Hillary Storms Onward

Poor Hillary Clinton can't catch a break.

Just when she was all set to claim entitlement to saturation media coverage of the latest version of her life, a hurricane named Irma is sucking it all up instead. Irma even has the nerve to totally crush Florida, which Hillary also memorably lost to her favorite stalker, Donald J. Trump. Didn't Irma get the message that there's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women? So Irma is either a Bernie-bro, a Putin troll, a James Comey FBI entrapment schemer, an Anthony Weiner sexting partner, or a Wikileaks dumpster fire that got way out of control.

Or probably all of the above. The important thing is that if something inconveniences Hillary Clinton, nobody else - not the homeless, the jobless, the drowned -  could possibly ever hope to reach the level of her sublime victimhood.

I don't plan on reading Hillary's book when it officially comes out. But judging from reviews of deliberately leaked copies, it is a nauseating combination of political revenge porn and self-pity. Not a good look. As a matter of fact, the speculative parodic review I already wrote concerning What the Hell Happened pales in comparison to the real thing. I was half-kidding when I predicted that she would also blame Obama for her loss. But she really goes there, chiding him for not abusing his office by hijacking the airwaves to deliver a  fear-mongering address about Russian interference in her coronation. 

She outlines numerous instances when she wanted to do something, but her handlers wouldn't let her. Her instincts and her intellect lost out every single time. Donald Trump was literally breathing down her neck on national television during a debate and she had to force herself to smile like a docile lady and keep quiet. She wanted to lash out at James Comey after he called her illegal email set-up "careless" but she had to keep quiet. Yada yada yada. She actually still cedes power to white male supremacy while pretending to fight against it even as she struggled to represent white male supremacy as the very first First Lady ever to ride her husband's coattails to the Oval Office.

Not a good look for someone who claims to have such unprecedented qualifications for leadership. Hillary was not and never will be a feminist with the courage of her own convictions.  

As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex, "when a woman is named or elected to a position of power, she still represents the patriarchy; the lot of her female subjects/constituents/employees doesn't automatically improve. A queen (or a president) is not a woman first and foremost - she is an institution."

 A Clintonian restoration, with its neoliberal, plutocrat-friendly agenda, would have done little or nothing to elevate working class women.

De Beauvoir could have been forecasting Hillary's faux feminism, her sense of "it's my turn" aggrieved entitlement, and her current blame-game antics when she observed nearly 70 years ago:

She was promised compensations, she was assured that if she abdicated her opportunities into the hands of the man, they would be returned to her a hundredfold, and she considers herself duped; she accuses the whole masculine universe; resentment is the other side of dependence; when one gives everything, one never receives enough in return.

The snippet in Hillary's memoir which I find the most interesting and troublesome, though, was her claim that she was actually napping on Election Night as the returns came in. This is not a good look for a potential president who needs to stay awake and alert during critical national and international moments. Forget the 3 a.m. phone call. This dame couldn't even last past 9 p.m.

Was she hitting the bottle? She seems to admit, every chance she gets, that she does love her Chardonnay.

Was she on some other medications? Did Wolf Blitzer's stentorian CNN babble render her unconscious? Was she simply bored?

Perhaps she was just getting caught up on her beauty sleep in order to look her best at the Javits Center coronation gala. Perhaps she was lying about her election night snooze altogether.

I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. As Hillary herself famously scoffed about Benghazi, what difference at this point, does it make?

What I do know is that Hillary Clinton must be a bit short on the excessive cash needed to maintain herself and Bill and Chelsea and the grandkids in their lifestyles. Why else would she charge thousands of dollars for tickets to her book tour appearances? Most authors are only too happy to sign autographs for the price of just the book, score a few unpaid interviews, and then call it a tour.

But where there is chutzpah and where there are globs of money to be made, there is life in the old gal yet. So along with the book tour comes the political campaign to keep the centrist Democratic Party dream alive. Somebody's got to stand up against the growing anti-capitalist chorus for Single Payer health insurance, after all. So it might as well be Hillary. If she can't destroy something good, then what good is she?  She already managed to destroy the possibility for universal coverage once, during her husband's administration, so who says she can't try, try again?

I got an email from her just today, slugged "re: bravery" as though I were part of some ongoing trendy, insidery discussion. Hillary being Hillary, of course, she had the gall and the bad taste to immediately use the name of murdered Charlottesville activist Heather Heyer as a means to suck money off someone else's courageous dead body. In coordination with her book tour, Clinton is using her political action slush fund to "fight back" against the very hate and divisiveness which her tortured new memoir absolutely wallows in and perpetuates!

"Some days, it feels like the work left to do is insurmountable," she writes in the spammy email, probably typed out between exhausting sips of Chardonnay. "But if I've learned anything, it's that those (sic,hic) are the days we need each other* more than ever. That's one of the reasons we created Onward Together: to support smart, passionate activists who know what needs to be done and could use a little of our help to get there."

