Dear Hillary

Can we talk?

I’ve been listening to you now for, the last three years, and I have to tell you, as difficult as this is to hear, that you lost the election. And by that, I do not mean to just state a fact, I mean to lay the blame for the loss, and for the subtotal destruction of the Democratic party, at your feet. You. You lost the election.

When Alabama’s football team loses, Nick Saban doesn’t blame the players, or the referees, or the sportscasters on the SEC Network. He shoulders the responsibility. It’s that way with every coach, because, at the end of the day, the buck stops with them.

You were the captain of the ship, and you ran it aground early and often on the shoals of Corruption Island. And, Hillary, this is the important thing: I voted for you in 2008, and I voted for Obama in 2012. I’m a “liberal trial lawyer” and when you lose me, well, you’ve lost a lot more than just your base. You’ve lost any chance of winning.

So, let’s go back to why you lost in 2008. You lost because you expected name recognition and your history as first lady (and, albeit minimal, your experience as a senator) to carry the day. Your message was “I’m ready.” You lost because a better message came along: hope and change.

So, if you had done any kind of autopsy on your still-born candidacy in 2008 you would have seen that your lack of a message was the key to your defeat. But instead the lesson you took away from 2008 was “I need to cheat to win.” It was exactly the wrong message to take away. But in 2016, you knew that you had to drive a stake through the heart of Sander’s candidacy to win, and you lucked out and had an opposition candidate with an ethical disposition who decided to debate on policy, and not point out your other problems.

But rather than just thanking your lucky stars that you drew Sanders, instead, you colluded with Donna Brazile, your mole-in-residence at CNN, to get debate questions early so that with the help of your polling arm you could craft the least offensive message. You aimed not to offend. By abandoning the most inspiring message, you abandoned the idea of leading. Instead, you served up Shredded Wheat when the cool kids were clamoring for Captain Crunch.

Now, the blue wall states are filled with lots of Union workers. These are people who work hourly jobs, pay taxes, and believe in the companies and country. You’ve always had their vote in the Democratic party, and so you took them for granted. You’ve always had the black vote, but again, you misread the mood of the country and decided to throw your lot in with Black Lives Matter (more). You chose to demonize those factory workers by saying they were racists and homophobes. You called out the police who were doing no more than their job.  Worse, you defamed them.

Ask yourself this, Hillary: would Harry S. Truman ever have thrown his lot in with a thug who committed a strong-arm convenience store robbery and then viciously assaulted a police officer? While tragic that it cost the young man his life, my guess is Harry would have said “serve’s him right.” And while the BLM folks were marching, blocking traffic, and generally chanting “What do we want: dead cops” you were discussing how the white folks had to abandon their “white privilege.”

This is just a bit of rhetorical advice here Hilly, but as a general rule if your outfit costs more than some families make in a calendar year, you probably shouldn’t be lecturing them on “white privilege.”

I don’t know what your messaging consultants get, but it ought to be life without parole. “We’re going to raise taxes on the middle class!” Whose bright idea was that? What, were the lot of you blind drunk and creating a narrative for an alternate universe, or do you just really not understand how tone-deaf that is?

Then there’s the climate-change, global-warming, environmentalist poppycock. Did you walk in one day and say “What can I do to ensure that the entirety of Appalachia will vote for my opponent?” Because I’m pretty sure that’s the only way your insipid “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of work,” speech found its way on to your teleprompter.

Now, I realize that suburban New York doesn’t have the best broadcast TV service, but surely you and Bubba can afford either Cable or Dish (note: get the Foundation to pay for it). Surely you must have seen all the horror brought to our shores (and the countries of Europe) by terrorists. Perhaps you didn’t do well in Geography, but if you’d employed a few consultants who were not in the Muslim Brotherhood, you might have learned that a lot of those terrorists were, in fact, Muslim. And you might have learned that their holy book, the Quran/Koran in fact urges them to kill “infidels.” For the record, infidels are people who make up about 96% of the United States.

Stop! I know what you’re saying to yourself right now: “not all Muslims are bad!” That’s true, and not all snakes are poisonous, but if I come upon one in the woods the safe bet is to assume that slithering thing on the ground, is, in fact, the single most venomous reptile in the world. You see, when Trump was analogizing Muslims to Skittles, you missed the point. The point isn’t that the majority of the bowl is perfectly safe, the point is that you can’t tell the poison ones from the good ones unless you eat them. And by then, it’s too damned late.

