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There She Goes Again: Clinton’s Blame Game, Mumbai Edition

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Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire
Hillary Clinton in Concord, New Hampshire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s  been James Comey. It’s been Them Russians. It’s been Barack Obama. It’s been misogyny. It’s been WikiLeaks. It’s been social media.  Hillary Clinton has tons of reasons why she lost the 2016 presidential election. And, oddly, none of those reasons are herself or her campaign.

This week, the excuse is that millions of whipped women just did as they were told. Clinton dropped that one on a conference in Mumbai:  “We do not do well with white men and we don’t do well with married, white women ….  part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Hillary Clinton loves strong women. Well, sort of. She loves women who are strong enough to vote for Hillary Clinton, but not quite strong enough to speak publicly about their encounters — willing or unwilling, as equals or as mere White House interns bedazzled by presidential attention — with her husband.

It’s not the first time Clinton and her coterie have thrown feminism under the bus.  At a 2016 campaign rally in New Hampshire, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright announced “a special place in hell” for women who dared make up their own minds instead of just buckling down and supporting Clinton.

One begins to suspect that for Hillary Clinton, everything is all about Hillary Clinton, all the time. That Hillary Clinton’s guiding principle is whatever’s best for Hillary Clinton right now. That Hillary Clinton is never to blame, nor to be held responsible, for anything negative.

If her record of fobbing every problem off on others while publicly stroking her own ego didn’t stretch back decades, and if I hadn’t seem them together, I might have to conclude that she and Donald Trump are the same person wearing different wigs.

Clinton didn’t lose the presidential election because white women don’t have minds of their own. She lost the presidential election because they do.

And because she ran a train wreck of a campaign.

And because she erroneously assumed that organized labor would get out the vote for her in the Rust Belt, an area she mostly ignored and Trump didn’t, where she lost by about 80,000 votes out of more than 135 million cast.

Hillary Clinton lost the election because of Hillary Clinton.

Trump is awful, but America dodged a bullet by not electing her.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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