If you think Hillary Clinton would ever have given a dime to smart, passionate Bernie Sanders supporter Heather Heyer or any other anti-fascist, then I've got a ghostwritten memoir to sell you. Of course, what she really wants is money for her collapsed little eye-wall of  functionaries and campaign operatives, who are now doing such amazing work as collating maudlin quotes from other functionaries in a clunky new propaganda website called Verrit. (rhymes with Ferret.) 

Read the fine print: Hillary's slush fund will do nothing to make ordinary people's lives better today, or even tomorrow. It is classic neoliberal claptrap, a purely aspirational and intentionally vague public relations gimmick:

Onward Together works to build a brighter future for generations to come by supporting groups that encourage people to organize in their communities or run for office."

 Translation: give Hillary Clinton money to pay Clinton people a fraction of this money to inspire volunteer Clinton people to support other unpaid Clinton people. And if you're very lucky, some amazing shards of shattered glass ceiling might even eventually trickle down to your grandkids after you're long dead.

The designated grift sweepstakes winner for today is a group called Run For Something, (the hills?) which is designed to suck up money for only "good and necessary" causes, defined as winning more seats for centrist Democrats who are not in the Bernie Medicare For All Brigade. Oh and to get you even more inspired, click here to score a ticket to one of Hillary's own upcoming pity party/revenge porn appearances!

And while you're breathlessly waiting to see Hillary in the flesh, she suggests that you also do your mental health part and show your class solidarity by attending Broadway shows.

I've been fortunate enough (wealthy enough)  to see quite a bit of theater - if you get the chance to see Come From Away on Broadway, take it."

 By "you," she obviously doesn't mean people on fixed or low or no incomes. She means only those fellow Fortunates with enough disposable income to afford the three-figure price of admission to a hit Broadway show. Just by this suggestion alone, Hillary gives her own whole show away. Her appeal is both geographically and financially limited to the Acela Corridor/Wall Street and Silicon Valley/Hollywood.

But in her book, she nevertheless persists in claiming not to understand why her approval ratings stand even below those of her favorite stalker. It must be on account of her XX chromosomes and the vast, right wing He-Man Woman Haters Club. What other explanation could there possibly be?

Then again, this troubling confusion is probably understandable from a woman who says that her favorite reading material is mystery novels. She is a cozy closed-room puzzle unto herself, in dire need of an emergency dose of Hercule Poirot-level little gray cells to help her in the fine art of honest self-examination.

The hoped-for whirlwind of a comeback from a comeback from a defeat is barreling toward some mighty cold waters in the form of dismay from her fellow Democrats. Her book might be storming sales lists on Amazon this week, but all forecasts point to a rapid weakening to classic tropical depression status in the overstock bin.

But there will always be fine wine from Hillary's Zazzle collection. At only $6.65 a bottle, even the deplorables can feel the Clinton glow and afford to drown their sorrows with the Hillary Signature Star, Woman's Place White House, or Love Trumps Hate Heart (?) labels.

*oppressed wealthy elite donors of the superior knowledge class who couldn't care less about those annoying and demanding purists in the bottom 90%.

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.?!.?!

Calling Doctor Freud

My biggest "takeaway" (I do hate that word) from James Comey's testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is that Donald Trump equates being president with being the CEO of the biggest corporation in the world.  Either that, or his demand for "loyalty" from the FBI director shows that he equates being president with being the godfather of the global mafia.

And in a perverse sort of way, Trump would be absolutely right about both job descriptions. His problem is that he doesn't stay in his proper place. Presidents have heretofore acted as super-salesmen and propagandists for the plutocracy, dutifully using their private armies (the CIA and Special Ops) without bragging and Tweeting about them. Previous presidents have carefully kept their individual psychopathies away from public view, for the most part.

In some Freudian-slipped remarks at a pre-inauguration press conference on Jan. 11th, Trump bragged to the whole world:

"As president, I could run the Trump organization, great, great company, and I could run the company—the country. I’d do a very good job [at both], but I don’t want to do that."

He doesn't want to do a good job at both, because he views the country and his company as one and the same thing: a mega-merger for the ages, if not the greatest hostile takeover the world has ever seen.

Two months into his presidency, Trump was still persisting in his job description. He again called the United States a "company" during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before, again, belatedly correcting himself.

As far as James Comey is concerned, has there ever been a more slippery character in the canon of Washington political theater? Now seemingly forgiven for having helped destroy Hillary Clinton right before voters went to the polls, he has morphed from villain to All-American hero, a multimillionaire golly gee willikers Boy Scout in a six foot seven frame. He pulled off the awesome stunt of forcing the Democrats and Republicans to act in the lockstep bipartisan manner so beloved of the Washington neoliberal establishment. 

He openly admitted having head-faked Trump by waving the discredited "urinating prostitutes" dossier in front of his face during the transition period as a subtle way of telling the president-elect that the Intelligence Community (another loathsome phrase if there ever was one) has what Chuck Schumer called six ways from Sunday of getting him to behave. He openly admitted to carefully transcribing every Trump conversation - a practice he never bothered with under his previous bosses, Messrs. Bush II and Obama. He openly admitted leaking these transcripts to the New York Times and other outlets - even though they are now so "classified" that he simply could not in good conscience share all the salacious contents with the American public on national TV.

