Not even the Onion could have come up with that excuse.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton at times. Here she was the heir apparent to the White House, a long-time party go-along and malleable puff of air ready to say she believed whatever the driving trend of a given historical moment might be, and at the last minute, her turn was snatched away from her by the American people. She was left spinning, angry and bemused, and she’s still not sure what happened.
But it’s not complicated. At rock-bottom, it was Hillary’s go-along readiness to manifest Obama’s third term and “protect” his legacy, that ever-shifting never-quite-real belief system that Americans rejected. Hillary was for DADT before she was against it, she was for military engagement in the Middle East before she was against it, she pilloried and destroyed women who alleged sexual assaults before she thought they should be believed, she was for more taxes before she was against—and then once more for—them, she supported single-payer healthcare before she didn’t (and then did again), she wanted lower taxes before she wanted to gouge the “rich,” she was a foreign policy hawk before she was a dove. The list goes on. And on.
Hillary changed with the times—and the opinion polls—so much that I can think of no other politician (including the mercurial poll-product, finger-to-the-wind cut-out Mitt Romney) who has been, at various times, both for and against the same multitude of issues, policies, and opinions.
It mattered that she is deeply unlikable. When she wasn’t dodging imaginary bullets while lugging bottles of hot sauce in her purse, Hillary was busy feigning Southern accents and crying crocodile tears. She walked in a cloud of misdirection and insincerity and carried a whiff of corruption and phoniness that make her distinctly and perhaps uniquely repellent to a large swath of American voters.
Needless to say, she and her devotees don’t want to hear that truth. Instead, they see misogyny in Hillary’s defeat. She’s not flawed, and her insistence on running on being the “first female president” wasn’t flawed. Instead, misogynist American voters are flawed for not wanting a female president. The fact that Hillary Clinton was the female offered up—and rejected on her own merits or lack thereof—didn’t matter, apparently. Instead, misogyny did her in, as she’s been saying when she wasn’t blaming Comey, we “deplorables,” Bernie Sanders, “white resentment,” and that funky sunspot thing (okay, I made that last sunspot thing up, but why not blame sunspots? She’s blamed everyone and everything else.).
Misogyny, the narrative is now being spun, manifested throughout her failed presidential campaign and sunk her chance to be president because the media has now proven to be swarming with sexual predators. That’s the argument she’s making and that the New York Times is somehow, coincidentally, echoing.
Yes, really. Hillary lost because Matt Lauer and his perverted media ilk are misogynists who wanted her to fail. You can’t make this stuff up.