The Sunday before the election, This American Life ran an episode on Hillary!

The lead item was about her email schlamozzle. A reporter had read all the interviews of her people with the FBI, and concluded that rather than nefarious, the whole thing came down to Hillary! -- and her bag carriers -- being such technotards they had no idea how stupid they were.

Hillary!, apparently, doesn't even know how to use a desktop computer.

And that's the least bad explanation.

Give her a few years and she'll be catching up with internet memes of 1998, you'll see!

When you run your organization like a dictator, no one will tell you you're wrong or tell you news you don't want to hear. When the Allies invaded Normandy on D-Day, the Nazis had tanks held in reserve to counter the expected invasion (at Calais). Hitler was taking a nap and no one was willing to wake him to tell him the bad news and that they needed the tanks in Normandy. Add to the petulant dictator a staff the wasn't quite sure what was going on (was this a diversion?) and you've got a recipe for confusion and failure.

Hillary is widely known for acts of verbal and even physical violence against those who tell her things she doesn't want to hear. So, who was going to tell her that Trump could win Michigan and that more money was needed to counter him there?

As has been noted here, in another thread, she went ballistic against Mook and Podesta when it became obvious she was going to lose the election. Instead of telling everyone they did a good job and should feel proud even though they lost, she started hurling expletives and blame.

It was Comey's fault for investigating the e-mails and the server, not hers for setting it up and forwarding classified e-mails to her maid to print for her.

Hillary was expecting coronation and in was in no way mentally and emotionally prepared for a competitive campaign. And no one on her staff was willing to tell her she wasn't the queen.

And that's the least bad explanation. ~ Jeff Guinn at November 17, 2016 8:02 AM

Fascinating link, Jeff. It sounds like a technologically inept staff joined a government department that was technologically backward and tried to use their modern conveniences without understanding how they would operate sitting on an antiquated system.

That the State Department in 2001 had almost no desktop computers is startling.

Prior to hearing this, I ascribed Hillary's e-mail problems to corruption. Now, I'm willing to admit it was most likely due to incompetence.

Not that this makes her a better candidate for president. It does, however, bring up an interesting point on what we need our presidents to be able to do. And with this, the ability to operate a laptop or a modern Blackberry or iPhone assumes a greater importance. And the McCain campaign's 2008 admission that McCain was only then learning to use modern communication methods (e-mail, Twitter, etc.) damns him more than his bumbling campaign management.

"What we need our presidents to be able to do" is first last and always be honest.

OF COURSE is looked like she was bullshitting when she said it, OF COURSE it did: But if her "With a cloth?" denials were in fact sincere, she could nonetheless have dodged our continuing disdain by being honest about the failure. She might well have become president if she had.

"What we need our presidents to be able to do" is first last and always be honest. ~ Crid at November 17, 2016 10:22 AM

Hillary Clinton's fundamental inability to be honest about anything - the e-mails, the pneumonia, the Rose Law Firm billing records, the White House travel office, Bill's proclivities - doomed her campaign to failure from the outset. She was dishonest not only with the voters, but with herself as well.

If you want to be president, the first thing you need to know is yourself. Don't make the campaign about something that will come back and to bite you in the ass.

Had she been honest about Bill's misogyny, she might have campaigned on something other than Trump's misogyny, something that would have resonated with the voters and not been turned back against her.

"the whole thing came down to Hillary! -- and her bag carriers -- being such technotards they had no idea how stupid they were."

That's interesting, because for the past decade, the younger people in the Republican Party have been complaining about how slow the GOP has been to embrace tech / Big Data, and how they allowed the Democrats to gain a big advantage in this area. Maybe all that was "proprietary" to the Obama organization and wasn't shared with the rest of the Democratic Party. Wouldn't surprise me.

"Prior to hearing this, I ascribed Hillary's e-mail problems to corruption. Now, I'm willing to admit it was most likely due to incompetence."

Not buying it. The mistakes made in setting up the system might could be ascribed to incompetence, but Hillary had been warned that her system was leaking classified data, and she very clearly told her staff that it was not open for discussion. It's clear that Hillary believed that She, as the Queen, did not need to be bothered with such trifling concerns. Further, don't lose track of the reason her system was set up in the first place. She could have had a turnkey, ready-to-go system from the NSA just for the asking. But she knew she was going to be doing a lot of shit that she wanted to keep out of federal records and beyond FOIA reach. That wasn't an accident.

Maybe all that was "proprietary" to the Obama organization....

Yes, Dave, it appears that it was.

President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has turned over its most valuable asset — a massive computer database containing personal data on millions of American voters — to a new advocacy group created to advance the White House agenda on issues ranging from gun control to immigration reform.

Organizing For Action (OFA), the advocacy group set up in recent weeks by the president’s top political aides, has already acquired access to the database under a leasing agreement with the Obama campaign, Katie Hogan, a former Obama campaign aide who is now serving as spokeswoman for the lobbying group, told NBC News. The information will be used to unleash an “army of the door knockers” to back the president’s legislative agenda as well as raise money for “issue ads” – particularly in crucial congressional districts, she said.