Even so, Comey humble-bragged about the exhilarating freedom he now enjoys as a private citizen to destroy Trump by calling him a liar on national TV. This career prosecutor, steeped in the intricacies of criminal law, lays out a prima facie case for obstruction of justice and then sanctimoniously demurs from calling Trump's behavior criminally offensive. He is not enough of an expert.

And speaking of the subconscious, Comey's dramatic bodice-ripper account of his fraught private dinner with the Groper-in-Chief - he later told colleagues he never wanted to be alone with Trump, ever again - gains new meaning with revelations that he was once accosted as a teenager in his own suburban home by the infamous Ramsey Rapist. So Comey is apparently very sensitive to the vibes put out by serial predators.

His narrative has garnered for him empathy, if not admiration, from every woman who has ever felt intimidated by her boss.  It has also deprived Hillary Clinton of one of the main scapegoats for her election loss.

And just one more speculation before I quit: would there even be a #RussiaGate had Hillary prevailed?

I think not. After all, James Comey also unhelpfully mentioned that Vladimir Putin is an ecumenical abuser. Vlad wasn't just gunning for Hillary; he can't stand either side of the American Uniparty. He's not out to destroy the Democrats, who are already doing a pretty good job of destroying themselves.

The appeal of a liberal 21st Century Inquisition does have its limits, especially in the wake of the punishing bipartisan Age of Austerity. Voters will be apt to stay home when their only choice is between Donald "Berlusconi" Trump and the neoliberal McCarthyites of the Surveillance State.

Give It a Rest, Hillary

Hillary Clinton's latest excuse for losing the election to Donald Trump is that nobody could have survived on her pedestal of awesome inevitability.

"I was the victim of the assumption that I would win," Hillary Clinton deadpanned in the latest episode of her perpetual Blame Game Tour.

That's like complaining you've been fired based upon the unreasonable expectation of your boss that you'd show up for work. That's like complaining that after you fell in an Olympic relay race you'd bribed your way into, it was all the fault of the greedy officials who let you on the track as well as the stupid rubes who bet on your victory.

I take full responsibility, but nothing is ever my fault. Hear me roar, whined Hillary to her well-heeled Silicon Valley audience. She presented her hosts with a complimentary bottle of an alcoholic concoction she called Rodham Rye. The stage was thus set for some sloppy softball mellowness to help make the vitriol go down.

"Goldman Sachs paid me!" she squealed in delight at one point during Wednesday's interview. But the fact that she also spoke to camp counselors balanced the whole thing out. Also too, she helped hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. Plus, men get paid for the speeches they make.

 Also miffed that Trump is stealing the media-blaming limelight from her, Clinton accused the press of treating her use of a private email system "as though it were Pearl Harbor." She obviously didn't get the irony of that remark, given how she acted like a Kamikaze pilot during her presidential campaign. She bombed in one suicidal campaign appearance after the other.

She also had the nerve to rip the Democratic National Committee, which had bent over backwards to rig the nomination in her favor through, among other things, limiting the number of debates with Bernie Sanders and ensuring that their scheduling interfered with football playoffs and national holidays and weekends so as to attract the fewest viewers possible.

"I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party," she fumed, whereas Donald Trump got all his precious data handed to him on a silver platter. Harrumph.

But the real paranoid coup de grace of her performance at a California technology conference was her rambling attack on "Americans" who must have helped "the Russians" to meddle in her campaign. “I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign, and how did they know what messages to deliver?” she said. “Who told them? Who were they coordinating with, and colluding with?”

After conjuring up an epic image of a thousand grotesque anti-Hillary bots and trolls cavorting about in cyberspace, she then paradoxically went on to call Trump a "very reactive personality" and questioned what, exactly, he means by the word "covfefe." It must be a secret coded dog-whistle to Vladimir Putin. That is the only possible, rational explanation. She was, after all, speaking at a Code Conference.

You can watch her whole spiel in the clip below. You are guaranteed to cringe in your seat as the litany of blame evolves into an ear-splittingly off-key crescendo of bilious self-pity.

If more than a few minutes of unbridled narcissistic victimhood are too much for you to bear, however, then I highly recommend the troll-hunting scene from Peer Gynt as a more healthful substitute. It absolutely captures the essence of where this woman's head is at:

Meanwhile, Hillary's more understated understudy Chelsea Clinton went on TV herself to trill that the dashing of stupid people's unreasonable expectations about her mother was actually "an unexpected blessing."

Chelsea said that although she's been told by outsiders that her family once planted petunias and tomatoes together when she was a tot, she has no independent memory of this event. All she can remember of her childhood is the hours of homework and the piano lessons that transformed her into the overachieving adult she is today.

Chelsea says she is imagining the childhood she might have had as she watches Bill and Hillary in their dotage dig in the dirt with her own daughter in a DNA deluge. "It was such an unforeseen gift that my daughter was giving me to see my parents in that way," Chelsea smirked to the ladies of The View.

