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| Buster Keaton in The Playhouse (1921), I think, via. |
As far as recriminations go over what happened in November, I liked
Thers's idea (welcome back to Cyberspace, Andrew!) a lot:
As to who on the Democratic side, or the Left, is to blame, I'm only going to say this once, and then we're going to just let it go.
It was your fault.
You fucker.
It was my fault.
Me fucker.
FUCK ME. This was our job, and whatever it is we tried to do, we fucked it up, even if most Americans broadly agree with us.
Nevertheless there's something about
BooMan's non-apology FUCK ME that I can't let go of:
One thing I know I really didn’t do in this campaign was to defend Clinton. It was difficult for me to accept that she would be our party’s nominee, although I accepted it fully even though I didn’t vote for her. Spending my energy defending her was generally just too much for me, however. I thought she could pull off a victory because I gave the public too much credit for being able to see through Trump. Nonetheless, I saw the main threat as the possibility that they wouldn’t. Trump was getting a lot of press coverage, and I thought it was most important to counter the positive attributes and narratives he was receiving.
The last thing I felt like doing was writing about Benghazi or her email server or (especially) the Clinton Foundation. That appears to have been a mistake on my part. The real threat was that Clinton would be brought down to Trump’s level and seen as equally unacceptable.
Speaking as one who did try to make the positive case for Clinton, ad nauseam (52 posts from March through November under the label "
Is Hillary Clinton the Worst Human Being in the Universe?" and I'm sure there were many more without the label), including on the damn emails and Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation (and its ruthlessly corrupt acceptance of money from Norway, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and, yes, Algeria and Saudi Arabia and some other excessively foreign countries), I'd take it back a step and argue that you didn't try to find out whether there
was a possible defense of Clinton. You swallowed a bunch of idées reçues from the self-denominated left (including such notable social democrats as Glenn Greenwald and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin) and never asked yourself whether they were even true.
