I had no problem defending Hillary. She had a history of trying to help. It cannot be denied that the media held Clinton to a different standard. Trump calls the media liars at every one of his victory tour rallies. Trump was never called to task. Female NBC reports have been attacked by Trump yet the NBC main anchors pretend that nothing happened.

Some on the Left have a hair trigger attacking Democrats before they turn attention to Republicans. The chorus calling to close the Clinton Foundation was typical. Now we have people wondering why Obama is not publicly announcing a Cyberwar with Russia.  This attack on Obama comes before yelling that the Republicans are now agents of Russia. Any intelligence agent has to be concerned that any reported information will find its way to Putin. Even the partisan FBI director accepts the conclusions of the CIA that Putin wanted Trump in place. Some on the Left attacked the CIA report as bogus. Their initial push was to agree with Trump that the CIA was wrong.

We have a voting population that is gullible and a portion of the Left that uses Republican talking points. We have a lazy press corps that acts as stenographers for Trump and the GOP. Our rights are under assault and the attacks are focused on the Democrats.

We are screwed.

The problem with criticizing Hillary's campaign strategy is that she was under a full-court press for 1 1/2 years, while we're expecting her to strategize and run a normal campaign.

In most campaigns, you release some policy position and it gets a bit of attention. In this one, it was a pivot between Donald's latest daily brain fart, her emails or the Goldman Sachs transcripts, later replaced by the daily Wikileaks leak.

I am interested in the post-mortem on the ground game and media campaign they ran, especially in swing states. But when you're boxed in, you do things to break out of the box, not what you'd do in a more straightforward situation. In one statement I heard they assumed it was a GOTV campaign - that everything was so polarized, there was limited ability to persuade anyone of anything.

And yes, even her own side kept attacking on everything from Haiti to the Clinton Foundation, to saying "superpredator" 20 years ago in the middle of a crime crisis, gross exaggerations of NAFTA's effects, making her out to be the biggest warmonger we've ever had, making her elitist, etc. "Getting the money out of politics" - a brilliant tactic when the challenger has no money. Trump then ran with that and turned his part into "I don't need the money". So in a campaign year flush with cash and private PACs & unregulated spending & $27 money bombs, Hillary was the only one dinged for raising money. So in 2020 we'll solicit only small donations?

If Hillary came riding on Obama's coattails, it became incumbent to destroy those coattails. The primaries bizarrely started with resurrecting the single payer discussion when most of America is undersold on Obamacare as it is. Double down on what most hate? The debate about fracking was just as bizarre - control it, fine, but a ban? When it's part of over 50% of oil & gas production and responsible for our global drop in prices?

Even when it came to the debates, everyone had an opinion on what she "had to do", and when it came down to it, she seemed to destroy Trump in all 3. Combined with Pussygate, how *did* he rise from the grave?

A large part is simply repeating over and over and over and even over again how bad the economy is doing. Did you know how bad the economy is doing? It's doing bad, everyone says it, you just have to ask around, bad bad bad bad bad. And those immigrants, taking all our jobs? More bad - and Hillary did all that. Bad NAFTA, bad immigrants, bad terrorists - build a wall, waterboard the terrorists, make America great again. 3 simple steps to win again. Wall, Waterboard, Great. Plus lock her up. If only she'd thought of that. But then, she's a chick, so it wouldn't work. Manly power, testosterone - that's what America's missing. White light, white heat. Who knows, it'll take some time to understand.

I was reminded yesterday about another forgotten event - how AP "recounted" the delegates and prematurely declared Hillary the winner the day before the primary when she was expected to clinch. Everything was designed to take the wind out of her sails. 

Even with Obama, I have difficulty clalming his strategies were wrong. Maybe he got as much done as possible - maybe pushing harder instead of being effective would have just been used against him. They already passed the blame for the 2008 crash onto him. A lot of Americans don't seem to realize the drop in unemployment. They don't seem to realize the tiny numbers of domestic terrorist attacks were miniscule, and that a much bigger danger was either gun deaths (often by whites pretending to "defend themselves") or deaths by entanglement with police. While the marketing of Obamacare might have been too clever by half, how did so many Americans miss the improvements with the economy? What do they expect to happen now?