As long as Hillary Clinton keeps telling us over and over and over again that she is doing O.K. despite her persecution complex, maybe some of her psychotic magic will start rubbing off on us too.

Long walks in the woods, organizing our closets, blaming Russians, guzzling the Chardonnay and the Rodham Rye like there's no tomorrow might help us forget all our unreasonable assumptions about there even being a tomorrow.

Skol. Hiccup. And then gag me with a Covfefe.

Adventures in Hillaryland

I wrote a critical response to a New York Times column (originally and grotesquely titled Hillary - Free At Last!)  by Nicholas Kristof, who recapped his softball interview with Clinton at last week's Women in the World Conference. 

After my comment about the ignored class war was published, myriad digital tongues emerged from the ethosphere to castigate me for my blasphemy, and for my failure to properly appreciate all the good things that Hillary, her ultra-rich friends and donors, and our great transnational corporations have been selflessly doing behind the scenes for me and for all the other bitter and jealous have-nots of America. One disgusted Times reader actually demanded to know if I am a Russian.

It's getting bad -- oops, I mean divisive -- out there, people. Being affluent and stuck in those stages (denial, depression, anger) of Hillary grief must be such a dreadful thing. I'll write more about the cult of MccCarthyite Mourners later in this post - but first, I'll let Summit Founder Tina Brown explain the purpose of the confab in question on its official website:

The three-day Women in the World Summit, held at New York City’s Lincoln Center, presents powerful new female role models whose personal stories illuminate the most pressing international issues. They range from CEOs and world leaders to artists, activists, peacemakers, and firebrand dissidents. The Summit’s vivid journalistic narratives, high-impact video, and fast-paced staging have made it the premier platform to showcase women of impact. Increasingly, Women in the World also includes the participation, onstage and in the audience, of men who champion women.
Past participants have included Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Angelina Jolie, Diane von Furstenberg, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, Tom Hanks, Malala Yousafzai, Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand and many more amazing and inspiring women from all over the world.

A couple of truly memorable quotes from this year's "celebs and luminaries" page really stood out for me.

"None of us can do everything, but each of us can do something." -- Meryl Streep.

"There's a lot of estrogen in this room!" -- Katie Couric. 

Even though it's billed as a conference by, for and of females, the hosts always invite a few A-List men to the proceedings in order to prove that one can be male, hunky, powerful and feminist all in one package. This year's hotties were Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Kristof's fellow Times columnist and liberal interventionist Thomas Friedman.

Why not? The Times helped foot the bill for the show, after all, with other costs defrayed by the $350 price of admission along with generous donations from Toyota and a whole host of corporate sponsors. The luministas all dutifully posed on the red carpet in front of the car manufacturer's corporate logo: Let's Go Places!

So it was only natural that Kristof would be granted the first one-on-one interview with Hillary Clinton since the election, right? He begins his column with the requisite bathos:

 In the most wrenching, humiliating way possible, Hillary Clinton has been liberated. She is now out of the woods again, and speaking her mind.

As I noted, the original title of his piece was borrowed from the gospel song of enslaved people called Free At Last, which Martin Luther King also made the centerpiece of his iconic I Have a Dream speech. So in retrospect, it appears that wiser heads at the Gray Lady prevailed, and reslugged the Kristof column a more seemly Free to Speak Her Mind.

This was an apt choice, because there were relatively few women of color either on stage or in the audience of the Women in the World summit. As Antoinette Isama, a journalist who attended the event, writes:

As I walked in to receive my press pass, the production of event amplified the posh David H. Koch Theater with bright lights, a Women In The World Boutique, a lounge courtesy of Toyota and free refreshments and munchies courtesy of Pepsi (lol). It was a corporate company’s dream to rub elbows with an occasion such as this—because women rule the world, right?
Before the conversation between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, with Katie Couric called “How To Raise A Feminist” began, there was an a cappella rendition of the unofficial theme song of the Women’s March accompanied by a montage of pink pussy hats. From the welcome speech by the Summit’s Founder and CEO, Tina Brown, it seems like the march, where millions of women gathered in D.C. and around the world in solidarity to stick the middle finger to patriarchy and Trump was the main theme to reflect on throughout the Summit.

Isama says that when she looked around the press section, she noticed that she was the only black reporter among a sea of white faces. Ditto for the wealthy attendees in the audience.

My experience at the Women In The World Summit pretty much confirmed why I don’t go out of my way to attend events like this. I don’t understand the point of having these grand and fancy events for [white] women to pat themselves on the back, singing several renditions of kumbaya through the tired tropes of heart wrenching and dramatic stories that come from women of color who participated. I would think, especially in our intense climate around the world, that it would be imperative to utilize this moment to drive folks to keep taking action and actually doing something instead of being reactionary.
Access was another huge issue for me. If I didn’t have the privilege of obtaining a press pass, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend. The first time I even heard this event was a thing was last year—and this has been a yearly event for 8 years now. There was a price range for tickets, where the highest priced at $350. So I had to ask myself—with the lack of people of color in the actual audience that I managed to see, who’s the intended audience for this? It may not be for people like me.

