Hillary Tells Us What Happened

I am not sure that it’s time for a celebration, but Hillary Clinton’s memoir is on sale today. I have not read it. I do not plan to read it. I suspect you feel exactly the same way.

In her memoir Hillary explains how she lost an election that she should have won easily, against a candidate who had no political experience whatever. How did she snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory? Not to traffic in clichés, but isn’t that what she and Barack Obama did in Iraq and in Syria and in Egypt and in Libya.

For my part the most intriguing part of her title, What Happened, is the absence of a question mark. Hillary does not question what happened. She insists that she is going to tell us what happened. It isn’t the same thing.

By now everyone but Hillary knows what happened. Even those who occupy the political left know that she blew it. She was an awful candidate running on an empty resume. Besides, she wasn’t really, in the immortal words of Barack Obama, likeable enough. In truth, she wasn’t likeable at all.

Better yet, the most amusing part of the campaign was Obama’s suggestion that she was the most qualified candidate in American history. The statement was so obviously absurd that it became an unsubtle dismissal.

As I am sure you know, Hillary did manage to say that she takes complete and total responsibility for her loss. It’s called paying lip service to something that she does not believe. It reminds me of Janet Reno. Remember Waco? Remember the way that Janet Reno’s FBI incinerated the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas? Remember all the men, women and children who died there?

In the aftermath of that holocaust, Janet Reno appeared before a Congressional committee and broke down in tears explaining how she took responsibility for the catastrophe. But then, what happened? Exactly nothing. If you take responsibility you pay a price. You resign from office. You retire from public life for a decent interval.

If you say you take responsibility and go back to work as though nothing had happened… it means that your apology is insincere and that you are a fraud.

Anyway, for the record, and without any real evidence, I suspect that the reigning genie behind the Clinton administration’s Waco policy was Hillary herself.

So, Hillary tells us that she accepts full personal responsibility for her failed election campaign. And then she goes on to blame everyone else. Not only that, but she wants you to buy her book, thus enriching her beyond measure for having botched every job she has ever held.

Keep in mind, the media was not exactly carrying water for her opponent. It was on her side. It was vigorously and forcefully on her side. It had already crowned her the victor. She had already crowned herself the victor. She had been measuring the drapes in the White House.

But then, along came James Comey. You remember, it was the same James Comey who had exonerated her for her criminal activities… before he sort of changed his mind.

And not just James Comey. She got bad advice from Barack Obama. She was undermined by Bernie Sanders. Heck, compared with Bernie she looked old and frumpy. If only, if only.

The Sanders boomlet had not allowed her to unify her support in time. Does she mention that the Democratic National Committee did everything it could to enhance her candidacy while undermining Sanders? I suspect that she does not.

It doesn’t stop there. Hillary was undermined by Wikileaks, by the Podesta emails, by the private email server that she had kept in her residence, by the Russians, and, hold your breath now… by misogyny and sexism. What about transphobia? How did she forget that?

And, we recall, little woman that she was, she was so thoroughly intimidated by the Donald in one of their debates that she allowed him to hover over her. She could not bring herself to perform even the most perfunctory gesture to dismiss his presence. George W. had done it to Al Gore. Hillary, tough and strong empowered feminist that she is… choked.

Naturally, since Hillary has never been a stickler for the truth, she failed to mention that she had wandered into his space. It reminds you of her failure to remember, during the 2008 campaign, that she had not, as she claimed, come under fire in Bosnia.

Funnily enough, when Hillary complains about all the bad advice she received, she never mentions that she could have rejected it. She could have weighed and measured it all and then chosen not to accept it. But, she did accept it. Thus, the fault is hers, for being weak and dishonest.

From all I can tell the only person Hillary does not blame is… Bill Clinton. We do not know whether Bubba offered any advice during the campaign. One suspects that he did. One suspects that he offered very good advice. Yet, while Hillary bowed down to bad advice, she probably rejected Bubba’s advice… because she did not want to appear to be his puppet. Considering that she owed the entirety of her political career to her husband, she apparently chose the wrong time to pretend to be independent.

As for the sexism and misogyny, the truth remains. If Hillary had not been a female and if she had not been married to Bill Clinton she would never, ever have been considered for public office. On her own she accomplished next to nothing. That is the real reason why people did not vote for her.

People, even liberal New York women, despised her. They did not consider that she was advancing the cause. They believed that she was diminishing the cause by suggesting that having XX chromosomes was somehow a quality that transcended all job qualifications. She was an insult to all the women who have worked their way up the ranks, who have accomplished great and not-so-great things.... not on the basis of their husband’s name.

Worse yet, Hillary lost the election because she imagined that the American people owed it to her. Think about the sacrifice she made, marrying Bill Clinton. She had given her life to make Bill Clinton president. Now, it was time for America to pay her back. Thus, she did not need to work at it. The stench of entitlement hung over her campaign.

Some of us suggested that Donald Trump did not have the relevant background or experience to do the job of president. It was not a very hard call. And yet, he was running against a candidate who was not only incompetent, but who also was a manifest fraud. No one could ignore the corruption surrounding Hillary.

And, of course, women hated Hillary because they thought that her marriage was a fraud. They believed that she had contracted a political arrangement and had called it a marriage. For most women marriage is not a career move. They do not consider that political ambition is ample grounds for marrying someone.

As a general rule, women have a far more acute sense of the way other women behave sexually. Women, more than men, derogate other women’s sexual behavior. For all the feminist caterwauling words like “slut” are more likely to be spoken by women about other women.

Hillary Clinton did not love her husband. He did not especially love her. They had contracted an arrangement that was supposed to have benefited both of them equally. One can say that it brought them power and wealth beyond their imagination. Does the notion of a Faustian bargain pop into mind here?

The same can be said about the marriage between Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin. The Clintons arranged it. Bill Clinton married them. If you think that it was a real marriage you are smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes.

What happened was that just before the Clintons were going to pull off their greatest coup, the American people caught on. Enough of them in enough blue states caught on to deprive Hillary of the prize that would have vindicated her Faustian bargain. Now, the unhappy couple will run around the world making more money. And staying in the public eye.

If Hillary had any sense of decency at all, she would take a walk in the woods and shut the fuck up.