Media, Politics

Clinton: It Wasn’t Me, It Was Comey

Jcomey-100

hillary_clinton_elizabeth_warren_manchester_nh_october_2016
Photo: Tim Pierce / CC-BY

As I discussed over the weekend, the Democratic leadership appears to be spinning its snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory this electoral season.  Various Democratic leaders have been blaming the results not on their engineering Hillary Clinton’s victory over Bernie Sanders but FBI director James Comey. Now Clinton herself is advancing that same spin despite every objective measure to the contrary. It is precisely why Clinton was never able to seriously improve the overwhelming view of being less than honest. Her campaign would continually spin events and scandals rather than deal directly with obvious problems. In the meantime, Clinton’s controversial friend and close advisor Sidney Blumenthal is raising yet another vast conservative conspiracy theory — that it was not the candidate but a cabal of secret agents directed by Rudy Giuliani that caused the defeat.


For those still interested in recent history, the public has been consistent that they did not want an establishment candidate and particularly did not want Hillary Clinton. Clinton and Trump were the most unpopular politicians ever to be nominated for president and over 60 percent of voters viewed Clinton as fundamentally dishonest. None of that stopped the DNC from engineering her victory over Bernie Sanders who presented precisely the populist campaign that many voters were looking for. Clinton had the Democratic establishment and many allies in the media — everyone agreed except the public. That was enough . . . until the voters had their say on November 8th.

Now there are many (particularly Sanders supporters) calling for a massive overhaul of the Democratic party.  In response, the establishment has been quick to blame Comey even though Clinton’s unpopularity levels remained dismal and her popularity was dropping before his disclosure to Congress. For many, the problem with the emails was not so much as the concern of her compromising national security but her bad judgment coupled with er belated acceptance of responsibility. Clinton at first laughed off the controversy and refused to say that she used bad judgment. She then begrudgingly accepted that it was a “mistake” while still maintaining that her national security judgment was her primary strength.

Clinton’s first statement after concession came in a private call with major donors. She did not acknowledge her long-standing polling issues with truthfulness or reputation as the ultimate establishment candidate in a counter-establishment election. Instead, she said it was all about Comey even though she was struggling to even gain a few percentage points over Trump who had rallied oppositional forces against himself. She even lost Wisconsin – a first since 1984 for a Democrat. That is not about Comey. The whole election was a disaster as we previously discussed on the blog. While this blog and others openly marveled at the decision of the Democratic establishment to pick an establishment candidate with such baggage, Democratic insiders and the media pushed the line that Clinton would necessarily win and that people would overcome their clear dislike for her. While Clinton appears to have won the popular vote, a Democratic nominee without the baggage and bad polling numbers might have produced a starkly different result, including the possible flipping of the Senate. particularly a perceived outside like Sanders.  While I have long been a critic of the electoral college and an advocate of a majority requirement for president, a run off would not have necessarily helped Clinton.  First, while she won the popular vote, she was well below 50 percent.  She was roughly 5 million below Obama’s total in the prior election against a much more polarizing opponent than Mitt Romney.  The final numbers are still uncertain but both REe likely to end up in the 47 percentile.  She won Colorado after Libertarian Ron Johnson took five percent.  The Clinton campaign sought to win on an anti-Trump vote as Trump sought an anti-Clinton victory.  That was not enough for a lot of young people and others who were simply not motivated by Clinton.  In the end, the pro-Trump and anti-Hillary voters were unstoppable.  Moreover, judging from the losses of the Senate races, the Democrats gave up on selecting a candidate with any “coattails.”  The Democrats lost a golden opportunity to take back the Senate and will now face the opposite situation in two years where more Democratic seats will be a risk.