Oh, but despite all her own hardships and devastation, Hillary Clinton is finally free, people! Kristof quotes her as saying:

 "I just had to make up my mind that, yes, I was going to get out of bed, and, yes, I was going to go for a lot of long walks in the woods. And I was going to see my grandchildren a lot and spend time with my family and my friends. They have rallied around me in an amazing way.”

What - she thought Chelsea and the grandkids were going to snub her because she lost the election?

So now that she's finally out of her shell and free to speak "bluntly," Hillary Clinton's version of honesty is to continue blaming her loss on misogyny. The more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to be a victim of those who "unconsciously" resent people like her, she told Kristof. And she stayed stalwartly honest and true to the other official reasons that she lost: the Russian "plunder" of her campaign emails and the FBI investigation into her use of a private internet server.

Russia’s hacking of campaign emails “was a more effective theft even than Watergate,” she said, adding: “We aren’t going to let somebody sitting in the Kremlin, with 1,000 agents, with bots and trolls and everybody else, try to mix up in our election. We’ve got to end that, and we need to make sure that’s a bipartisan, American commitment.”

The most telling symbol of Hillary Clinton's freedom, according to Kristof, is that she is once again using "Rodham" as her middle name. Free at last, free at least, Great God almighty she's free at last.

Now, realizing that the New York Times reader commentariat is chock-full of Clinton supporters, I was as politely sarcastic, or sarcastically polite, as possible in my own published comment. which I think dovetails the classist aspect of the summit with Antoinette Isama's critique of its "colorblind" racist undertones. The current debate of classism v. racism is a false one, in my opinion, because neoliberalism relies on both for its continued survival. Plutocrats and philoanthrocapitalists love to showcase a certain select few black and brown people on the public stage, because it allows them to deny there is even such a thing as the class war. It shows citizen-consumers how liberal and magnanimous and socially responsible they are as they suck up even more of the globe's wealth for themselves.

The Women in the World summit series is nothing if not virtue-signalling writ large.

So here is my "controversial" comment (for once, mine was the first one submitted yesterday, so anyone interested in reading all the responses to it can easily find them lby selecting the "oldest" option.)

"Clinton acknowledged that Democrats need to do a better job reaching working-class Americans, but she added that part of her problem was that many voters were already struggling with tumult in their lives, 'and you layer on the first woman president over that, and I think some people, women included, had real problems.'”

Too bad that hardly any working class women were actually there to hear Mrs. Clinton's wise and heartfelt words. That's because  six out of every 10 American voters don't even have $500 in savings and thus couldn't afford the $350 cost of admission to the event, held in a glitzy venue which billionaire arch-conservative David H. Koch so humbly named after himself.

The millions of women working two or three part-time service sector jobs couldn't even get time off to be inspired long distance, via live-streaming, by Clinton and other media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley personalities.True, corporate sponsors including PepsiCo, P&G and AT&T did subsidize some tickets to the live event. But. like everything else in this Land of the Free, it was a high-odds lottery.

Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic. Yes, Comey did Hillary wrong.

Still, to listen to her explain to a theater full of plutocrats that she lost struggling voters because of her "success" and gender feels only slightly less insulting than once again lumping them into her Basket of Deplorables.

But anyway, let us rejoice that she's out of her shell and free to finally be herself.

Several dozen readers reacted, some supportive and some critical. I'll only include the real doozies, just to show that liberalism does indeed seem to be inexorably moving to the right. And since comments were shut off before I could respond, I will include my reactions to these utterly enjoyable responses as well.

Ed Chang, NYC:  Wow, totally unfair. Just because you are unable to make it to the party doesn't mean that the guests are uncaring about your needs. I mean do you want Hillary to start touring Walmarts around the country? Is that really the best use of her time? Or, alternatively, speak to a high profile group of people who may be able to donate to her causes and at the same time get a high profile write-up in the Times, as well as a video archive of the entire event on YouTube? It's simply more efficient to do the latter.

Sadly this is more proof of the jealousy some women feel towards more successful women, hence the election loss.

(No, Ed, we wouldn't want Hillary to catch cooties from a Walmart greeter. Plus, I must compliment you on the nice use of one of my favorite neoliberal buzzwords: efficiency.)

Mary Ann Donahue, NYS:  To Karen Garcia ~ I am disappointed that you, you who are well informed and well spoken would reduce Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables comment to the oft repeated damning sound bite. Taken out of context, it distorts the understanding and compassion that Clinton conveyed in the full text of her remarks.
Here is the last paragraph just to remind people who are so eager and willing to diminish her that she is a woman of rare intellect, insight and work ethic. We would be a better nation if she had been elected.
""But the other basket -- and I know this because I see friends from all over America here -- I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas -- as well as, you know, New York and California -- but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end.Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.""
Thank you Hillary.

