Like many who dismiss MSNBC as nothing more that a Clinton News Network mouthpiece, I wasn't watching "Morning Joe" this past Friday when co-host Mika Brzezinski owned up that the Clinton campaign had tried to yank her off the air.  I picked up the story online from the New York Daily News, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and Fox News.  

'I'll just say it,' Brzezinski declared. 'NBC got a call from the [Clinton] campaign. Like I had done something that was journalistically inappropriate or something and needed to be pulled off the air.'

'I mean, think about that! That's just - that's shooting the wrong messenger.'

Brzezinski didn't say who had made the call to the MSNBC brass, which came in the campaign's closing days.

But she recalled being critical of 'arrogance' coming from Clintonworld, where long-time loyalists considered Trump a vulgarian political novice and believed the former secretary of state was unbeatable.

'I was concerned the campaign was not understanding that perhaps there was an arrogance,' Brzezinski said Friday.

'They needed to sort of get off their high horse and understand that this isn't over.' That, she said, is when the Clinton camp tried to silence her.

Scarborough sympathized with his co-host.

'By the way, Mika,' he said, 'there were also people surrounding the campaign that tried to tell the campaign it was in trouble. Those people were shut out.'

'And here we are,' Brzezinski added.

We're supposed to conclude from this revelation that Clinton would have won if only she'd listened to Mika Brzezinski!

I'm not holding my breath for an analysis by the MSM listing the reasons Hillary Clinton got trounced.  It had nothing to do with "failure to communicate," to quote a famous line from Cool Hand Luke.  Americans by the tens of millions understood perfectly well what a Clinton presidency would mean, and they rejected it emphatically.

It's important to put Brzezinski's revelation in the proper context. What the Clinton campaign tried but failed to do is but a mild version of a familiar practice.  Totalitarian regimes routinely use vicious tactics to silence opposition.  Had Brzezinski dared to speak up in Soviet Russia, for example, her body would have been found in the woods somewhere with a bullet in the back of the head.  Come to think of it, Putin isn't exactly a friend of critical journalism either, nor are the communist owners of today's China.  Iran's Politburo of turbaned mullahs is not any different.

What happened to Brzezinski is but a preview of what life would be like under a Clinton administration.  Had this disaster come to pass, we would surely have witnessed attempts to stifle media criticism eventually as heavy-handed as Stalin's and Hitler's.  There is nothing subtle about the Clinton Machine.  They play for keeps.

Brzezinski should thank Americans for choosing Trump over Clinton.  But I'm not holding my breath for an upcoming episode of Morning Joe during which Brzezinski expresses such gratitude.  After all, 2020 is not too far off.  The Democrats will soon pick up the pieces of this year's debacle, and the MSM will once again be expected to labor mightily and long to help pull the party's standard bearer across the finish line.  It will be "déjà vu all over again," to quote Yogi Berra.