The Left Turns on Colin Powell

Colin Powell taught Hillary Clinton how to hide her emails. She should have returned the favor and taught him how to Bleachbit the unsavory ones. Alas, she didn’t, and now a man once highly respected in progressive circles everywhere has been reduced to a smoldering pile of deplorable hashtags.

There’s no group out there defending him, and #LeaveColinAlone won’t be trending anytime soon. Now, all Powell can do is watch as the flames of scandal consume his last remaining political bridge.

Seconds after the Clinton-bashing emails were released, liberal opinion writers suddenly remembered that Colin Powell laid out the case for invading Iraq.

How did it come to this?

What if Sean Hannity had claimed from the beginning to be a liberal Democrat? Then, instead of saying things like, “Obama is trampling on the Constitution,” he could say things like, “I’m a progressive and I loved Lyndon Johnson, but I think Obama is trampling on the Constitution.” Then, all the conservatives could point a finger at Sean Hannity and say, “See! Even Lyndon-Johnson-loving liberal Sean Hannity thinks it! It has to be true!”

It’s an infiltration technique. A game of political spectrum camouflaging that I call Scarborough-ing (because “Morning Joe-ing” was too clunky).

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Colin Powell pretty much had Scarboroughing down to an art form. The media gushed over him even though he was a perfect candidate for their ire — Bush’s secretary of state. Reagan’s national security adviser. But they overlook all that. They love him. Why? Any Republican who is willing to denigrate other Republicans gets a pedestal. It’s the sort of liberal math you can do in your head.

And that’s what Scarboroughing is all about. The liberal elites allow you to rub elbows with them because you look down on all the right working-class people.

But now, in one fell computer hack, all the street cred he’s spent years building up with progressives and the mainstream media has been blown to bits because the principle rule of Scarboroughing is: You do not embarrass those who are propping you up. And Colin Powell’s hacked emails did just that. They eviscerated Hillary Clinton.

Salon writer Helen Digby Parton called him a “catty Real Housewife of the Potomac.”

On NYmag.com, Jessica Roy wrote that Colin Powell is “quite similar to your bitchiest friend.”

In the emails, Colin Powell called Hillary ambitious — not regular ambitious, but the “unbridled” kind. You know, the now-what-to-do-with-King-Duncan kind. He called her “greedy” and “nontransformational.” He said everything she “touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”

Seconds after the Clinton-bashing emails were released, liberal opinion writers suddenly remembered that Colin Powell laid out the case for invading Iraq. Suddenly, the words Iran-Contra are popping up in Colin Powell articles for the first time in ages.

Looks like the phrase “highly respected in both parties,” the media’s go-to Powell descriptor, is about to be so out-of-style that not even a millennial hipster with gauged ears and a Che Guevara T-shirt can resurrect it.

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The emails are hugely embarrassing for Colin Powell, not only due to his brutal criticisms of Hillary Clinton, but because of the level of immaturity apparent in them. On a scale ranging from “Kardashian Text Messages” at one end to “Correspondence of a Former Secretary of State” at the other, it was much more of the former.

There should be a game called Kardashian or Diplomat that challenges the player to read a quote and decide if it’s from an episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” — or from Colin Powell’s emails.

Quote: “I had to throw a mini tantrum at a Hampton’s party to get their attention.”

Answer: Colin Powell’s emails

Quote: “They are idiots and spent force peddling a book that ain’t going nowhere.”

Answer: Colin Powell’s emails

Quote: “[engaging in relations with] bimbos.”

Answer: Colin Powell’s emails

The real shame is that Powell never had to burn the progressive bridge he’s been working so hard on. They were his private emails; Bleachbit would have been 100 percent legal.