(I know, I know, there's a special place in hell for me and all women who didn't support Hillary. It's sad but true that the "deplorables" part of her full remarks is the one that will go down as one of the of the more tone-deaf recorded remarks in all of political history. Just as Clinton professed concern for the downtrodden at the Koch Theater event, she  made her previous infamous remarks at another venue catering the extremely wealthy donor class. Additionally, she showed her true neoliberal hand when she asserted that struggling people only "feel" that they have been let down. They have been shafted, screwed and cheated in actual fact. They do not suffer from an emotional problem, they suffer from a poverty problem and hunger problem and a jobless problem.)

Stephanie Sommer, St. Paul: Ah, the politics of resentment roars its ugly head once again. Her success isn't the cause of others suffering. Its not a zero sum game. Moreover, her policies would have addressed so much of the suffering you mention, and that is exactly why conservatives hate her.

(Her policies did not include Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage or world peace or restoration of Glass-Steagall. The suffering would have gone on, the neoliberal dream would be alive and kicking, whether she was president or not.)

arbitrot, Paris:  Methinks Ms. Garcia is projecting her own guilt from the campaign, when she regularly expressed her displeasure with Sec. Clinton as opposed to another authentic hero, Sen Bernie Sanders.

Not that Ms. Garcia voted for Donald Trump, or even Jill Stein. I assume she pulled the lever for Clinton if only faute de mieux.

But I'll bet even Maureen Dowd did that.

Clinton didn't lose the 2016 election. Just a few too many self-righteous, woolly-headed, and downright politically naive Democrats did by trying too hard to cut Clinton down to their size.

("arbitrot" must possess magical thinking skills way across the ocean, purporting to know how I voted. And this is not the first time that my critiques of Democrats automatically turn me into Maureen Dowd. I always have to chuckle when this happens, because it is so sexist. Ever notice how women who write opinion pieces are often characterized as shrill, catty and bitchy?  And what's with the woolly-headed insult? I assume and hope that"arbitrot" implies that I'm stupid, and not that other meaning of the pejorative.)

David L. Jr, Mississippi:  Until your ardent desire to help the poor is trumped by your understanding of how they benefit from a growing private sector, your analytical absurdities will persist. Also, because you and Bernie Sanders often talk up Scandinavia: Scandinavians had greater levels of equality BEFORE their social democracies were built. Doesn't this tell you that it likely has more to do with culture than economics? Indeed, Nordics living in America outperform Nordic citizens themselves!

And David Koch is hardly conservative, whatever the media claims. There's nothing conservative about the man at all. He supports conservative candidates and then funds groups that pressure them into taking extreme anti-government economic positions, which aren't really "conservative" so much as revolutionary. He loathes their social views. While I disagree with him, I refuse to permit your implication that socialists care more about paupers than libertarians, which is false.

You really despise incorporation, don't you? Corporations built the modern world. Without them, it wouldn't exist. They didn't develop in the Islamic world; or in China, where hereditary bureaucrats oversaw state monopolies -- the one place where private companies did take hold in Asia, Japan, was a smashing success. Stratification is a product of the difference in ability as well as circumstances. Trying to level society in the name of an abstract idea is a recipe for disaster. You'll derogate anyone who succeeds in life.

(I can't even.)

 Lisa, Charlotte: And when all is said and done, Karen, you and the rest of Bernie's crowd own Trump. I won't insult you by pointing out he silliness of arguing that she should not have been speaking in a venue founded by David Koch. Lots of people did not like Hillary for lots of reasons. But surely you can't argue that her candidacy was in any way equivalent to Trump's because reality does not agree with you. I'd argue that this should have been blindingly clear to a person of your knowledge and intellect.

(I was wondering when somebody would finally blame me and the Berniebros for Trump. It's one of their favorite tropes. Who knew we had so much power?)

JS: I've seen her speak, free, to huge audiences in the poorest venues. Here she speaks and is heard around the world. A leader needs to do both, and she has, but only a woman is criticized in this manner, and that has to stop.

(Several readers accused me of picking on Hillary's greed just because she's a woman, and neglecting to ever criticize other politicians, such as Barack Obama, for doing the exact same money-grubbing. They obviously have never read my blog or previous Times commentary. And I have to ask, would Lucrezia Borgia be getting this kind of defense from modern liberals, with her XX chromosomes also becoming a protective shield from accountability?)

Michael Joseph, NYC:  Karen, you seem almost to take it as a personal insult that there are different classes in America, that corporations target certain populations, and that affluent people also have certain rights. I find it insulting that you would castigate all middle-class supporters of Hillary as plutocrats, that you assume a single-minded fixation on class constitutes some kind of "vision" or gives you moral superiority, and that you dismiss with a condescending sniff any injustice or tyranny "Yes, many Trump voters are misogynistic" that isn't Marxist-based. You exhibit the same limiting "foundational certainties" about class that the Trump people do, only from the opposing perspective. Both belief sets seem mired in the same 19th century ideologies that proved so disastrous for the 20h century.

(OK, I'll try to stay in my assigned place from now on.)

njlea, Seattle:  How much do The Con Don and Robber Barons - and their arm candy - spend on clothes, McCarthy?