But rather than craft an intelligent message on immigration and terrorism, you relied on your own Muslim Brotherhood Mole and you decided that we needed to bring in half a million Muslims.

Now, I have to tell you, while that played really well on the Left Coast, and the glitterati were throwing roses at your feet, the factory workers, Vietnam and Iraq War vets, and those of us with working brain cells in the middle of the country were going “Did we just hear that right?” We thought that was fake news. But, no, it wasn’t. You were serious. Even though you knew you could not establish their bona fides, you decided you were going to throw open the doors to the migrants and allow them to do to America what they have been doing to Europe over the last eight to ten months. Maybe you missed the stories, Hilly, so here’s a tip: Google “rape and Cologne” and see what you get.   Watch the videos. That’s what you wanted to do to us.

Did you see that? Did you see the way the women were violated? That brings us around to the issue I care the most about. The Second Amendment. The moment you announced that you wanted to consider gun confiscation, you lost the vote of veterans and gun owners. We all believe we have a God-given right to protect ourselves against violence, and your desire to “regulate” gun ownership was simply cover for creating large and tall barriers to lawful ownership and possession of firearms. You were so scary as the anti-gun candidate that the NRA spent a record amount of money to defeat you. And Hilly, girl, let’s be honest. You don’t give a shit about “gun safety.” The Pulse Nightclub was not some poor misbegotten fool who got his finger stuck in the trigger guard! It was a madman who passed all the background checks your husband signed into law (and that have not stopped a single felon who wanted one from possessing a gun). It was a Muslim. It was a terrorist. Crafting law to deal with this kind of madman, and making it fit the millions of lawful gun owners is simply not possible. As the Minnesota shooter confirmed, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun. And more to the point, if these draconian gun laws are going to be effective, you need to tell your friend Barrack to stop pardoning people with gun convictions. Either we want to stop gun crime, or we want to let all the deadbeats out of jail: you can’t have it both ways.

Other than pandering to Black Lives Matter (more) you never said a single thing on the stump that might actually have gone toward fixing the problem for Black America. You have not said anything that would have made life better for a single lawful immigrant family. Instead, you took the Hispanic and black votes as a given, and were surprised to learn that a lot of people took Trump’s message about “what have they actually done for you” to heart. You can’t keep drawing on the bank if you don’t have any credit there!

So, let’s be honest. Your people helped you craft your message. You, as the candidate, approved that message. Both of you were so blind to the reality on the ground in the country (particularly in the majority of counties across the country that went for Trump) that you never saw how many people you were alienating.

But then, there was that major faux pas, committed in September, that sealed the deal for a majority of the country: basket of deplorables. Those of us who identified with the vision of Trump, but had not signed on yet, were suddenly told that if we supported Trump we were deplorable. We were irredeemable. If your goal was to drive more people straight into Trump’s embrace, you were fabulously successful. In case you’re not paying attention, that should not have been your goal.

So, if you really want to understand why you lost, the first thing you have to recognize is, you could not convince the Pope he was Catholic if you used your rhetoricians to craft the message. I would also add that your delivery (and especially that hideous “why am I not 50 points ahead” debacle) made you look angry, unapproachable, and you were the mommy who was going to tell the kids to shut up or go to their room. You just looked and sounded mean. Not righteous anger, but contrived anger. Your anger came across as “damn it, I should not have to be campaigning; these people should just vote for me!” Ugh! You made us tired.

Now, the second reason you lost is history. And here, Hollywood can give us some analytical help. Remember Boris Karloff? Bela Lugosi? Vincent Price? These guys always played “villains.” In fact, they were such exceptional villains, they couldn’t get a role doing anything else. If you see a movie with Vincent Price, you know its going to be spooky. How? Because that’s all you have ever seen him in.

Cut now to your “life in review” video. Whitewater. Travelgate. Filegate. Chinagate, The Bimbo Eruptions, your efforts to silence Bill’s critics. Vince Foster. The “gifts” to the American people that you took home (and later were forced to return). And you hadn’t even run for anything yet, and you were already seen as a woman who would do anything to hold on to power. Those of us over forty remember.

Millenials, however, knew nothing of this, and they were never interested in history. You thought you’d skate by them. And then you did several things all at the same time that absolutely destroyed your candidacy.  You set up a private email server for your use as Secretary of State, communicated with the President and others on it, and stored classified material on it. You kept it completely secret, except from our country’s enemies. Then, Benghazi fell. Our ambassador was killed, and his body was put on display. You had never seen it coming. Worse, instead of getting it right, and properly attributing the 9/11 terrorist attack in Benghazi to radical Islamic terrorists, you instead said it was “due to a horrible internet video,” when you knew that wasn’t true, or, in the exercise of reasonable caution, you could have learned was not true.

