Sandra Fluke's plaintive moaning (to advance the Democrats' plan to shove Obamacare down our gullets) about the difficulties college girls have trying to pay for contraceptives ran its course. Indeed, Obamacare itself is on its last legs. Like Cindy Sheehan, Fluke’s now on the back shelf in the left’s propaganda storage room. The Clinton team searched for someone new -- this time to push its stale Republicans-are-misogynists theme and settled upon Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe from Venezuela. Since summer they’ve been grooming her for this starring role in a Clinton campaign lacking in appealing issues. Without apparently vetting her, they set her up with an interview in the Guardian and arranged a photo spread with Cosmopolitan, the magazine for entry level young women looking to climb the ladder of success through bosses’ bedrooms using diets, expensive grooming, and Cosmo seduction techniques. The story was embargoed till this week when the publications let loose and Clinton super PAC Priorities USA created and promoted the story to the media courtiers.

This year’s appeal to such dimwits and overweight women voters -- through the Machado fandango -- is that Trump “fat shamed” the gal -- another un-PC act in media circles where half-dressed sylphs in revealing cleavage and plenty of leg read the news and heavily made up slender 13-year-old girls in bikinis grace magazine covers.

Unfortunately, few outside the Internet know the story is 100% false, and there’s plenty of contemporaneous evidence to prove that -- even if one assumes this takes precedence over Hillary’s and Obama’s failures in substantive matters. (I really do think journalism students should be required to take a course called “How to Google”.) The New York Times, by way of example, ran this headline “Shocked and Angry: Alicia Machado, a Miss Universe Mocked by Donald Trump”.

Here’s what turned up about Miss Machado and her treatment by Trump

1. Prior to being named Miss Universe in 1997, she had an eating disorder, anorexia and bulimia. She conceded as much then.

After she was named Miss Universe she packed on 60 pounds in a matter of months. Whether or not you care if women are fat, her contract, as is normal for beauty queens, required her to remain beautiful and slender and she was about to lose her crown. Trump didn’t shame her -- instead he tried to help her lose weight and retain her crown. You can believe these sources or your own eyes -- here’s the contemporaneous video showing Machado cheering on Trump as he helps her lose weight and fat shames the reporters who had been attacking her for putting on weight. 

In any event were I teaching in journalism school, I’d make How to Google a mandatory course because it turns out that after the Miss Universe gig, Machado's life took such a turn as to raise questions about how she attained citizenship under 8 CFR Sec 316 “Good Moral Character”.

Fausta, who knows a thing or two about Venezuela, details Machado’s post-title behavior:

Machado:

• allegedly drove the getaway car when her then-boyfriend shot a man,
• threatened to kill the judge who found the same then-boyfriend guilty of attempted murder,
• had sex on TV with a fellow cast member of Spain’s version of Big Brother, La Granja, while engaged to MLB player Bobby Abreu,
• gave birth to a daughter allegedly sired by drug lord José Gerardo Álvarez, “el Indio” -- who was connected to both the Beltrán Leyva and Los Negros cartels,
• and her daughter’s christening was attended Beltrán Leyva cartel bigwigs Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the “Jefe de Jefes”, his brother Héctor Beltrán, and hitman Edgar Valdés Villarreal, “La Barbie” (related posts here).

By the way, what happened to the guy who first revealed the information on the christening party?  He was killed while having lunch at a cafe prior to when he was scheduled to testify on the Beltrán Leyva case.

In the words of the great Mark Steyn in another context: 

"This kind of super-fake-o lame-ass nothing controversy that you dowager duchesses of the press are having the vapors about is precisely why the political process has fallen into such disrepute and your own industry is bankrupt. No real person cares about this "scandal". So, unless you've got a question about the economy or immigration or something real, screw off outta here." 

With this week’s stupid distraction out of the way, let me highlight just a few of the reasons why voters have every reason to treat the political elite with contempt and seek to displace them with an outsider with executive experience and a respect for the bottom line.

The deputy secretary of State testified before Congress that the administration doesn’t have a plan for dealing with the chaos in Syria -- something directly attributable to the topping of Gadhafi at Clinton’s hand and our support for various thuggish terrorist groups in Syria:  

Read his gibberish in response to a question by Senator Corker:

“What is Plan B? Give me the elements of Plan B.”

“Two things, again. The consequences I think to Russia as well as to the regime will begin to be felt as a result of Plan A not being implemented,” Blinken reiterated. “Second, as I indicated the President has asked all of the agencies to put forward options, some familiar, some new, that we are very actively reviewing.”

“When we are able to work through those in the days ahead, we will be able to come back and talk about them,” he admitted.

“Let me just say what we already know,” Corker said in closing. “There is no Plan B.”

I don’t have a plan either, but I’m not paid not to have one.

Ignorance was also on display when Jeh Johnson was questioned about how 800 -- or was it 1800? -- aliens to be deported were granted citizenship by mistake:

He told Congress he didn’t have the exact number of those granted citizenship in error or how many were from countries known to be terrorist havens.

As for the “vetting of “refugees” of which Hillary plans to bring even more tens of thousands in this country, we had an eye-opener this week when Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) grilled Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Population, Refugees, and Migrants of the U.S. Department of State Simon Henshaw in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. We learned there really is no vetting.

Sessions: “Do you take into consideration the applicant’s proficiency in English or even their literacy with regard to the country from which they come?”

Henshaw: “Our decisions to bring in refugees are based on their vulnerabilities.”

Sessions: “Do you make any inquiry about practices that we reject in the United States like female genital mutilation? Do you say, ‘do you believe in that and when you come to the United States will you comply with the laws of the United States on that kind of question?’”

Henshaw: “On all questions, we make it clear to refugees that we are a nation of laws and that they need to comply with our laws.”

Sessions: “But you don’t ask them whether they would comply with that law?”

Henshaw: “I can’t answer that question I don’t know.”

Indeed, we learned learned from Leon Rodriquez, director of Citizenship  and Immigration Services at DHS, that a recipe for fraud is built into the process:

“Mr. Rodriguez,” Cruz interrupted, “it’s a very simple question… Is it true or false that the testimony of the applicant alone can be sufficient for approval?”

Rodriguez hedged until Cruz finally secured an answer.

“I am acknowledging that yes, testimony can be the basis for the grant of a refugee, but it needs to be tested against other information that we know -- about the country conditions, at a minimum,” he said. 

It’s an administration whose idiocy and word salad pronouncements would seem to have been created by the late author Joseph Heller.

This week’s capper was FBI director James Comey’s admission that he didn’t know why the Department of Justice granted immunity to Hillary’s accomplices in her illegal use and scrubbing (even while under subpoenas to produce) of her private email service and communications -- an act by which Attorney General Lynch effectively granted Hillary herself immunity from prosecution. That he still sits as head of the FBI is a mark of his moral cowardice.

No wonder, Hillary’s team -- the team that promises to give us more of the same -- is desperate for sexy diversions.