Monday, July 31, 2017

What the Hell Happened?


Her Real Self

You may have heard that Hillary Clinton's "highly anticipated" new book is due out in September, so set your countdown clocks to Zero Hour and get buzzed on all the buzz. From what little has officially leaked out so far, Hillary will portray herself as a circus acrobat with no other safety net than her stash of hundreds of millions of dollars:
 In "What Happened," the former Democratic presidential nominee will discuss the roles of former FBI Director James Comey and Russia in her loss to Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with the book.
“In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down," Clinton writes in an excerpt from the book's introduction.
Why the declarative title What Happened, as opposed to the interrogative What Happened? Or for that matter, What the Hell Happened? 

In an exclusive interview with Sardonicky, Hillary explains it all in her own words. (The following remarks were lightly edited for something resembling clarity.)
  I chose What Happened because it sounds so authoritative. Put a period on it, it's done... by me, Hillary Clinton. Nobody puts Baby in the corner. What, you were expecting Great Expectations or something? No cobwebby old Miss Havisham jokes from the haters of the vast right wing conspiracy, thank you very much.  Plus, if I made my book title into a freaking question, I would then be forced to answer it, not to mention inviting more tiresome debate. But if you really insist upon knowing, the only possible answer is: Shit Happened. To me, Hillary Clinton, not to the citizens of this country. I will do just fine with my long walks in the woods and my slugs of fine wine.
Of course, if I really wanted to be truthful, I would call it Bullshit Happened. And if I wanted to be really, really truthful I'd put it in the present tense: Bullshit Happens. After all, I am the one writing this book. And since the unproven trope "Russia Meddled in My Campaign, a/k/a Our Democracy" will be a main theme of my book, I will probably leave out the part where my DNC operatives mysteriously refused to let the FBI investigate our computers, lest evidence of an Inside Job destroy our whole Putin-Did-It narrative. Especially now that this narrative threatens to start World War III.
 If I wanted to be really really really truthful, I would also admit that I am paying (depending on sales and if he's very lucky) one of my former speechwriters to write my book for me. We've been flying back and forth between coasts at regular intervals to collude, I mean collaborate.
 And I wasn't about to call it Something Happened, because that is a brilliant, albeit forgotten, novel by Joseph Heller. Although it is fiction, it is way, way more honest than anything I could ever bullshit my way through, even if my very life depended on it. As a matter of fact, if you read Heller's book, you will discover that his satiric observations on bullshit come bleakly and uncomfortably close to who I am and how I ran, or didn't run, my campaign. For example, in the following section, Heller perfectly captures how Team Clinton put way too much stupid faith in polls giving me a 99% chance of winning, and how we relied on outdated demographics and algorithms instead of paying attention to people's real problems:
We had no way of knowing whether the information on which we based our own information was true or false. But that didn't seem to matter; all that mattered is that the information came from a reputable source. People in our market research division were never held to blame for conditions they discovered outside the campaign that placed us at a competitive disadvantage. What was, was - and they were not expected to change reality, but merely to find it if they could and suggest ingenious ways of disguising it. To a great extent, that is the nature of my own work, and all of us worked closely with the sales department and the public relations department in converting whole truths into half truths and half truths into whole ones.




