‘Washington political elite bunch of snarky, back-stabbing kids’

If ordinary people have certain perceptions of Secretary Clinton that turn out to be shared by people who know her well, it tends to validate our opinions, political cartoonist and author Ted Rall told RT.

Hillary Clinton's White House campaign has suffered an unexpected blow from someone who says he's a close friend.

A newly released trove of leaked emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell leaves the presidential hopeful with a damning character reference.

RT: “A 70-year person with... unbridled ambition, greedy... a husband still d*cking bimbos” - not the kind of language one would expect from one former Secretary of State referring to another former top diplomat. Does that surprise you that one of Clinton's friends describes her like that? Do you think the emails reflect Powell's real attitude?

Ted Rall: If you have been following Washington, you’ve probably picked up a sense that the way people act in public and before the cameras isn’t anything close to the way they are in real life. In the real world the Washington Beltway political elite are a bunch of snarky, back-stabbing little kids. And they have it out for each other and just like the rest of us they love to gossip and… they are passionate about their work.

For me, the content of the Colin Powell hacked emails is not at all surprising. I would say that I probably would vote for the secret Colin Powell I never knew existed, the one who is honest and tells it like it is. I wish that Colin Powell had been around back in 2003, instead of the one we saw at the UN with the fake vial of anthrax urging us to go to war when he knew that he was lying. I suspect that he really is at least a political ally of Hillary Clinton and that doesn’t mean that - as all of us know who have friends who are annoying sometimes - he may even be friends with her, but frustrated by her lackluster campaign abilities. He’s not the only to have noticed that the charm fairy seems to have visited her husband, but never her….

RT: Some would say digging into this kind of private emails is not a quite ethical. What's your take on that? Doesn't this kind of leak help to fire things up in the elections?

TR: Hacking into people’s private emails is completely unethical. I wouldn’t want it to happen to me. You wouldn’t want it to happen to you. I am not happy at all with what these hackers did. I wish they hadn’t.

Once these things have happened from a news perspective, news organizations certainly have every right to report them. They sure do make things more interesting and they certainly give us something to talk about. But more to the point, it gives us some insight. Because if we as ordinary citizens are observing the US political process this way and we have certain perceptions of Secretary Clinton that turn out to be shared by people who know her well, it tends to validate our opinions.

RT: Who should we thank for these leaks? Now it seems the MSM is pointing a finger directly at Russia, how justified is such attitude?

TR: I think in the US the idea that all hackers are Russian hackers is something that goes back to at least the late 1990s, and it hasn’t really ever gone away. And certainly since the rhetoric has ramped up against President Vladimir Putin and the dispute over Crimea and Ukraine, the rhetoric has got more heated. But there is no evidence that has been presented whatsoever as to who is responsible. This could be anybody.