What an out-of-touch comment. She is the most admired woman in the United States and one of the most admired women in the world. Women like other women to dress well. She is actually very conservative.

Are you Russian?

(No, but my paternal ancestors were. Catherine the Great gave them political asylum after they were persecuted in their native Germany on the basis of their religion. The clan, mostly independent farmers, later went back to Germany after one of the later czars, I think it was Alexander, tried to draft them into the armed services. So I guess you'd better squeal me out to PropOrNot, or if that fails, maybe alert the ICE goon squad.)

Hillary Clinton: L'État, C'est Moi

Hillary Clinton is not accepting her defeat at the hammy hands of former friend and kleptocrat Donald Trump graciously.

The Empress-in-Exile is placing all the blame for her loss on the FBI and on Russia and on the media. Speaking on Thursday night to the same wealthy donors who'd brayed their appreciation of her dissing the working class as a "basket of deplorables" a few months ago, she brazenly announced that she, Hillary Clinton, is the United States personified.

 As reported by Amy Chozick of the New York Times: 

“Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Mrs. Clinton said.

They were her first public remarks since widespread reports that the Russian government was behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and Mr. Podesta, with the goal of influencing the election.

“Make no mistake, as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign,” Mrs. Clinton told the group, which collectively poured roughly $1 billion into her effort. “This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation."

She said Russia's alleged theft and delivery of the emails to Wikileaks was a direct result of Russian President Vladimir Putin's "personal beef" with her over her criticism of his own rigging of parliamentary elections in 2011. She conveniently forgot to mention the meddling of her own State Department in Ukraine's "color revolution" along with her threat to impose a no-fly zone in Syria -- which is the same thing as declaring direct war on Russia.

Now that the Washington Post and the New York Times and the six media conglomerates which control 90% of all the information broadcast to the public have engaged on a concerted campaign to blame Russia for Donald Trump's victory, and the public seems to buying into Red Scare Redux, Hillary Clinton obviously now feels free to come out of the closet herself, joining the blame game personally and directly.

An attack on Hillary is an attack on the United States. Therefore, the implicit message is that in order to save the honor of the Empress-in-Exile, we must declare war on Russia.

 And they say Donald Trump is a narcissist?

Entitlement dies so hard. Plutocratic donors need to be soothed into thinking that their class war and the worst wealth inequality in modern history had nothing to do with Hillary's failure to win the hearts, minds and votes of deplorables of all ages, skin colors, ethnicities and genders. Meanwhile, some of her donors are themselves fair-weather friends, having gone to pre-parties at Trump Tower before attending Hillary's holiday gala in the Plaza Hotel, smack dab in the middle of the income disparity capital of the universe.

President Obama, after failing himself to sound the false alarm when he still had the chance, pre-election, is also coming around to embracing the Russophobic propaganda. He wants a full report from all 17 clans of the "intelligence community" on his desk by the time he leaves office for the safety of the golf course, the speaking circuit, the memoirs, and the raising of a billion dollars for his shrine to himself.

But even before receiving that alleged report, he is vowing retaliation in order to save the honor of the country, a/k/a Hillary and the Dismal Democrats. As reported by the Times White House mouthpiece about Obama's interview with the NPR White House mouthpiece:

The president discussed the potential for American retaliation with Steve Inskeep of NPR for an interview to air on Friday morning. “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our election,” Mr. Obama said, “we need to take action. And we will — at the time and place of our choosing.”

Could Obama be any more mealy-mouthed? You may or you may not learn of this counter-attack. And you probably won't, given that Obama doesn't want to open up the can of worms about Hillary America's meddling in Ukraine, and the proxy war against Putin in Syria. He certainly doesn't want to be called out as a hypocrite for his own recent brazen meddling in U.K. politics, when he warned Brits right before the Brexit vote that their failure to stay in the Eurozone would result in his shoving them to the back of the queue on trade with America.

Poison Pills

 (Optional soundtrack)

Much to my chagrin, not one trick-or-treater showed up at my door this Halloween. This was despite all my welcoming decorations and the strains of spooky holiday music wafting from my humble abode.

 I've therefore had no choice but to binge these past few days on a bowl full of "fun-size" Kit-Kats. Still, the jittery chocolate hangover I'm suffering is pure bliss compared to my election hangover.

One antidote that's worked calming wonders for me so far is news that Donna Brazile will never again show her face on CNN for money. The media will never be the same. They loved their girl. Now that she's gone, whatever will they do to fill all that deadly dull air time? Never again will she have to "persecuted" by the media for feeding debate questions to the Clinton campaign. Brazile, of course, is just one of the way too many partisan hacks posting as journalists on TV. When I symbolically condemned these talking heads to post-election jars of formaldehyde the other day as a Halloween gift to the tortured, I still wasn't aware that Donna had already been condemned without me. I have to admit, it was pure holiday magic.