  In any event, Something Happened (!) is far too exclamatory and singular, and it implies that only one bad thing happened to spoil my victory dance. Since I am Hillary Clinton, and I have whole shitloads of blame to lob at so many people, my book will be about the many many horrible things that happened to the singular woman who is me, Hillary Clinton.
 Unfortunately, the title A Singular Woman has also already been taken. It's the biography of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham.  I am also thinking of blaming her, simply for having spawned the first man with the effrontery to steal the presidency from me. But you'll just have to wait for September when the book comes out to find out how much ink I will actually spill on direct Barry-blaming. (Hint: my publicists have already planted the story that No Drama Obama deliberately ignored RussiaGate before my publicists thought to invent it mere days after I lost my second election, to Donald Trump, whom my publicists had planted in the press as one of the Pied Piper candidates it would be a cinch for me to beat.)
 But Goldwater Girl that I am, and for purposes of the austerity (for others) which has been my whole life's work, I am sticking to What Happened, Period. It gives out the perfect whiff of control and personal agency while also passive-aggressively absolving me, Hillary Clinton. of any accountability for my decisions. It also leaves enough space on the book jacket for a photo of me for a possible second and last printing. For now, though, we're going with the appropriately stern plain vanilla look. My publicists were leaning toward that now-iconic silhouette profile, which sends the message of a singular woman who holds her nose very proudly in the air so as to avoid actually looking at such things as middle class voters. So stay tuned. There may be multiple covers available to mirror my multiple reinvented public personae. One thing I can promise my readers is authentic high grade glossy paper milled from genuine dead trees.
Meanwhile, since I'll be heading out to the Vineyard and/or the Hamptons in the next couple of days, you won't see me in the woods around your neighborhood. But not to worry. I will be hard at work putting the finishing touches on the galleys. I will work my heart out for you, and continue my SuperPac fundraising for other centrist Democrats as they tout their new inspiring slogan, A Better Deal.
As my beleaguered millionaire pal Nancy Pelosi said just the other day, it's not the Democratic Party's de facto agenda of steak for the wealthy and crumbs for the poor that matters - it's the way that they put out their message. "We'll be making not a course correction, but a presentation correction," she announced.
It's not the economy stupid after all. It's the propaganda stupid.The main course of the feast for the Haves will stay exactly the same.
That is such a profound observation by Nancy I might even fit in my book somewhere, most likely in the acknowledgment section. That's the part, after unloading brick by brick my entire shitload of blame, where I air-kiss my myriad donors, celebrity fans, and enablers. It will take up at least a third of the entire book. This will give my memoir the appearance of intellectual heft and thereby justify my charging an outrageous sum of money for it.
We corporate Democrats are walking a mighty fragile tightrope these days. The danger is getting swept away by our own virtue-signalling.  When "they" go low, we go so high that we get oxygen-deprived sometimes. I don't mean to say that's a bad thing, because our enthusiasm for tiny incremental solutions becomes so contagious that it usually infects enough of the people at least some of the time. We only lost about a thousand national and state seats in the past decade, after all.

So as I so coyly teased in my leaked preface, we always run the risk of completely losing our balance performing such a multitude of verbal stunts as we seek public office. Especially when one is as clumsy as I was/am in the trickery department. And, channeling Joseph Heller again, when we lose sight of the fact that our bullshit is bullshit, we start relying too heavily on our version of the truth. We forget that the Big Lie has to be constantly honed to achieve maximum effectiveness. We get lazy and sloppy and self-satisfied, even after we lose one here or there. We nobly walk in the woods of our estates and guzzle our Chardonnay and attend many Broadway shows to prove to other wealthy members of our class that we're okay and smarter than the average bear.
Nonetheless. we have trouble distinguishing between the private positions we share with our patrons and donors and colleagues in the global finance capital cartel and the public positions we share with the hoi polloi. We become focus-grouped and poll-tested and trial-ballooned out of all rationality and meaning. We get so confused, that when we do get caught out in a lie or a grift, we have the chutzpah to channel Honest Abe and compare our paid speeches to Goldman Sachs with Lincoln freeing the slaves.
 We become mere ghosts, diminished to dictating our bullshit to ghostwriters.
Of course, that is far more honesty than my reputation as Warrior Victim Queen could ever possibly bear. 
Did I forget to request that this conversation be off the record? I did? Well knock me over with a Scaramucci feather! When I wrote in my teaser of a preface that I'd be letting my guard down and forgoing the safety net, I must have mistakenly meant what I said for once in my life.
What the hell.?!.?!

10 comments:

Tom Shefchik said...

Well that certainly was unfunny. Hillary faced 33 states with vote suppression laws, 6 million are not allowed to vote due to prior felonies, and Karen Handel personally purged many thousands for having the same first and last name as someone in another state: ex. John Smith. Republicans are un-American and cheaters. There is 100% certainty they cheated once again to let this despicable creature win.

I've seen evidence that Comey's unfair thrashing eight days before the election turned the tide against her. Not to mention the Russian collusion and fake news bots. Or the billion dollars in free media given to Don "The Con". Also does not include the institutionalized and still powerful misogyny present throughout the nation, including among a huge section of women.

So no, not funny. And tagging BS when you haven't read it is also unfair.

annenigma said...

#BetterNamesForHillarysBook

Everyone's Fault But Mine
I Came, I Saw, I Lost
Trumped
The Audacity of Nope
The Girl With the Goldman Sachs Tattoo
What Difference Does It Make?
It Takes A Gated Village
I Robbed Bernie But I Am The Victim
The Liar, The Witch, and the Warmonger
Buy This Book Or You're A Racist Sexist Bigoted Islamophobe
It Was My Turn, Dammit
The Crying Blame
Excuses - A Memoir By Hillary Clinton
How To Lose Elections And Alienate People
I Fought The Deplorables And The Deplorables Won
The Art Of The Steal
I Rigged The Primary, Cheated In The Debate, Propagandized The MSM, Spent 1.2 Billion, and STILL Lost 30 States

Elizabeth -- Marysville said...

