added in the bizarre answer that Jazz noted yesterday:

Integrity? David Sirota and Andrew Perez put that in perspective, too. In an IBT review of Hillary’s campaign cash over the years, Sirota and Perez note that Hillary was a Wall Street favorite before 9/11, too:

In her 2000 U.S. Senate race, Clinton vacuumed in more than $1.1 million from the securities and investment industry, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That made her the third- largest recipient of Wall Street money of any member of Congress or congressional candidate running in that entire election cycle, which concluded 10 months before 9/11. The securities and investment sector was Clinton’s third-largest source of campaign cash in the 2000 cycle, after lawyers and retirees. In fact, four of Clinton’s top 10 campaign donors during the election were employees from major Wall Street banks Citigroup ($105,650), Goldman Sachs ($89,920), JP Morgan ($53,750) and UBS ($53,750). On top of that, employees of Credit Suisse gave her $47,500 and employees of Bear Stearns gave her $39,400. According to CRP data, Clinton in 2000 was, out of all U.S. Senate candidates that year, the No. 2 recipient of campaign cash from employees of hedge funds, the third-largest from employees of private equity firms, the fourth-largest from employees of commercial banks and the sixth-largest from employees of mortgage bankers and brokers. … In the months between Clinton’s election and the 9/11 attacks, her family benefited from big speaking fees from major Wall Street banks. According to federal financial disclosure forms, Bill Clinton was paid $125,000 by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in February 2001 — just weeks after leaving the White House — and was paid another $125,000 by Credit Suisse First Boston later that same month.

Let’s not forget that this was Hillary’s very first election, too — conducted while still First Lady. Could those Wall Street firms have had some ulterior motives for influence with a sitting president in the final year of his term? That’s what Sanders certainly meant to insinuate. Why not defend her Wall Street ties as a legitimate connection to the vast numbers of Americans invested in small, medium, and large corporations — a defense that would at least be truthful?

Instead, Hillary instead decided to spin yet another fabulist tale. And what exactly did Hillary do as a freshman Senator to rebuild the financial sector, and for which they’re still filling her coffers out of gratitude? Her party was out of power, both in the White House and in the Senate for most of that first term (except for the brief Jumping Jim Jeffords interregnum), and she was just one vote out of 100 among much more senior members of the upper chamber. The senior member was Chuck Schumer, a man with vast Wall Street ties and clearly the go-to member for the financial sector, then and now.

There are two reasons that Wall Street gives so heavily to Hillary. One, like everyone else on that side of the aisle, they are expecting the Clinton Restoration and want their chits to count when it arrives. Two, the rest of the Democratic Party has fallen sick with class-warfare fever, and they’ve got nowhere else to go. Rather than use that to go on offense and haul Democrats back to the center, Hillary invents herself as the savior of post-9/11 Wall Street.

Integrity.

On the gender card, oddly tossed into this answer, Salena Zito advises other Democrats to stop playing it:

In September, Clinton and U.S. Senate candidate Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, spoke for a combined hour on voter suppression and women’s reproductive rights at a Cleveland university. They told the small crowd of millenials, mostly women, that Republicans are “terrorists” and “extremist.” The response to all that rhetoric was confusion (many asked who Strickland was) and silence. The message simply did not resonate. … Back in the 2014 midterm elections, Democrats went full force to make the election all about women. They wasted so much time, money and oxygen on women’s body parts that they overcooked their scare tactics and lost the ability to persuade voters on what really mattered to them — which party would make government work for them. Americans still do not think that government works for them, and they have not benefited from the new economy. They are still looking for the candidate who will make those things happen. It seems pretty clear that such a person will have to do more than provoke gender and class warfare.

So it’s bad news for Bernie, too.