Liberals and progressives are in a state of derangement this week after the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton that put Donald Trump into the White House. There is much weeping and gnashing of the teeth as grief-stricken Democrats look for excuses, promote conspiracy theories and empty their tear ducts over a pool of rapidly souring spilled milk. But the truth that none will admit to is that they earned every bit of their dumpster fire of an election by throwing in with a polarizing candidate who had already been rejected back in 2008.

As this humble author wrote two years ago in my article “Democrats Laying the Groundwork For 2016 Catastrophe”:

Democrats may have gone to bed crying softly into their pillows in the wee hours of early Wednesday morning last week but awoke determined to double down on exactly what it was that got their clocks cleaned in the first place. You would think that after receiving such an ass-whipping that there would be some sort of soul-searching and a rethinking of their overall strategy prior to 2016. But we are talking about the Democratic party here so the only logical thing to do with the iceberg in sight is to order the engine room to crank it up to ramming speed. On Thursday, Senate Democrats once again elected Harry Reid to be their leader.

The intrepid Reid’s fingerprints were all over the great beat down of 2014 and early indications are that they will also be on the torpedo hit amidships in two years if Queen Hillary the Inevitable gets rejected by the electorate in her quixotic quest for power. If Mrs. Clinton goes down she is going to take the entire party down with her and there is no Plan B for the immediate future. Republican strategists must be licking their chops over the prospect of a Democratic party self-immolation — that is if they can stop bickering among themselves long enough take advantage of the rare historical opportunity to deliver the killing blow to their nemesis. The scheming Karl Rove once spoke of a “permanent Republican majority” although he could never deliver it. That prophecy is within reach if all that the GOP does is simply stay out of the Democrats’ way as they continue to march off the edge of a cliff like a pack of drunken lemmings.

Well Hillary Clinton indeed went down and took the entire party down with her, a devastating defeat from which they will not soon (if ever) recover from and one that has cost liberals and progressives the Supreme Court for the next several decades.

There is to this point little reflection on the very important fact that the Democrats were peddling damaged goods and that the party poohbahs chose to sabotage and later neutralize the one person who would have thumped Trump. As internal DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks showed, the political organization that was to have been a neutral arbiter in the process was stacked with Clinton loyalists who worked overtime to undermine Bernie Sanders and his own populist message. Sanders generated an enthusiasm that energized young voters but he was never going to be accepted by the Wall Street fat cats who owned Mrs. Clinton and expected a return on their investment for all of those six-figure speaking gigs.

Sanders ran an insurgent campaign that could well have toppled Queen Hillary were it not for the meddling of party insiders, the complicity of the media and the superdelegates who were in the bag for the Clintons from the beginning. One big reason why Trump won is that he was able to appeal to those white working class voters that the elitist snobs running the Democratic party viewed with contempt, these were the so-called Reagan Democrats and had Clinton even bothered to pay lip service to them she could very well be the president elect instead of a bitter old woman who is blaming her defeat on FBI Director James Comey.

The Hill reports “Clinton blames loss on FBI director’s letter”:

Hillary Clinton blamed her electoral defeat on FBI Director James Comey in a call with her top donors on Saturday, offering her most extensive comments yet following her loss to Donald Trump.

“There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” Clinton said, according to The New York Times. “[O]ur analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

Clinton said that her poll numbers recovered from a plunge following the first letter from Comey, which came 11 days before the election and informed Congress that the FBI had renewed its interest in the investigation after they found emails related to the probe.

However, she argued the second letter sent just two days before the election saying that a review of newly discovered emails found nothing to alter the decision to not recommend charges over the mishandling of classified information aroused Trump’s supporters.

“We were once again up in all but two of the battleground states, and we were up considerably in some that we ended up losing,” Clinton said, according to the Times report. “And we were feeling like we had to put it back together.”

Clinton’s comments come just days after her top campaign aides also pinned blame for the loss on the FBI director in another call.

On that call with donors on Thursday, campaign chairman John Podesta said that Comey is the one “who we think may have cost us the election.”

Granted that the Comey letter was damaging but it wasn’t the reason that voters drop-kicked Mrs. Clinton. The blame belongs with Team Hillary itself and the repulsive nature of the most cynical, angry and divisive campaign ever. Hillary managed to dodge any discussion of actual issues and focused her energy on race baiting, conspiracy mongering, neo-McCarthyist demagoguery that came around to bite her in the ass.

GROSS INCOMPETENCE + HUBRIS = DISASTER

It’s not that Clinton went negative but rather never even bothered to articulate a positive vision for America as a whole. So effective were her lies and spewing of hatred that her brain dead minions are currently rioting in the streets and demanding that the election results be overturned or at the very least, the Electoral College realize that there was a mistake and give the presidency back to Queen Hillary.

Clinton got creamed because she chose to tell the white working class to go to hell and paid dearly for that miscalculation in the Rust Belt which became the killing fields for her White House hopes. Instead of spending the last weekend appealing to voters in economically decimated areas of Ohio, Hillary chose to pander to blacks by appearing with foul-mouthed rappers, cop-hating divas and multimillionaire celebrity basketball players. That worked out really well for her didn’t it?

Her organization was led by an all-star team of fuck-ups who set new standards for incompetence. Campaign manager John Podesta bumbled into a phishing trap and then watched in horror as over 50,000 of his emails were published by Wikileaks. The collusion between the campaign and her stooge infested DNC was laid bare when internal emails detailing political skullduggery and primary rigging against Sanders were also released. Rather than mitigate the damage by profusely apologizing to the public, Democrats quickly blamed it all on the Russians.

Another epic miscalculation was Hillary’s embracing of the neocons and especially ideologues Robert Kagan and William Kristol who gained notoriety for their think tank the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and it’s role in providing the intellectual underpinnings of Bush and Cheney’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq and destabilize the Middle East. While the Beltway bozos, the corrupt media and the defense industry which underwrites the careers of thousands within Imperial Washington were drooling over the prospect of unleashing the warmongering Hillary on the world, the idea that Americans are tired of foreign wars and want to fix America instead was never considered.

Then there was boy wonder Robbie Mook who pushed the red-baiting in the stretch run, going on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit to allege that Trump was a Kremlin puppet. This was a meme that Clinton herself pushed and actually accused her opponent of during the third debate. Mook’s foray into the past was so sleazy that one writer called him out as a “millennial Roy Cohn” but the smears of Trump and his supporters as Putin’s fifth column never resonated with voters. Nor did her big “alt-right” speech seeking to marginalize conservatives and Trump supporters as neo-Nazis and her doubling down on failure by calling out millions of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” served as a rallying cry for the anti-Clinton opposition.

The list of blunders is endless but it bears noting that the FBI wouldn’t be involved at all if not for Clinton’s own choice to use a private email server. So FBI Director Comey may have done some damage to the Clinton criminal empire but the majority was wholly self-inflated by a campaign that more than made up for a lack of substance with an abundance of arrogance.

WELCOME TO TRUMPLAND

The words President Trump are like acid in the mouths of liberals and progressives but they must accept the new reality. The iconoclastic billionaire is neither the new Hitler as the media and liberals have invested much in portraying him as nor is he a raving racist fiend. That was more of a narrative that Team Hillary chose to promote than the actual truth. Never before in the history of American politics was a legitimate presidential candidate of one of the two major parties so savagely vilified by so many and it blew up in spectacular manner.

I always found the narrative that Trump is an anti-Muslim hatemonger to be a very hypocritical one. The same media that constantly attacked the new president-elect as an Islamophobic lunatic has spent fifteen years providing cover for an ongoing series of Middle Eastern wars that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims (including women and children) as well as the creation of a refugee crisis that has destroyed the lives of millions. As the saying goes “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” and let’s face it, Trump has no blood on his hands (at least not yet) while the corrupt media bathes in it.

Trump’s alleged racism towards Latinos was also ginned up, largely due to the Democrats needing to appeal to that particular demographic for future elections. Trump’s comments were always cherry-picked and then spun for maximum impact in terms of the potential to generate public outrage. He may have blasted illegal immigrants but these are indeed people who are in the country in violation of the law and the biggest proponents of immigration reform are corporate types who benefit greatly by keeping American wages depressed. There was the border wall that the media harped about but in another glaring show of hypocrisy and selective outrage, the fact that Israel has a border wall was never once offered as context.

Despite the media and Democrats’ insistence to the contrary, Trump has not said anything negative about either LGBT people nor of African Americans but keeping these demographics in fear of facing persecution serves the Democrats well and keeps them aligned with the party. Trump reached out to blacks in the latter months of his campaign, many of whom were deeply suspicious of the intentions of the Democrats who have always taken their votes for granted. Despite months of demagoguery and dabbling in the always incendiary politics of race, the black vote failed to turn out for Hillary as it did for Obama.

There are many reasons to suspect that Trump may be a lot more moderate than a President Clinton would have been, especially in foreign policy now that the neocons and World War III have been placed on hold.

STEPPING BACK FROM THE ABYSS

From early indications it’s looking like liberals and progressives are hellbent at tripling down on failure. The Trump revolution was a yuuuge shock but had the warning signs over Hillary’s toxic legacy and repugnant qualities been paid attention to then history may indeed have been different. A funereal sense of defeat, bitterness and anger is suffocating rational thought and the reaction to Tuesday’s shocker is not one that bodes well for long-term success.

Efforts at pressuring the Electoral College into reversing the results of the election only serve to make Democrats look like sore losers. Granted that the Electoral College sucks and is an affront to democracy but before Hillary was blindsided there were no complaints. You can’t change the rules of the game AFTER you lose and the longer that it goes on, the more that the public will come to view liberals and progressives as petulant babies.

The thousands who have taken to the streets in protests coordinated by shady groups like MoveOn.org and others are only doing harm to their cause. You are not likely to sway anyone to your cause by blocking off highways and impeding their right to free passage, there will inevitably be violence and property damage as hooligans join the crowds and this is going to backfire spectacularly when that happens. Despite the growing election trutherism, conspiracy mongering about right-wing coups and hacked voting machines the fact is that Trump and the Republicans won and ongoing attempts to overturn the results and intimidate Americans by running amok in the streets is only going to damage opposition chances in 2018 and 2020.

The constructive thing do do would be to purge the party of all Clinton loyalists, burn thing to the ground and start over from scratch. A complete housecleaning at the corrupt DNC is in order and screamin’ Howard Dean is not the answer. Once that particular swamp has been drained it would be wise to install those who are inclusive, forward thinking and above all neutral as leaders and take cybersecurity more seriously.

The party’s failure to cultivate young political talent so that there would be no repeat of 2008 when Obama snatched away the nomination to which Hillary was entitled has left the Dems with an empty bench. Forget about Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who both disgraced themselves by becoming surrogates for Mrs. Clinton, a woman who embodied everything that they made their names in opposing. They are facing long enough odds now that Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) will be assuming control of the Democrats in the Senate anyway. Like a parasite, the establishment Dems will continue to feed on their host. According to The Hill, an early look at potential 2020 presidential contenders includes longtime insider Tim Kaine whose pick as Hillary’s running mate was yet another example of who she truly represented.

One thing is imperative and that is that liberals and progressives and their political party stop looking down at white working class voters as hillbilly white trash undeserving of their attention. It would serve liberals and progressives well to familiarize themselves with the work of the late, great Joe Bageant whose book Deer Hunting With Jesus is a must read for those looking to do an honest assessment of Trump’s victory. By shitting all over millions of white voters in rural and deindustrialized areas, the cultural elitist Democrats have nurtured the very populism that was finally driven to grabbing their pitchforks in 2016. People are hurting badly thanks to the one-sided global trade deals that are backed by Clinton and establishment Dems and the Obama administration’s refusal to hold Wall Street and the big banks accountable was akin to rubbing salt into their open wounds. Reaching out to this forgotten demographic is a key to any recovery from Trumpageddon.

The Democrats sowed the seeds of their own defeat and as it sits today haven’t learned one damned thing. When you are in a hole the logical answer is to stop digging, not ask for a bigger shovel.

A failure to recognize the catastrophic failure of going all-in on Hillary will only serve to render the blue jackass extinct.

Originally Published at OpEd News