After all these many pre-election months of watching news programs; panel discussions; and Sunday news shows on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and Fox News, as well as talk radio, the burning question is, as more and more is revealed about the Clintons unscrupulous ways of being by WikiLeaks, Project Veritas, and the FBI, why do the people around the Clintons stay?  With each passing day, the breadth and depth of their duplicity, their venality is made provably clearer, and yet the same people show up day after day, night after night defending them: Bill Burton, Julie Roginsky, Lanny Davis, Robert Zimmerman, Dana Bash, Gloria Borger, James Carville, Andrea Mitchell, Jessica Tarlov, Don Lemon, Coco Soodek, Donna Brazile, Maryanne Walsh, Richard Fowler, Geraldo Rivera, Austan Goolsbee, and others.  The list is long and mystifying.  It is not possible that all these people are as shamelessly corrupt as the Clintons are, and yet they go on national television and support them.

How do all these people continue to maintain their allegiance to and defend Hillary Clinton and the criminal enterprise that is the Clinton Foundation?  The Clintons have violated so many laws, state and federal, and yet they continue to assume they are above the law because they have gotten away with breaking it for over thirty years.  As proof of the lying, the cheating, the selling of the State Department, and all the underhanded dirty tricks seeps out, how do their on-screen acolytes rationalize supporting a woman who is so obviously morally and ethically challenged?

"Since the narcissist suffers from a severe deficit of conscience, their morals and ethics are mobile and adaptive; their rules for living are based strictly on the end game, the bottom line.  The question is not whether they will cross the legal, ethical, or moral line but when."  –Linda Martinez-Lewi, Ph.D.

It is said of toxic narcissists that they manipulate two kinds of people: those who do not see the abuse and those who purposefully ignore the abuse.  Who among all those telegenic defenders cannot see the truth of who these people are?  Podesta's emails are a virtual road map, as Thomas Frank wrote in an already famous Guardian article that lays out how this country is being run by a small cadre of wealthy, inter-connected elites whose mission in life is only to preserve their own power and wealth.  This crowd helps each other, each other's kids and families.  They cover for each other, lie for each other, defend each other when legal problems arise because so many of them are lawyers. 

What is stunning in the Podesta emails is that there is absolutely nothing in any of them that mentions any concern about the country, its citizens, its productivity, economy, or culture.  The emails are only about winning, by any means necessary.  They discuss "dumping emails" an hour after the news of Hillary's private server broke.  They speak about how to get more money out of donors, how to deceive and manipulate the media, and which of them is in their pocket, and how to take out their opposition.  The videos show them planning violence against Trump supporters in order to blame them for it.  The people represented in those email chains are pretty much as vile as the Clintons themselves, self-serving narcissists all.  So how do we explain their TV proponents' commitment to the lawless Clintons?  They are not officially part of the Clinton campaign team, but still they prostrate themselves on the altar of Clintonism, no matter how much evidence proves that it is deeply corrupt.

Donald Trump was and remains a difficult candidate for many Americans to accept, but they should consider the alternative.  By now every moderately aware citizen of this nation must know that Hillary Clinton is a classic narcissist who has devoted her life to two things, gaining power and amassing wealth.  She cares not one iota about our country or its people.  Trump, on the other hand, a narcissist himself, is a political outsider who clearly does love the country.  He has spent his life building things and creating jobs; Hillary has never built or produced a single thing in her life.  She has become fabulously wealthy by selling access to the power she has attained, which has, in turn, made her friends fabulously wealthy, too.  Surprisingly, it is Trump's brand of narcissism, the brash "I don't quit" kind, that won him the nomination.  He pushes back against the well oiled Democratic dirty-tricks machine that the Clintons have spent so many years perfecting.

In her book, Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story, FDR’s wife wrote: "Will people ever be wise enough to refuse to follow bad leaders or to take away the freedom of other people?"  It was a good question.  But judging by the vast numbers of people who still champion Hillary Clinton, we have a long way to go to achieve the wisdom Mrs. Roosevelt wondered about.  Sadly, the ability to recognize narcissistic psychopathy when it is so painfully obvious is lost on millions of people, especially those who are willing to protect and defend it on television all day long. 

Perhaps, driven to the limelight, they have all made a Faustian bargain with themselves.  They have yet to realize that when the Clintons fall, and they will, they will fall as well.  Donna Brazile has just learned that painful lesson; Huma Abudin is learning it this very week.  With the flip of a switch, she is suddenly one of HRC's "staffers," no longer her "closest aide of twenty years."  It has yet to be determined if Huma is a victim or a culprit.  Either way, she has none of the wisdom Eleanor hoped the American people would acquire.  Nor do all those Hillary promoters who think they are bright in her reflected light.

It will be a dark day in America if Hillary is elected, because she is the most malevolent person to ever run for the office of president.