For some, the Comey spin was not nearly conspiratorial enough.  After all, Comey had spent weeks being pummeled by the right for his clearing of Clinton of any criminal actions — the basis for a number of pro-Clinton ads and pitches.  He then informed Congress that they were looking into new emails while expressly stating that they did not know the significance of the emails.  He then cleared her again a few days later.  Blumenthal (who has been long denounced as something of a gossip and conspiracy spreader) is not willing to simply stop with Comey. No conspiracy is sufficient unless it is vast and conservative. So Blumenthal is reportedly telling people that a group of “right-wing agents” in the FBI staged an effective coup d’etat. Of course a coup presupposes that Clinton was the ordained new leader and that the election was merely a formality. He is quoted as telling Dutch television that “It was the result of a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani, who was a member of Trump’s campaign. I think it’s not unfair to call it a coup.” Unfair? No I would say unhinged is more accurate.

As shown by the staffer who denounced Donna Brazile last week, many liberals (and particularly young people) are not buying the spin. Liberal blogs are already denouncing the DNC for engineering the victory of the “Clinton-corporate wing.” One such critic is Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who insisted that “The Democratic Party can no longer be the same, it has been repudiated. This has been a huge refutation of establishment politics and the political organization has got to be changed … if the Democratic Party can’t do it, we’ll do it through a third party.”

Notably, in a Hill article, Democratic insiders are blaming Sanders voters and young people for not doing as they were told and voting for Clinton . . . which obviously misses the point.  The Democrats have been selling the lesser of two evils for years and voters simply had had enough with the selection of Clinton.  The primary revealed deep-seated opposition to Clinton who continued to refuse to turn over her Wall Street speeches and spinned serious questions about massive contributions and speaking fees from corporations and power brokers.  Even if the leadership sought to be willfully blind before the primary in lining up behind Clinton, the Sanders movement revealed the depth and anger of the electorate.  It was their election to lose and they engineered the Clinton victory and lost it.

To show the inability to even consider a new course after this defeat, the establishment is already grooming Chelsea Clinton for political office under the apparent theory that the solution to the public rejecting the Clintons is to add more Clintons.  Likewise, various Democratic members are pushing to continue the leadership of Nancy Pelosi as minority leader in the House despite calls for new leadership from younger members.

So the spin is on. It was not Clinton and certainly not the Democratic leadership. It was Comey and perhaps a hidden cabal of secret agents.  The Democratic party is again fulfilling Einstein’s view that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”

301 thoughts on “Clinton: It Wasn’t Me, It Was Comey”

  1. Here is an excellent “good sense” rant giving further elaboration to many of the things Professor Turley touches upon in this post.



  2. Here is a fantastic article which expresses Scott Adams’ (Dilbert) factual analysis of what is wrong with Democratic anti-Trump protesters:

    The Cognitive Dissonance Cluster Bomb

    Guest Post by Scott Adams

    Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn’t even complete. I’ve heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing?

    It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. This is the cleanest and clearest example of cognitive dissonance you will ever see. Remember it.

    This phenomenon is why a year ago I told you I was putting so much emphasis on PREDICTING the outcome of the election using the Master Persuader Filter. I told you it would be easy to fit any theory to the facts AFTER the result. And sure enough, we can fit lots of theories to the facts. At least 24 of them by CNN’s count.

    Generally speaking, the greater the persuasion, the more cognitive dissonance you get. Trump is – in my opinion – the greatest persuader of my lifetime. I expected this level of cognitive dissonance. Next time you see a persuader of this magnitude, you can expect the outcome to be cognitive dissonance in that case too.

    This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future. Here’s the setup that triggered them.

    1. They believe they are smart and well-informed.

    2. Their good judgement told them Trump is OBVIOUSLY the next Hitler, or something similarly bad.

    3. Half of the voters of the United States – including a lot of smart people – voted Trump into office anyway.

    Those “facts” can’t be reconciled in the minds of the anti-Trumpers. Mentally, something has to give. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in.

    There are two ways for an anti-Trumper to interpret that reality. One option is to accept that if half the public doesn’t see Trump as a dangerous monster, perhaps he isn’t. But that would conflict with a person’s self-image as being smart and well-informed in the first place. When you violate a person’s self-image, it triggers cognitive dissonance to explain-away the discrepancy.

    So how do you explain-away Trump’s election if you think you are smart and you think you are well-informed and you think Trump is OBVIOUSLY a monster?