Because perhaps even worse than her big offense of cheating was the way, in one of the leaked Podesta emails, that she'd flippantly denigrated a voting citizen as a nameless "woman with a rash" whose debate question on lead poisoning was one of the two (that we know about so far) which she leaked to the Clinton campaign. Brazile made it sound as though the woman was hoarding a stash of illegal poison instead of being sickened, over time, by the water of Flint, Michigan. "Her family has lead poison," Brazile inartfully explained to Hillary's campaign manager.

 Brazile told Podesta March 5 to expect a question from a resident of Flint, Mich., about the city’s water crisis, writing in an email, “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”
At the Flint debate the next day, CNN moderator Anderson Cooper introduced Flint resident Lee-Anne Walters, who said the city’s water had poisoned her family. She asked what the candidates would do about the issue. (Walters told Fox News on Tuesday that she still has a rash from the tainted water.)

More disgusting than CNN's belated disgust at Brazile's behavior is that executives kept the news of her ouster on the QT for two weeks before finally admitting, on Halloween, that she had in fact been fired.

Even more disgusting than that, though, was Hillary's cold-blooded refusal to even decently answer the "rash woman's" question in the first place.

From the transcript of the Democratic forum starring Bernie Sanders and Clinton:

COOPER: I want to go to Lee-Anne Walters. This is Lee-Anne Walters. She was one of the first people to report problems with the water in Flint. One of her twin boys stopped growing. Her daughter lost her hair.

She says she’s undecided, and has a question for both of you to answer, but we’ll start with Senator Sanders. Ms. Walters?

QUESTION: After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines.

(APPLAUSE)

 SANDERS: I will make a personal promise to you that the EPA and the EPA director that I appoint will make sure that every water system in the United States of America is tested, and that the people of those communities know the quality of the water that they are drinking, and that we are gonna have a plan to rebuild water systems in this country that are unsafe for drinking.

CLINTON: Well, I agree completely. I want to go further though. I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies.

So, I want to do exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere.

Bernie was plenty vague himself, but notice that Hillary outright refused to promise to get the lead out quickly in an effort to save lives, today. She only committed to discussions, within five years, to put together a plan to solve the humanitarian catastrophe. She wouldn't even commit to commit during her first term in office. This is what Hillary means by incrementalism. She as much as accused Ms. Walters of being too much of a purist by expecting pure water for her family any time soon.

Lee-Anne Walters, who told the media after the March debate that Hillary's cold non-answer had made her feel like "throwing up in my mouth" was absolutely livid when she discovered this week that her question had been pre-submitted to Clinton.  "She should be disqualified," Ms. Walters said.

***

Maureen Dowd has an illuminating piece in the New York Times magazine about the incestuous New York social world of the Trumps and the Clintons -- which, for purposes of neoliberal efficiency and best practices, I prefer to call Clump.

Once upon a time, the clans were members of the Mutual Admiration Society, but for purposes every bit as toxic and murky as Flint's water: 

The friendship, on both sides, was a transaction. Not personal, as they say in the “The Godfather” — just business. Trump’s life in New York was all about promoting the brand and making money for the family business. It was the same for the Clintons. A former Clinton White House official puts it more bluntly: “This was a classic Clinton go-where-the-money-is move.”

“They all played the same game in the same town with the same thing in mind,” says Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who was invited to Trump’s third wedding and served prison time for tax fraud and other felony charges. “Better your relationships and build the business. It’s all about money and getting ahead and hedging your bets and playing the angles.”

While Trump openly brags about canoodling with the Clintons and boasts how their socialite daughters are still the very best of friends, Hillary's operatives strive mightily and unsuccessfully to downgrade the clans' historical relationship as much ado about nothing. (For some reason, Dowd dished about the Mar-A-Lago wedding and the golf outings, but omitted their slimy joint jaunts on convicted billionaire pedophile Jeff Epstein's Lolita Express. She also left out the society page hoopla about Chelsea's friendship with fellow society matron Mrs. David Koch, which I wrote about under the title "Kochclintopia Inc" last year.)

Here's my published response to Maureen Dowd's piece:

Good article on how the elite take care of their own, whether or not they really "like" one other. If we learned nothing else from the WikiLeaks/Podesta emails, it's that money really does talk and that such values as peer loyalty and honesty and governance in the public interest went out the window awhile ago, if it ever even existed at all.

For the Clinton people to try to "play down" Chelsea's friendship with Ivanka is laughable. They apparently missed her recent appearance on "The View" when she gushed: "We were friends long before this election and we'll be friends long after this election. Our friendship didn't start with politics and it certainly is not going to end because of politics. I have tremendous respect for Ivanka."

There are plenty of photos of Chelsea and Ivanka hugging and kissing and gazing upon one another with the same kind of glittering, vacuous adoration that Hillary aimed at Donald at his $ociety wedding.

http://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/news/a17627/chelsea-clinto...

 I thought it was really strange that (at the last debate) Hillary kept smiling serenely and with much apparent enjoyment as Donald lobbed insult after insult at her. But then it dawned on me. They know it's all in the game. Only, the plenty of tears that will fall will not be theirs, but ours.

Money's gotta talk. Grifters gotta grift.

It's All In the Game (2nd optional soundtrack)