The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Hillary Rodham Clinton

Happy Black Friday!  I have to work so I care even less than usual about Black Friday.  Plus all the cool shit is online anyway, right?

I figure no one will read this anyway, so I'll just amuse myself.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret was a British series starring Arrested Development's David Cross as a dumb American who goes to England to launch an energy drink called "Thunder Muscle."  As the title suggests, he makes one bad decision after another until the point of unleashing Armageddon.  (The less said about the IFC reboot the better.)

When you look back, you can likewise think of all the poor decisions Hillary Clinton made that led to her defeat at the hands of the electoral college a few weeks ago.

You could begin a lot of places.  Like trying to lead the push to reform healthcare in 1993 that wound up freaking people out and costing Democrats the midterms in 1994.  That in turn unleashed Newt Gingrich and company on the Clintons, culminating in impeachment hearings.

Or you could start with staying with Bill Clinton after the whole Monica Lewinsky thing came out.  That certainly came back to grab her by the pussy after Trump's lewd comments came out.  Had she divorced Bill, she could have taken the high ground of saying she wouldn't tolerate such behavior.  By "standing by her man" it left things kind of muddled even for liberals.  I mean, all we could fall back on to justify Bill's behavior vs. Trump's is that Bill wasn't running for president.

Running for Senate in 2000 while still being First Lady never struck a good chord with me.  Especially since she hardly had any tie to New York state at the time.  It seemed like using her star power to grab continued power for herself.

Those are debatable to some extent.  Probably the first big mistake was voting for the Iraq War.  That bit her in the ass when it came to the primaries this year.  People like me who didn't support the war would rather vote for someone like Obama or Sanders who likewise did not support Bush's war.  And falling back on "I was duped by the bad intelligence" just made her seem like a gullible fool.

The mistake she made in 2008 was repeated in 2016.  I talked about it after the election:  she never really gave people a vision of what she wanted to accomplish.  As we saw with Trump voters, Americans have a "What are you gonna do for me?" mentality about voting.  You have to promise them something, even if you have no intention of actually doing it.  Obama was all about Hope and Change and making America great again, whereas Hillary was about...what?*

*(Part of it isn't her fault in that Obama embodied the idea of a fresh start being young and half-black.  Hillary, because of her history, would always represent the past, the former status quo.  Trump's people used that against her, casting her as "the insider" and him as "the outsider")

Her worst decision?  Becoming Secretary of State.  Think about it:  the emails and Benghazi all stemmed from her taking that job.  If she remains a humble senator from New York, Republicans would have had to reach back to the 90s to dust off all that Whitewater and Vince Foster stuff--which they did anyway, but not as prevalently.

If you set that aside, obviously using the email server was a bad idea.  Even if Powell and Rice did that before her.    From what happened in the 90s, she should have realized she needed everything above-board and crystal clear.  The same with the Clinton Foundation.  She and Bill needed to keep all that squeaky clean instead of acting shady.

Speaking of, she was just doing her job, but criticizing Julian Assange for the first Wikileaks releases really bit her in the ass this year.  I forget if it was 60 Minutes or one of the HBO shows talking about how the one-sided release of emails from Wikileaks was a result of Assange wanting revenge for the Obama administration's reaction to that first batch of leaked information around 2010.

I'm not counting Benghazi.  I think most of that was just a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking.

Like voting for Iraq, those Wall Street speeches really hurt her with Bernie Sanders in the primaries and again with Trump.  I mean, how could she say she was going to reform Wall Street when she'd been taking their money?  Then thanks to Wikileaks (see above) the text of the speeches came out and that line about "open borders" even though taken out of context didn't help with paranoid dopes worried about all those "bad hombres" coming across the border.

A mistake last year about this time was not being more forthcoming about those emails.  Instead she tried to laugh it off.  "I'm an old lady who doesn't know much about technology. lol"  It was disingenuous and let that non-issue fester into an issue.  Since there was really not much in the emails, she should have just come clean straight away.  "You want my emails?  Here's my emails!"  Deleting 30,000+ made her look guiltier than she probably was.

Speaking of the emails, hiring Anthony Weiner's ex-wife as her assistant really backfired on her.  Sure there was no connection between Hillary and Weiner, but just putting "Anthony Weiner," "sexting," "Hillary Clinton," and "emails" together, it let people THINK there was something to it.  It's not fair to the ex-wife but political scandals paint people with a pretty broad brush.  It was guilt by association.

The "basket of deplorables" comment was shades of Mitt Romney's 47% comment.  Something she should probably have realized is that in 2016 anywhere you speak it's essentially a hot mic; there will always be someone with a phone to record the thing.  She should have thought of that for those Wall Street speeches too.  It's a lot harder to keep stuff like that secret in 2016 than it was in 1996 when the Web was in its infancy and we just had message boards and email.

A lot of things that all added up in the end.  If any time travelers stumble upon this and want to stop Trump, here are some places where you could help Hillary get elected.  That and actually getting people to fucking vote!