    You solve for that incongruity by hallucinating – literally – that Trump supporters KNOW Trump is a monster and they PREFER the monster. In this hallucination, the KKK is not a nutty fringe group but rather a symbol of how all Trump supporters must feel. (They don’t. Not even close.)

    In a rational world it would be obvious that Trump supporters include lots of brilliant and well-informed people. That fact – as obvious as it would seem – is invisible to the folks who can’t even imagine a world in which their powers of perception could be so wrong. To reconcile their world, they have to imagine all Trump supporters as defective in some moral or cognitive way, or both.

    As I often tell you, we all live in our own movies inside our heads. Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.

    That’s why the protestors live in a movie in which they are fighting against a monster called Trump and you live in a movie where you got the president you wanted for the changes you prefer. Same planet, different realities.

    https://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/13/the-cognitive-dissonance-cluster-bomb/#more-136296

    That guy is really smart, and must have been reading some of my stuff.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

    1. You can whine all you like about the protest movements and other responses to Trump, and by all means, post smug, pretentious, pompous, supercilious dismissals of the numerous documented outrages committed by Trump and his raving right wing followers, and the righteous attempts to deal with them — it only marks you out as a credulous nitwit.

      1. Thanks! I did this one like 3 or 4 months ago:

        https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CqB54uwUkAABi3u.jpg

        I am telling you, the Democrats have some pretty severe mental issues going on. I think a lot of them are just wrapped too tight. There was a good factual analysis I just saw on Twitter, that the Democrats are losing their minds, they are just revealing them:

        http://constitution.com/anti-trump-temper-tantrums-riots-liberals-arent-losing-minds-theyre-revealing/

        Squeeky Fromm
        Girl Reporter

        (PS: I am calling these “factual analyses” just to screw with some of the partisan shills here who like to post somebody else’s opinion as proof of something.)

  3. Report: Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens

    Trump may have won popular vote

        1. Squeeky,
          It seems to be an Independent, switching back and forth between parties from one election to the next.
          It’s been meddling in earth politics far too long, and it needs to stop!

    2. Were the aliens mostly the little grays from Zeta Reticuli B and other planets, or just the aliens dreamed up by right wing crackpot websites chumps like you consider credible news sources? ROTFLMAO

    1. The ONLY reason you can post gibberish like that that is the high standard for defamation of a public figure set by NY Times v. Sullivan. You’re more of a “terrorist” than the Congressman from the Fifth District in Minnesota, when it comes to that. So sue me.

  6. Pence pushes for email privacy
    http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/11/pence-email-privacy-indiana-231332

    Vice President-elect Mike Pence is seeking to keep secret the contents of an email relating to Indiana’s participation, at his behest, in a lawsuit to block President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

    Pence’s administration brought in an outside law firm to join the litigation, which was spearheaded by Texas Gov. Greg Abbot. The move prompted one Indianapolis lawyer to request documents related to the decision to bring in outside counsel.

    Per the article: “Pence produced the documents in the request ‘but those documents included substantial redaction,’ according to court documents. The 57-page response also included an email that Daniel Hodge, Abbott’s chief of staff, sent to 30 recipients in various states asking them to join the lawsuit against Obama. The message included an attached white paper, but the governor failed to produce the document, according to court records. After a yearlong [legal process], the Superior Court held that the issue was not a matter for the courts to decide, citing a Indiana Supreme Court case decided just days before.”

    Pence’s efforts, so far upheld by state courts, were highlighted in an Indianapolis Star article Monday.

    The effort to shield an email from public scrutiny follows an election in which Hillary Clinton’s campaign was hounded by her use of a private email server while serving at the State Department — a move that was criticized as both a security risk and a blow against transparency.

    The decision was appealed, and the Indiana Court of Appeals is set to hear oral arguments in Indianapolis on Nov. 21.

    Pence’s office declined to comment.

    1. The mainstream media will ignore this issue in the same way they ignore the gun-wielding maniac (photos so clear you can practically read the serial number on his pistol) who was firing shots and driving recklessly at the Dakata Access Pipeline protest. Pence/Trump now represent power, and the sucking up to power process is already well underway.