Compounding this, you told the families of the slaughtered that you’d make sure the person who made that video was prosecuted (demonstrating a profound lack of understanding of the First Amendment). Yes, that’s right, you did not say “we’ll find the attackers and kill them,” you wanted to go after the people who made a mostly factual if irreverent portrayal of Mohammed. What were you thinking? Was that Huma’s advice to you? Because, it was bad advice.

Then, because you were running for the presidency, and because you couldn’t be seen as weak, or error-prone, instead of admitting you had screwed this up, you went before Congress and lied. You provided them with only the emails that had been sanitized through the State Department email system. You never volunteered that you had a private server. Then, when questioned about Benghazi, you deflected questions with “What difference, at this point, does it make?” What Americans saw in that moment was a woman who did not give two shits for those combat warriors who fought to save their friends and their embassy from invaders. They were clearly expendable. You could not be bothered to admit the error and fix the problem. Here’s another tip. The visuals of not caring about your overseas staff when they were attacked and killed makes people reticent to appoint you to the position of commander in chief where you might lead their children into future overseas debacles.

Here’s the ultimate irony: if you had admitted your errors, and stood up and been accountable, and promised to fix things, you might have had a chance at the Oval Office.

But, instead, once it was learned you had a private email server, and that you had not provided emails from that private server, Congress issued a subpoena. In case you don’t remember from Civil Procedure Class in Law School, a subpoena commands – it does not “request” production of documents. Emails are documents. You were under a lawful order to provide all your emails. Then, you, or someone in your employ, instructed your server host to delete 33,000 emails.

You are a lawyer. You know the law. You know that you have an ethical obligation as a lawyer to respond to a subpoena. You know you cannot destroy evidence. You know that it’s an ethical violation to do it. But you did it anyway. You explained it by saying all those emails were about yoga and your daughter’s wedding.

Hey, Hilly, I had three girls get married. We didn’t send more than 100 emails for all three weddings. And if you were sending 32,700 emails about yoga, you’re really not getting the whole idea of yoga. But more importantly, you had your people use a program that destroyed the data and made it unrecoverable.

And just like last time, you refused to take responsibility. You refused to stand up and say “we screwed up.” You fogged. You deflected. And just like no one believed the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf, no one believed the Blooming Pantsuit of Mendacity when she blamed the vast rightwing conspiracy, right wing zealots in Congress, and the New York Times.

Your election loss was sealed then.

James Comey’s letter may have reminded people you were under investigation, but it didn’t put you there. His letter may have reminded them of your criminal acts, but you committed them. The letter wasn’t why you lost. You lost because you do not understand the truth, and you do not know how to tell the truth.

The Clinton Foundation didn’t help you. You can’t leave the White House flat broke and suddenly have $300,000,000 in the bank and not be doing something underhanded. You couldn’t throw open the books on the Foundation, so you fogged by talking about Trump’s taxes. It didn’t work.

And worse, you made it look like people who donated to the Foundation bought access to you by making sure to give them priority access at the State Department. That’s called “pay-for-play” and it’s unlawful. You managed to skate from prosecution because your buddy Loretta couldn’t find a criminal act in the biography of Bonnie and Clyde. But let’s be honest: no one thought you were innocent. No one. Not. Even. You.

So, what’s the story been? Since the election we’ve heard it was Fake News. We’ve heard it was the Millennials. We heard it was Wikileaks. We heard it was Russian Hackers. We heard it was Comey. We heard it was Putin. Maybe next week it will be Bill?

No.

The buck stops with you. You could have chosen honesty and won. You chose mendacity, and you lost. You are responsible. This falls on no one else. You could have won this. In many respects you almost won it simply because some people cannot be bothered to pay attention and learn the truth.

Even worse, you’ve created a bunch of fragile-ego snowflakes who now want to talk about how you won the popular vote, which is like saying that the team that gets the loudest applause wins the football game, not the team with the most points. They were so upset that they needed puppies and hot cocoa to deal with the fact that the adults are now running the country.

You’ll always have that popular vote – a figure vastly inflated by illegal aliens and all those people in Chicago and Detroit who voted two and three times – but you’ll never hold the reins of power in this country, because you don’t understand it, and you don’t deserve to lead it.

Now please. Shut up. Go back to New York and let the patriots run the country.