Perhaps Hillary Clinton ought to ponder the saying, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” First there was “gold star father” Khzir Khan, who, after excoriating Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, was discovered to be a Sharia law supporter who made money facilitating Muslim immigration into the United States. Now Clinton is using Venezuelan-born former beauty pageant winner Alicia Machado (shown) as a means to thump Trump, slamming the GOP nominee for supposedly “fat shaming” Machado 20 years ago. It turns out, however, that the ex-beauty queen has many reasons to feel shame. And though erstwhile corpulence isn’t among them, being an accomplice to attempted murder, having an out-of-wedlock child with a drug kingpin, and threatening a judge’s life may be.
The murder-related charge stems from a 1998 incident in Venezuela, where Machado was accused of driving the getaway car after her then-boyfriend, Juan Rodriguez Reggeti, tried to murder his brother-in-law in a revenge attack. The judge in the case, Maximiliano Fuenmayor, ruled that there was insufficient evidence to charge Machado — but the story didn’t end there.
After Judge Fuenmayor ordered that Reggeti be jailed as the main suspect in the case, he said, wrote the Hurriyet Daily News at the time, that “a woman identifying herself as Machado called him after the ruling and ‘said she would make sure, using her friendship with the president (Rafael Caldera), that my career as judge is ruined and then she would kill me.’ Fuenmayor, who reported the alleged threats to police, said he traced the caller through an incoming call identity function on his mobile telephone.”
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Reggeti, mind you, disappeared before police could apprehend him, further helping to create what the Hurriyet Daily News described as a “real-life Venezuela soap [opera].” The paper continued, “The scent of scandal now surrounding Machado has fueled a media frenzy not seen since former President Carlos Andres Perez was drummed out of office in 1993 to face corruption charges.”
Note, too, that when asked about this by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper on Wednesday (video below), Machado didn’t deny the charges but merely said, “You know, I have my past. Of course, everybody has — everybody has a past. And I’m no, uh — [as she put her hands together in a praying position] a saint girl.”
Referring to Trump’s citing of these allegations, Machado also stated, dismissively, “He can use whatever he wants to use. The point is, that happened 20 years ago.”
Of course, so did Trump’s calling her an “eating machine” — which Clinton now maintains is relevant to the campaign.
Machado’s rather unsaintly behavior didn’t end there, however. There was a 2006 Mexican Playboy photo shoot in which she became the only Miss Universe winner to pose nude. But this was tame compared to a 2005 episode of the Spanish reality TV show La Granja, where she had sex on camera with TV host Fernando Acaso — all while engaged to Philadelphia Phillies right fielder Bobby Abreu. The details of the episode are too sordid to publish here, but anyone interested can read them at the Daily Mail.
So, apparently, 2012 contraception queen Sandra Fluke, the erstwhile face of the “War on Women,” has lost her dubious title. Speaking of which, the Federalist astutely points out that Machado is the Fluke of 2016: a phony poster girl for “women’s rights” rolled out to buttress the Democrat nominee’s fortunes. For while Fluke was a savvy activist calculatingly advancing leftist causes and Barack Obama’s reelection bid, writes the Federalist, journalists
pretended that a fresh-faced little law student just happened to find herself in the middle of a media maelstrom. The media’s talking points matched those of the Obama administration-staffed public relations firm down from start to finish.
An innocent, random young woman was victimized by mean old Republican men. Sound familiar? It should.
We’re in the middle of the exact same phenomenon with Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe Donald Trump allegedly [according to Machado] called “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.” This time, they’re even cutting out the public relations firm middle men.
Hillary Clinton made Machado the centerpiece of a line of attack against Donald Trump during [last] Monday night’s debate.
Yet while anything Trump might have said pales in comparison to Machado’s sordid past, what he did say requires perspective. First, Trump at times appeared as the beauty queen’s sympathetic defender; for example, CNN quoted him as saying in 1997, “Some people when they have pressure eat too much. Like me. Like Alicia.” Moreover, as the Federalist also pointed out, “There were calls to take away her crown but the pageant encouraged her instead to get her weight down. Trump’s supposedly horrific remarks were made in the context of a generally jovial atmosphere. CNN’s report ended with Trump telling a ‘rowdy pool of reporters’ that ‘A lot of you folks have weight problems. I hate to tell you.’”
But Machado’s real problems seem to involve not gluttony, but lust — and the company she keeps. Indicating that her affinity for bad boys didn’t end with on-the-run criminal Juan Rodriguez Reggeti, Machado is said to have had her now eight-year-old, out-of-wedlock daughter with incarcerated Mexican drug lord, Jose Gerardo “El Indio” Alvarez. And while Machado denies this, the Daily Caller informs that when “Alvarez, an enforcer linked to both the Beltran Leyva Cartel and the Los Negros criminal organization, was captured in 2010, multiple Mexican news networks unearthed his relationship with the Venezuelan beauty queen and current Hillary Clinton surrogate, reports Univision.”
So perhaps Machado ought to join Clinton in pondering, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Yet there’s a far larger point here than what Trump did or did not say 20 years ago about a beauty queen or the details of her-less-than princely character. To wit: Why would Clinton tout being supported by such a person? Was she unaware of Machado’s past? And, if she and her team did such a poor job vetting Machado (and, for that matter, Khzir Khan), can she be trusted to appoint cabinet members? Just as significantly, could her administration be trusted to vet the hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants that — in an expansion of Obama’s misguided policies — she has indicated she’d import to our shores?
Then again, maybe Clinton knows that not only will the mainstream media hide Machado’s past, but that those pointing it out — as happened with Fluke critic Rush Limbaugh in 2012 — will be demonized as engaging in “slut shaming.”
Of course, this has already occurred. And if it works, it says it all. If our society no longer accepts that a past such as Machado’s is a legitimate source of shame, then perhaps Hillary Clinton is precisely the leader we deserve.
Photo of Alicia Machado: AP Images
