Guess who has a new book out?
Guess what it’s called?
Hillary Clinton’s, What Happened, has hit the shelves (or hit the Amazon shipping boxes since bookstores are disappearing daily) and it provides us with whatever excuses the losing 2016 Democratic presidential candidate can conjure to wipe this mess of Donald J. Trump from her soul, which of course sounds like a paging-turning pile of horseshit. Aside from Trump himself and about 70,000 suckers in the Rust Belt he conned by promising to bring back the 1950s, this is the fault of Hillary Clinton. And no amount of book tours can strike this nightmare from her ledger. She will be known as the lousy candidate that lost to the stupidest human who ever ran for anything.
In fact, for those who were no fan of the previous president, you can also blame Madam Shoo-in, who twice lost to overwhelming historical underdogs. Only the doomed candidacies of Hillary Rodham could possibly usher in the first African American president and the first Game Show host commander-in-chief. Both times she was all-but positively going to win with big poll numbers, millions in campaign coffers, and a groundswell of demographic support. Except she did not win, she lost, badly and embarrassingly…twice!
She made history, all right.
And to be fair this is not my wheelhouse. I do not dog-pile on losing candidates. In two decades this has only happened three times in this space; Al Gore in 2000 (this was personal for reasons covered too many times to recount here), Andrew Spano (because my dear friend, Rob Astorino vanquished him for Westchester County Executive in 2009 and because he is a bottom-feeding scum sucker) and the recent ousting of uber-bigot Scott Garrett for my district’s congressional representative this past year (we were due to fistfight, but he backed out and put the cops on me, for which I got the law to almost agree to pistols at dawn – again, covered extensively in previous columns). But Hillary will not go away, nor will her apologists, who turned her defeat into some kind of feminist cause that is misguided and wrong. And so I write…
This would not be an issue even if Clinton continued to invade the vox populi. Cable news is littered with bitter losers who wish to throw grenades at a system that spit them out like sludge. Newt Gingrich immediately comes to mind. This guy is like gum on your shoe. His, “Hey, I’m an asshole, please look at me because otherwise I’d have to actually spend time with my third wife, who wishes I would just croak so she can spend my money and marry someone who isn’t abominable,” got old in 1998. Now it’s just sad. And this is where Hillary Clinton is going, accept for some reason her act is taken as heroic. This is partly because her “victim show,” which ironically her opponent who actually won the election has turned into an art form, is tethered to her like a cloak of sympathy, when it should look like a gurney of shame and degradation.
Clinton continues to book-tour this nonsense about Russians and the FBI director and personal attacks as excuses to why she lost a general election in this growing demographic era of progressives to a knuckle-dragging, man-child goofball. She wishes in the book she just whisked around and demanded Trump “Back off, creep” during the debates in which the Republican candidate appeared to stalk her like most of the women he’s embarrassingly fondled since the mid-1980s. But that is also a lie, because Clinton was never human enough to do this. She was busy playing a part, trying to be “above the fray” in a campaign season of low-brow street fights that failed miserably for a record-large Republican field of candidates who tried to get in the gutter with Trump and were sent packing.
But this was strategy, not authenticity; a concept lost on Clinton. Trump was authentic. He told people what he was loudly and crassly. Those who now claim buyer’s remorse or are shocked by his pardoning of racist criminals and half-defending Nazis is silly; like that dumb-ass Ann Coulter, who wrote a book titled In Trump We Trust and is now calling for him to impeached. Trump said he would wreck shit and he is wrecking shit. Good for him. Clinton didn’t say anything, except that she wasn’t Trump, and that really should have been enough for this wacky Internet-obsessed, porn-addled, overly-medicated country of celebrity sniffers, but it is no excuse for being beaten, and as a veteran of the tussle she should know that, but so many sycophants have blown this vacuous wind up her skirt it has apparently reached a saturation point.
Clinton, like Trump, the two most vilified and unpopular people to actually gain major party support, are one in the same to the people who defend them; they are symbols. And no matter what layers of nonsense you apply to their failures it will never end; and this is not new. This happens with symbols. But they are not really symbols, they are politicians, and politicians have records; some lose and some win, and some govern poorly and some govern terribly and some even manage to stay afloat, but the perception is never what the reality says. But alas that is a malady for the fanatics. Things get queer when the politician believes this lie and then puts it in a book and tries to sell it as a weak explanation for humiliating defeat.
Hillary Clinton will never say she lost because she sucked, that she was a bad candidate who stood for nothing and who a spectacular number people did not like. I don’t expect this to be an easy thing to say or even accept, but why spend months writing a book trying to salve this wound and then run around the country hitting up media outlets selling this delusion to sate a damaged ego? This is why so many people flat-out hated Hillary Clinton and held their nose to vote for a neophyte, who has shown to be even worse than anyone could have possibly imagined at this. Clinton sold this delusion every time she hit the stump; in 2008 and 2016, and I blame her for upsetting my then eight year-old daughter, who just wanted to see a woman become president but instead got the crap of all crap; the email thing not-withstanding, what about 80 days of no press conferences and never visiting the aforementioned Rust Belt states and all that inside-baseball nefarious maneuverings with her buddy, Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who rigged the debate system against Bernie Sanders and alienated an entire generation of politically-motivated kids who stayed home or voted Independent rather than cast a vote for her?
The real story of Nov. 2016 remains the same as the somewhat stunned analysis of this space the week following its fallout: 70,000 displaced and frightened people who hated trade deals and believed in their hearts that foreigners were stealing their American Dream buried Hillary Clinton, and because she stood with President Barack Obama, her husband, Bill Clinton, 80-percent of the Republican Party, and the reality of 21st century global economic realities by supporting the massive trade deals and refused to travel to those places to argue this point, sunk an abjectly flawed and mostly unelectable candidate.
When Hillary Clinton writes that book I might never read it, but I will not waste nearly 1,400 words slamming it.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey,” “Fear No Art,” “Trailing Jesus,” “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. and his new book, “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”.
