Stabbed in the Back?

When I played football, our coach forbade us from complaining about bad calls. If you lose a game because of a bad call, he sternly admonished us, you didn’t deserve to win in the first place. “Winners win in spite of adversity!” was his blunt response to whining of any kind.

This was Pop Warner, mind you, and I was only about, oh, eleven or twelve. It’s a pity the leaders of the Democratic party never received this bit of Pee Wee football tough love. Apparently they don’t teach it on the playing fields of Palo Alto or the Acela Corridor, or any of the other nurseries of the best and the brightest. They’re primarily responsible for a Dubya-sized political disaster, but rather than admit any culpability, they’re blaming everyone but themselves.

It was Jill Stein. It was the Bernie Bros. It was Putin. It was Wikileaks. It was the media. And now Hillary herself is whining that is was all James Comey’s fault:

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Clinton told top donors on a farewell conference call Saturday.

“But our analysis is that [FBI Director James B.] Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum,” she said.

What, one wonders in despair, will it ever take to make these people stop and question their analyses? Not since the economic crash, when Alan Greenspan admitted there was a flaw in his model of how the world worked, have we seen such a stark example of elite cluelessness and failure, but rather than admit that her campaign may have been flawed, Hillary is complaining she lost because she was stabbed in the back.

Yeah, that explains the amazing feat of losing Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, states that have been reliably blue for decades. It had nothing to do with the fact that these states are sunk in stagnant misery, and Clinton offered them nothing but four more years of the same doldrums. It had nothing to do with the fact Team Clinton strolled into the game thinking they could win with one or two predictable stock plays — “Trump is a horrid meanie!” and “I’ll be the first woman president ever!”— while making no further adjustments and offering no positive reasons to vote for her at all. One waited in vain for Clinton’s campaign to start hammering through the wall of Trumpian bullshit with ads about what she would actually do as president. It didn’t happen.

She took it for granted that all she had to do was scare people about the monster Trump, just as she took it for granted that she would sail to the nomination in 2008, and then again in 2016. She was consistently overconfident, consistently made miscalculations, consistently took the wrong advice, and consistently failed to see threats that were visible from a mile away. What makes you think she would have governed any differently?

She stood flat-footed at the plate, reflecting on which Maya Angelou poem to recite in her inaugural address, while a big fat soft ball floated right past her and struck her out.

Enough with the Clintons. Enough with the Robby Mooks, John Podestas, Donna Braziles, Paul Begalas and Ed Rendells. They’ve forfeited all claims to my support. They grossly mishandled the election, partly because they are blinkered and out of touch, and partly because they didn’t really want to do anything for people at all. They just wanted to scare us into voting for them so they could go back to pushing the same neoliberal shit that got is in this mess in the first place. Now that they’ve gotten they’re asses whipped, they’re poking around looking for scapegoats and concluding that, well, Virginia, I guess half the country is just deplorable. Yeah, well, they’re deplorable too.