Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
It’s May. The flowers are blooming. Young couples stroll through the park holding hands. And Hillary Clinton continues to tour the country explaining that she would have won if only it hadn’t been for the vast FBI-Russian-Misogynist conspiracy that shamelessly robbed her of an inevitable victory.
It’s not a campaign. It’s an anti-campaign. In our political tradition, losers go away. But the Clintons are the cockroaches of American politics. Getting nuked 306 to 232 won’t get rid of them. Instead they crawl out of the rubble, greedy antennas twitching, to cash in on their latest disaster.
Wearing one of Elton John’s used leather pantsuits, her latest act of fashion revenge on the nation that had spurned her, Hillary showed up at 583 Park Avenue in the sixth month leg of her Defeat Tour.
"If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles," she told a horrified Manhattan audience that included Meryl Streep and Donna Karan who can no more imagine going out without cell phone coverage than without their personal assistants.
And people without cell phone coverage, unlike Los Angeles and New York, which accounted for her “popular vote” that Hillary always brings up, don’t matter. Except around election time when even people without cell phone coverage, personal assistants and Netflix accounts are still allowed to vote.
If it’s anyone’s fault that Hillary lost, it’s the “States” part of the United States.
Is it fair that 3 million progressive Hillary voters in New York City and Los Angeles County should be outvoted by a bunch of hicks in flyover country who can’t even get 4G on their iPhone 7S?
As another defeated candidate once said, “This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you." That’s the position that the #Resistance, whose newest member is Hillary herself, embodies.
But as always, she was there to take responsibility. Absolute responsibility. Nothing relative about it.
"I take absolute personal responsibility," Hillary declared. Then she blamed the FBI-Russian conspiracy. Not to mention misogyny. And lack of cell phone coverage.
Absolute personal responsibility, indeed. At this sad stage in Hillary’s career, students of the English language are forced to ponder whether she’s a liar or just doesn’t understand what words mean.
During the campaign, Hillary had taken “responsibility” for setting up a private email server full of classified emails after weeks of pressure from her people. Before blaming it on aides and Colin Powell.
She also took responsibility for Benghazi, before blaming it on lower staffers, a YouTube video and Congress. Somehow Colin Powell, cell phones and misogyny escaped the blame that time around.
For the Clintons, “I take responsibility” is one of those things you say, but don’t really mean. Like, “I want to hear everything”, “Good game” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Instead of taking responsibility, Hillary blames her defeat on her classified emails being found on the laptop of the husband of a close aide being investigated by the FBI for child pornography.
That is a perfectly legitimate reason to lose an election, go to prison and be hounded by dogs across upstate New York. It’s hard to think of a worse scandal than the combination of endangering national security and child pornography. It’s a scandal that would bury any merely human politician.
But Hillary isn’t really taking responsibility. She’s assigning responsibility.
Responsibility is something that Hillary takes only to pass it along to someone else. When Hillary says that she takes responsibility, she means taking on the authority to assign it to someone else.
Like Colin Powell.
“If the election had been on Oct. 27,” Hillary insisted, “I would be your president.”
And if the 2012 election had taken place on Oct 21, President Romney would be on his second term. Also if the outcome of WW2 had been decided on December 7, 1941, Japan would have won.
Instead, America avoided a date that would have lived in “in infamy” and Hillary lost.
Hillary insists that the pre-election scandals "raised doubts in the minds of people inclined to vote for me but got scared off." If those voters were ready to vote for her on Oct 27, did they suddenly turn into misogynists under the influence of the FBI? Was it because they don’t have cell phones?
If misogyny is the issue, then the dates don’t matter. If the FBI is the issue, the email scandal had been running for years. And Hillary had been lying about it for years. During the election year, two-thirds rated her as untrustworthy. Anyone who was willing to vote for her despite being untrustworthy wouldn’t have had their minds changed by the Comey letter. Finally, the majority of voters had no idea who Podesta was. Only conservatives, government reporters and Bernie backers even cared.
Hillary’s excuses are self-contradictory and retroactive attempts to explain her defeat. As November rolled in, she was so confident that she was planning a fireworks victory celebration. Clinton was so certain she would win that she didn’t even bother to campaign in Wisconsin or run a proper ad campaign in Michigan. She did not believe that either scandal had dealt her campaign a major blow.
Instead she expected to easily crush Trump. So did the entire media.
Now as Shattered, the new campaign book, reveals how she mismanaged her campaign, Hillary is doubling down on blaming everyone else. It’s not just the notorious Clinton narcissism.
Hillary is prepping two books. And a new PAC. The Clinton Foundation isn’t doing the business it used to. And fewer lobbies will pay six figures while falling asleep through another rambling Hillary discourse on how expensive it is to lease private jets these days. So the Clintons need a new gimmick to avoid ending up flat broke in one of their mansions. Why not a PAC? There’s lots of money in them.
But who would donate money to the PAC of a politician who burned through $1.2 billion? The sorts of suckers who think she’s the victim of a vast FBI-Russian-Misogynist-Powell-Cell phone conspiracy.
If only the election had been held on Oct. 27 instead of Election Day. If only Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Florida and 24 other states didn’t exist. If only Hillary Clinton had been someone other the politician who never won a competitive election in her nepotistic political life
But Hillary can’t be anyone other than her unlikable and untrustworthy self. As she put it, “I can't be anything other than who I am.”
Even in defeat, she was still plagiarizing her speeches from Popeye.
CNN’s David Chalian called Hillary's appearance “most authentic”. This Hillary, in a leathery mud-colored pantsuit set off with a bright orange necktie that looked like it had been stolen from the window of a Chinese restaurant, was almost lifelike. And trying to understand why the humans didn’t vote for her.
Beyond the FBI and cell phones and misogyny, there were also robots and artificial intelligence.
“I can't be anything other than who I am, and I spent decades learning about what it would take to move our country forward, including people who, you know, clearly didn't vote for me, to try to make sure we dealt with a lot these hard issues that are right around the corner, like robotics and artificial intelligence,” she explained.
But we have nothing to worry about. Unlike the transparently fake robot artificial intelligence candidates of tomorrow whose attempts at passing for human would be readily apparent from their lack of emotion and the flies crawling on their faces during nationally televised debates, she is authentic.
And Hillary Clinton can’t be anything other than what she truly is. A poor black abuela from the South who loves the Yankees and the Cubs, carries hot sauce in her pursue and is a member of the Resistance.
"I'm now back to being an activist citizen and part of the resistance,” Hillary proclaimed.
Hillary is taking full and total responsibility for losing an election by joining the resistance against the politician who won the election. Some resist by smashing store windows in Portland or seizing power with judicial coups. But you can resist the Clinton way by buying her book and giving her PAC money.
And one day, when #Calexit and NYexit become a reality and the red flag flies over the People’s Republic of Californewyorkistan, who could be a better choice to rule it with an iron fist than the corrupt, unlikable and untrustworthy politician who won the popular vote in New York and California?
Clintonism may be as dead as Communism. But Hillary’s Defeat Tour will never end.