  7. True to form this woman CANNOT take responsibility for her actions. She is a year older than me so I know she was taught the same values as me. Why can’t she show some class? Are values lost with the ability to drive? It confounds me that this woman can’t stand up and admit she lost because of things She’s done. I wish ill to nobody and wish her a happy future but she should include some soul searching and look at what is in her heart. She may find things she can change for the better.

  9. For you and the other talking heads at Fox, you may recall that her numbers were very high until the Republicans started these hearings (that wasted a lot of time and have gone “nowhere”) and going on national TV and bragging about the way they had brought her numbers down. There will be a repayment sometime in the future, I just hope I live long enough to witness it.

    1. I thought it was the other way around. The Democrats better kill that thing while it’s down or you’ll never be rid of it. Lots of good people out there to go forward with.

  15. Trump Arrest the War Criminals
    Here are some names for starters; George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden.
    According to U.S. and International Law all the U.S. / Israeli invasions are Wars of Aggression, War Crimes.
    These are the same crimes the Nazis committed.
    Millions have been murdered & maimed due to these invasions.
    Washington, DC = Nazi Berlin.
    U.S. War Criminals who voted to attack Iraq.
    http://www.BuenaVistaMall.com/WarCrimes.htm

    1. Well, your plan would certainly lead to a complete isolationist foreign policy, that’s for sure!

      1. As the late wealthy Dallasite Gordon McGlendon said: “Neutrality is prosperity”. Sage advice.

        “In all thy getting, get understanding” – Malcolm Forbes.

    2. During the Nuremberg trial, the chief American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, stated: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

      1. As Harlan Fisk Stone said with regards to Nuremberg:

        I don’t care much what you do with Nazis, just don’t say you are running a common law court.

  16. Trump needs to ready a special prosecutor for the Bush / Obama Regimes.
    Nuremberg on the Potomac is long overdue.
    To fund a War of Aggression is War Crime. Many U.S. politicians are War Criminals in funding and supporting U.S. / Israeli Wars of Aggression.

    1. You’re including the Hamas regime in Gaza in the mix too, of course.
      Or if not, why not? And what about the Palestinian Authority political leadership elected over ten years ago to a four year term?

  17. I think people are over-simplifying the election results. There was no one thing that did it, but a collection of factors. Hillary’s ignoring of rural voters to court urban ones, was a mistake, no doubt about it. Just “being Hillary” was no help. But I do think that Comey’s actions did put one or two straws on the camel’s back. And keep in mind that Trump’s victories in the key Midwest states were very very close. So there was no national or overwhelming repudiation of Hillary, just a tight result that went one way and not another.

    Meanwhile, we will surely live in interesting times …..

  18. Other good things about Donald Trump: He does not believe in Global Warming and he knows Vaccines Cause Diseases. We hope soon he will tell the Truth about the U.S. / Israeli War Crimes, that Israel did 9/11 and Obama’s Innumerable Crimes. Trump, don’t back-pedal on your promises.

    2. Patriot?

      Trump knows full well that Israeli and U.S. intel/military elements are responsible for 9/11. Usama couldn’t have because he didn’t own or control any airliners that could melt into buildings. As a CIA asset, his only role was to be a good Patsy and GW Bush’s pet scapegoat.

    3. Yes, it’s good to have your country in the hands of a scientifically illiterate man whose education is from a 12th century curriculum. Next up, he’ll be telling us that the Grand Canyon is 5000 years old.

      BTW, he’s already backpedaling on his promises.

    1. Right, because David Duke and Keith Ellison are conceptually indistiguishable with respect to their political history and the evolution of their political views, and you have cogent, credible evidence to cite in favor of that contention, apparently.
      So where is it?

      1. Well, do you deign to analyze David Duke, or do you just say former Klan member and leave it at that? Sooo, why should I analyze Keith Ellison? He is a former supporter and defender of Farrakhan, who is an anti-Semite. Nuff said! Two peas in a pod!

        Squeeky Fromm
        Girl Reporter

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