Show Me Don't Tell Me

The sturm-and-drang-and-storm-and-drain of the post-Election Wheel of Blame In-fortune continues to spin like a swirling whirlpool, with various heads popping up in the descending water column to take desperate breaths.   Among the heads identified over the week have been:

----> Huma Abedin, the Clinton aide whose ex-husband, Anthony Weiner, allegedly housed tens of thousands of Clinton emails on his laptop;

----> James Comey, the Attorney General whose letter indicating a re-opening of the email case against Clinton, at the time he released it (less than two weeks before election day) certainly didn't help HRC's cause;

----> Vladimir Putin, who is now seen as T-Rump's puppet master - Edgar Bergen to T-Rump's Mortimer Snerd;

----> American voters in general, for not voting for the establishment's preferred candidate.

The roles these heads played in the 2016 Debacle vary in their importance, and in whether or not they belong in the swirling drain in the first place.   I don't put much blame in the hands of Abedin - it was her ex-husband's laptop, so why isn't he-with the-so-appropriate-surname being brought into the conversation?  The timing of Comey's letter was certainly suspect, but I go back to the initial case made by many:  why did Clinton have the server in the first place, and why was classified material stored there?  I'll get to Vladimir in a moment.   Finally, if you want to hear the voters take the pilloried blame for Clinton's defeat, look no further than the leftie press: Markos Moulitsas was in rare form in a recent Daily Kos rant where he, with obvious sarcasm, says that we should be happy that coal miners voted, almost in a block, for Donald Trump.   Hey, this is a democracy, and you get the government you deserve when you vote a certain way, says Kos.   Zero Hedge has a nice rebuttal to Kos' verbal convulsion.  But what you rarely hear, except for a few enlightened leftie sites (and as you would expect, the right side of the ledger) is blame being assigned to Hillary herself, who in my opinion, is where the lion's share of said blame belongs.   She was the captain of the ship - and the ship sank.

As promised, let's talk about Vladimir.  Honestly, I don't know who to believe, insofar as the Russian Federation's alleged involvement in hacking of the DNC's (and as we later learned, the RNC's) email servers.   It is also alleged that these hacks provided Julian Assange with the material he needed for Wikileaks' dissemination of the same.   It is also alleged that Russia had nothing to do with the Wikileaks' disclosures, that the source was a CIA insider.  Fingers and rhetoric are flying around on both sides of this one, to the point where some members of the Electoral College (due to meet on December 19) requested the viewing of classified documents related to Russia's alleged role.   From down here, the fog of doubt is too thick - but don't tell that to Keith Olbermann.   

I'm sure there are many more heads to pop in this whirl-cess-pool in the coming weeks and months.   It's a consequence of having witness what is perhaps the biggest political upset in American history.

Stay tuned.   This ride is far from over - in fact, it might just be getting started.

Truth or Consequences, Reasons or Excuses...

The previous month has seen more finger pointing and assignment of blame for the defeat of Hillary Clinton than I can recall from any previous Presidential campaign.   She had all of the advantages a candidate could ever hope for or dare to dream of: deep-pocketed donors, the Wall Street financial juggernaut and the mainstream media outlets it owns, sycophantic television and radio pundits, the entertainment industry and big-name entertainers, even prominent Republicans and neoconservative leaders were "with Her".

And she lost. 

Sure, she won the popular vote by over two million at this writing.   However, this popular vote advantage didn't truly manifest itself until after California was called, and the votes came in at a 2:1 margin for her.   She didn't win the swing states in the Rust Belt and in Florida - the so-called "Blue Wall" that was to keep Democrats in the White House for a generation - hence, her downfall.

Here is what I think happened, and why: