2016 Postmortem

terms of skill-set and knowledge, she is uniquely qualified. But we ran somebody who dared to be the President's Wife and try to make a difference in that role. For that, the GOP media machinery sunk its teeth into her and never let go. They smelled blood and they did such a number on her by making her THE boogie man of the democratic party, to the point where people who know nearly nothing about her know that she is the anti-christ.

I understand the impetus for party insiders and backers of Clinton to want to doggedly fight through that smear job and emerge victorious, and really, if there was a year it could happen, this was that year. But it was hubristic and it was in my opinion, outside of the standard operating procedure. Generally when someone is damaged, fairly or not, they are not encouraged to take that damage to the national level of politics.

To be fair, I'm saying it was a mistake now, but I never thought Trump had a chance. I never thought anybody in the GOP lineup had a chance. Sadly, its likely none of them did have a chance against a candidate who didn't bring into this campaign as much baggage as Clinton. I don't mean Bernie, because that's entirely different baggage. He would be persona non-grata by the media, and my guess is he wouldn't have been full-throatedly supported by the Dem establishment either. Who knows, maybe...but lets just say it would have been a different ball-game entirely with outcomes no more certain than Clinton's.

A lot of people held their nose and voted for Trump, certainly because they didn't and don't understand just how incompetent he is, or how truly sociopathic, anymore than they understand that the reasons they despise Hillary are almost whole-cloth fabrications. Chock that all up to the state of our media, which we refuse to go at as a party. I give credit to Obama for actually calling out Fox and Limbaugh during his term, but that gives an air of respectability and honest reporting to the others, which they just have not earned. What we should be calling out is their financial incentives...who owns them and just why that might make them less inclined to do honest, informative reporting. Instead, we thought it would be good to have our own corporate mouthpiece in MSNBC, but that hasn't worked out for us, and it's never been nearly enough or as uniform.

So we can at least, as a party, take responsibility for allowing a corporate media to run amok in this country. The political risks of taking it on have always been calculated as too high I guess but it doesn't help that its all as incestuous as it is, and that our politicians try to play that game of granting access too.

And yes, still she should have won, and if we're looking at every way in which voters rights have been eroded and election results have been made unverifiable, in an honest world, maybe she did, but the media let that happen too. Our party let the media happen, that in turn let that happen. You can't blame the GOP because they actively sought this stuff. We know they have no respect or love for democracy. As a party, we just stopped challenging these things. We let them happen. One caveat to this criticism is that had democrats put the media in their crosshairs, would they have been themselves destroyed by it? Would we be even worse off now? That's a a possibility I have to at least consider.

Anyway, we have somewhat decentralized media now. We have alternative sources. Its a double-edged sword, but there's still hope.