Though the article is from 2013, Organizing for Action doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.

One thing I saw that demonstrated the disorganization of Clinton's campaign was a sponsored post in my Facebook feed asking supporters to chip in for the campaign THE DAY BEFORE THE ELECTION! If I gave them my credit card information, they wouldn't get the money until the day after the election. If I was going to contribute, I'd want the money to help her win, not pay her bills. (Or worse, go into her pocket after she lost. I could see her saying, "You want me to pay for all that advertising? I lost the election! I'm not paying for that!")

[Conan:] Prior to hearing this, I ascribed Hillary's e-mail problems to corruption. Now, I'm willing to admit it was most likely due to incompetence.

[Cousin Dave:] Not buying it. The mistakes made in setting up the system might could be ascribed to incompetence,

I tend to agree with Cousin Dave. The reporter who read the interviews (which weren't provided under oath) seemed awfully credulous about apparent ignorance.

If that is as true as the reporter thinks it is, then it renders erasing thousands of emails, and printing thousands (who the hell does that, other than to make them extremely difficult to review and collate) really inexplicable.

It clearly was both. When Hillary claimed she had permission to setup her own server she was the person who gave herself that permission. A classic Clinton doublespeak. It is obvious that Hillary saw some of the things the Bush administration did and said, Hey, that looks like a good idea. The secret server was obviously to avoid FOIA requests and to prevent the keeping of official records. That Clinton set things up how she did and that she thought it wouldn't be discovered were pure incompetence.

It can be both.

Her "campaign" was at fault?

Oh, come on now. They/she needs to stop blaming everyone but Hillary for her failure. She lost because SHE lost.

Although, I guess, blaming her campaign is the closest that anyone will come to blaming her.

The sun is finally setting on Obamanation and she should just dry up and blow away, far away from the public eye. I am sick to death hearing about her and hearing from her.

Next thing you know they will be making a movie about her life and put it up on the O Network.

Next thing you know they will be making a movie about her life and put it up on the O Network. ~ charles at November 17, 2016 5:58 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if it was already in the works.

May we hear from Karma?

"At this point, what difference does it make?"

> She was dishonest not only with
> the voters, but with herself
> as well.

I totally ♥ all the commenters on this magnificent forum, but I hate that kind of rhetoric.

I just don't care about people's honesty to themselves.

• It doesn't mean a goddam thing. It's a Disney trope, and in their script guidelines, "honest with his/her self" is disallowed in narratives for characters over the age of six. Basically, you (the screenplay author) gotta let go of that at about the same time you let go of a cricket —Jimminy Cricket— as a narrative device.


• The threadbare circumstances where such intimate, compassionate, tender psychological reductionism might possibly apply are completely excluded from contexts of political service. Also from: Bus driving, shoe cobbling, fire fighting, musical performance, burger-flipping and most every other typical social relationship.
  
  It's intimate talk. And I don't WANT to be intimate with Hillary Clinton. (Or any of the other politicians who ever lived, including Honest Abe.) I'll ask them not to involve themselves in my intimacies lest they risk dire consequences, and they should fucking well expect a similar observation of boundaries from me. And when they ask that I go a little too far, tempting me for extra compassion because the husband is a globally famous lecher, I'll tell them to go fuck themselves. Their choices are not my problem.

Listen, DON'T DO HILLARY'S WORK *FOR* HER. You don't owe her that intimacy. Nor do you owe it to any but that handful of dears in your life.

Being dishonest to yourself just means you are incompetent. The feedback loop where you learn from your mistakes and do a better job next time is broken. So the same mistakes get repeated and new mistakes are made due to the misattribution of fault.

I thought it was 'be true to yourself' that was the trite Disney thing. It has some significance for happiness but is way over hyped and shouldn't matter to anyone else.

I think of it more along the lines of "don't fall for the Dunning-Kruger effect". Hillary is a prime example of this: she's gone through most of her adult life with people telling her that she is the Smartest Woman In The World. It's an instance of the overall conceit of the Left that they imagine themselves to be highly intelligent, because they went to the correct schools and have the correct credentials and hang out with the correct people. In fact, most of them are mal-educated; they have little practical knowledge in any field, and they have been taught an awful lot of stuff that isn't true.

What Ben and Dave said.

Hillary's fundamental inability to be honest with herself led her to make the same mistakes over again, only on a grander scale. Her feedback loop is broken, and it was broken by her. She didn't let anyone tell her she was wrong or tell anything she didn't want to hear, being known to fly into rages when someone tried to do that.

Trump stopped tweeting nonsense when Kellyanne Conway told him it made him look like an idiot. The final days of the campaign were blissfully free of Trump tweets. Others may joke that his staff didn't trust him with Twitter, but it shows that he is open to someone telling him something he might not want to hear. His feedback loop isn't totally broken.

My comment was less about intimacy than it was about self-awareness. That said, I agree with you about intimacy with politicians. I don't want any politician being intimate with me and I don't want to be intimate with them. The Bill Clinton affair broke me of any lingering inclination in that direction. Who among us really needs to know the distinguishing characteristics of the president's penis? Or what he likes to do with cigars?