Only Clinton Responsible for Her Defeat

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Hillary Clinton has blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged cyber attack of the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail server and FBI director James Comey’s investigation of her own e-mails for losing the presidential election.

Speaking to campaign donors in New York Dec. 15, she said Putin’s actions were “an attack against our country.”

The American political and media establishment has for weeks been in a state of hysteria over Russian interference in the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump – as if Clinton would otherwise have certainly won.

Let’s assume that the Russians hacked the DNC e-mails and had them leaked. First off, remember this: Putin didn’t actually fix the election, in the sense of electronically “stuffing” ballot boxes long-distance and creating a false victory for Trump.

The Russians simply released true information to WikiLeaks. They didn’t spread “false news” – the e-mails were not forgeries.

They revealed the corruption and collusion by those running the DNC, such as Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in order to defeat Bernie Sanders.

What the Democrats are now saying is that the American electorate should not have known about these shenanigans -- because they then voted for the “wrong” candidate. 

It’s hard to believe unemployed rust belt voters who helped elect Trump paid much heed to any of this anyhow, or that they were swayed by Putin.

As for those Americans who did bother to read them, they certainly, as American journalist Doug Henwood wrote Dec. 13 in of the London-based Guardian, “discovered precisely how cynical and empty the Clinton operation was.”

It’s also easy to blame James Comey, the director of the FBI, for the trouble that the private e-mail server scandal caused, but the decision to set that up was hers. Had she used the State Department’s own system, there would have been nothing to investigate.

Maybe Clinton should look in a mirror if she wants to lay blame. She lost because she failed to engage the millennial and the minorities Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. She spent most of August with the elites in Hollywood, the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard fundraising instead of meeting with the working class across the country.

Her refusal to hold press conferences, her dismissal of the Goldman Sachs speeches, her assumption that identity politics would suffice, her high-handed comments about Trump supporters being a “basket of deplorables,” and her assumption that the presidency should be hers by “divine right” – all these were far more important matters.

Anyhow, if foreign hacking is tantamount to an attack on the nation, maybe there should also be an investigation to determine whether foreign nations curried favor with the Clintons with their multi-million dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, and what they expected in return when Clinton was supposed to become president.

The election wasn’t an exam, where the voters gave the “wrong” answer. In a democracy, regardless of what the Russians or the FBI did, Americans had the right to vote for Trump and not for Clinton.

Now the mainstream press has taken to running endless articles warning their readers about Trump’s subservience to Putin, his anti-democratic tendencies, and his existential threat to their liberty.

Two typical examples in the Dec. 18 New York Times: Nicholas Kristof, “Trump: The Russian Poodle,” and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, “Is Our Democracy in Danger?”

They make Trump sound like a cross between the Nazi collaborators and puppets like Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy France and Vidkun Quisling in occupied Norway. It’s not even very subtle as propaganda.