Though the mainstream media may appear ready to break out the party streamers and noisemakers for Hillary’s long-awaited coronation, being a Hillary shill (a convincing one, at least) is an extremely tough row to hoe in 2016.

Consider this.

Even if (and this is a huge if, mind you) Hillary had no intention of wrongdoing in using her private email server to transmit classified State Department correspondence, she would, were she any ordinary American, be universally deemed unfit to even take credit card applications by phone, so careless has she proven herself to be with confidential information.

Take all politics out of it, and there is no reasonable refutation of that previous statement.  Even the most ardent Democrat supporters would be reticent to give their Social Security number to a person who had forwarded such sensitive information willy-nilly over unprotected email servers in the past, regardless of whether she had seen any harm in her doing so.

Gross negligence or a malicious circumvention of protocol, selling this woman as a trustworthy figurehead in consideration to this one fact alone should be impossible.  Her character flaws are so obvious that even the left’s celebrity ambassador du jour, Colin Kaepernick, could not help throwing jabs her way amid his recent publicity stunt. 

In a desperate grab for a relevance that overshadows his descent into NFL irrelevance, Kaepernick (the adopted child of two loving white parents and a current one-percenter with a $100 million NFL contract, just in case anyone’s keeping score on the scale of acceptable rationales for social grievance) committed to a public show of disrespect to the American flag, promising to sit during the pregame national anthem celebrations until such time that he deems this country worthy of his respect.

It angered millions of fans, but it made him a darling among the leftist ranks that lionize stupid and immature acts of protest among sports celebrities.  Remember the St. Louis Rams players who entered the field to immortalize the now-indisputably fabricated narrative about “Hands up, Don’t Shoot!”?  Same stuff.  This time, it’s still the fiction peddled by the Black Lives Matter movement -- Colin is just trying to extract some of that social currency for himself.

But some mainstream media pundits aren’t yet ready to induct him to the pantheon of civil rights heroes.

Over at CNN, Clay Cane had “immediately applauded Kaepernick for using the art of protest to spark a national dialogue.”  But all that good will engendered by the act was squandered when he directed his protest toward the Democrats’ sacred cow.

“But here’s where Kaepernick lost me,” Cane writes.  “His remarks to the press segued into a rant of the type you hear from the conservative right. He said: ‘I mean, you have Hillary who’s called black teens or black kids super predators.  You have Donald Trump who’s openly racist.  I mean, we have a presidential candidate [Hillary Clinton] who’s deleted emails and done things illegally and is a presidential candidate.  That doesn’t make sense to me, because if that were any other person, you’d be in prison.’”

Oh, my.  That one’s nowhere in the left’s playbook, Colin.  In terms suitable for a mainstream media journalist’s central programming, this kind of commentary simply does not compute.

Cane goes on to call Kaepernick’s statements about Hillary “wrong, offensive, and uninformed.” 

But Hillary did call black kids super predators.  She’s acknowledged that she did.  Hillary did go out of her way to eviscerate all traces of thousands of emails (many of which she was federally subpoenaed to provide intact) such that, as Trey Gowdy put it, “even God can’t read them.” Again, we have proof that she did just this. So where is Kaepernick wrong or uninformed on these issues?

And Kaepernick is certainly not wrong in stating that any ordinary American who were guilty of doing such things would possibly be in prison, but certainly wouldn’t be considered for the presidency.  

So since Kaepernick isn’t wrong about anything he said about Hillary, the remainder of Cane’s article is a screed of babbling thoughts and non-sequiturs that are common of the mainstream media defense of Hillary. “Donald Trump isn’t even in the same category as former President George W. Bush or former Vice President Dick Cheney.” “We cannot let Trump be president.” “Clinton apologized….  I, my friends, my family, and my neighbors cannot afford a Trump presidency.” And so on.

It’s funny to me that, had Kaepernick been more succinct with his commentary by saying only that “Donald Trump is openly racist” and leaving Hillary alone, Clay Cane might have spent his time and creative talents celebrating Kaepernick as a hero to be emulated, rather than musing about the inappropriate messaging.  Funnier still that Kaepernick is now caught between the patriotic right’s ire and a somewhat tepid support from the left because a) the issue is contentious even among Democrats and independents, and b) he has now insulted the Democrat Grand Poobah.

But the simple point is this.  Even a leftist loon with a mind full of Black Lives Matter talking points, who really believes the ridiculous fantasy that there are thousands of racist cops out there every night hunting black kids, can still rattle off indisputable facts signifying that Hillary Clinton is unfit to be president of the United States.  Everyone knows these facts to be true, and everyone is aware that the facts signify that she is, at the very least, irresponsible and dishonest.  At most, she is corrupt and a criminal. 

Hence, we have the media’s problem with stumping for Hillary. She is the proverbial sow’s ear that can never be a silk purse, no matter how many times the media tells you otherwise. 

Even if we take all the aforementioned (and undeniably incriminating) information out of play, Hillary is still an extremely tough sell.  As jobs go, promoting a Hillary in 2016 is clearly far more daunting a task than, say, promoting an Obama in 2008. 

Obama was young, hip, and represented a change from the unpopular status quo.  He tapped the ideological pulse of the youthful as well as the aged-hopefuls who loved his rhetoric about bridging America’s partisan divide. 

Hillary is old, square, and could not be more representative of the unpopular status quo.  She taps into… well, not the youthful.  To a large degree, the youthful left energetically supported Bernie Sanders with his promises of abolishing college debt and absolving them of any responsibility for their own future.  And the aged-hopefuls are realizing that the partisan divide has now become an unbridgeable chasm, and that they’re destined to pay ever-increasing taxes and healthcare premiums to finance the livelihoods, healthcare, and education for everyone whom the left side of the divide demands that they finance -- whoever they may be, even if they’re currently living in other countries and wish to violate American laws to get here.

Hillary’s made herself scarce on the campaign trail. I’m no campaign consultant, but if I were hers, I’d have to say that’s the safest of paths.  She only hurts herself by being in the limelight.  Not only because she appears literally unfit, given to falls, coughing spells, and lapses of mental acuity, but because she’s so incredibly uncharismatic. The fewer opportunities for her to cackle wildly at serious questions, make inappropriate jokes about her incredible lack of discretion with classified information, or attempt to court the black vote with an “I don’t feel no ways tired” the better, I’d say.

But it’s plain as day.  Hillary is painfully unfit to be the president.  Presenting Trump as a doomsday mechanism is therefore what the media is relegated to do, for the simple reason that their preferred candidate has little more to offer Americans than name recognition, and the two X chromosomes which might make her presidency historic.

William Sullivan can be followed on Twitter.