Yep, it's all in the delivery. Or package.

It's not the Democratic Party message that is wrong, or that they are completely tone deaf to the masses. It's just that the masses are too stupid to understand the narrative the Party has been forcing on us for decades.

Would that "What Happened" becomes the final book (let it be so) in the presidential library that never was.

Jay–Ottawa said...

Please, guys, may I feed the troll who just parachuted in?

@ Tom

How come 33 states fell into the hands of Republicans who could then pass voter suppression laws? How competent is the Democratic Party that forgets its roots and let's the opposing party walk all over it for eight years? More specifically, where was Obama, the head of Democratic Party, when, during his tenure, 1000 public offices on local, state and national levels passed from Democrats to Republicans?

Obama couldn't have cared less; he had his. His betrayals to the people who voted for him and to the party itself weren't so funny. What is funny is that in 2012 so many of the betrayed and still clueless gave him four more years to continue undoing justice at home and making a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Is it possible that something other than voter suppression laws, Comey or the Russians had something to do with millions of Americans going "strategic," or just plain vengeful, to vote for anything BUT the Democrats, if they bothered to turn out at all?

Did longtime Democrats have good reason to be fed up with the betrayals and glaring omissions of Obama, the DNC and the Clintons? Just maybe voters were tired of giving their votes to politicians who, once in office, catered to Wall Street, the Pentagon and its suppliers and the big corporations. See anything funny––as well as insightful––in the two big parties being called the Duopoly or the Uniparty?

I think it's funny that you drop in here, of all places, to preach the gospel of the lesser-of-two evils. You're not in the land of the clueless anymore. And don't tell us we're unfunny; we don't even try to do funny around here. Take a hard look at the masthead: Sardonicky. In that vein let me conclude with this: I myself could have won against Hillary Clinton. And the reason I could have won is because I'm not Hillary Clinton.

annenigma said...

Hillary's most absurd excuse is that she was "on her way to winning" but Comey "scared off those who were inclined to vote for her" - by letting her off the hook! What a bunch of scaredy Democats she thinks voters are. What were they afraid of, NOT electing Donald Trump? It doesn't even make sense. She needs a shrink and not Dr. Chardonnay.

Thirty years of public exposure, a popular ex-President husband campaign surrogate, DNC and powerful superdelegates/lobbyists in the bag for her, endorsement by the popular sitting President and his influential wife, support and assistance from the entirety of Hollywood, Wall Street, the Intelligence Community, Neocons, every major and minor news outlet in the country, and over a billion in campaign cash. Poor Hillary had a rough go of it, so leave her alone. Bwaaahahahahaha!

Erik Roth said...

Thanks Jay-O (and of course, as ever, Ms. G) for telling it like it is.
Presently I write from a northern Wisconsin county so backwoods, if not backwards, that it doesn't have a traffic light at any intersection.
This, Forest County, that once voted for Barack Obama, is now rabidly Scott Walker territory and boasts of voting for Trump. Yesterday I spotted a bumper sticker on the back of a truck that proclaimed: "NEVER HILLARY."
So, what happened? The damn dumb Dems blew it, and still don't get it.

Kat said...

Might it be more useful to attack policies rather than people? Hillary is done (and why does the word "witch" keep coming up in reference to her?) Ideas that Hillary embodied live on. Which makes sense, she didn't create them. She was just one in a line of people pushing them.

annenigma said...

Hillary Clinton - Cheated

Mad Max said...

"Presently I write from a northern Wisconsin county so backwoods, if not backwards, that it doesn't have a traffic light at any intersection."

Do I detect a wee bit of contempt for America's rural population, or, maybe, some sense of solidarity there? The image just isn't clear.

As to "What Happened" in YOUR neck of the deep woods, see

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/blue-red-state-democrats-trump-country-214647

Erik Roth said...


Mad Max:
To be clear, I hold no contempt for America's rural population, but in fact have abiding affection for most of the people and for all of the places. Actually, regarding traffic and lights, I hope the beaten track does not reach and then ruin this neck of the woods.
Of course, individually, and in masses, "bad apples" can be found rotting everywhere.
But I do hold contempt for the imperial, oppressive, exploiting, plutocratic powers that be.
What continues to happen is widespread denial enabling an utterly unsustainable and morally insufferable status quo.
Now the politico story you linked is well worth attending.
Thanks.