Hillary Lacks Remorse of Conscience

Oddly, she seems completely sincere, as if she believes the alternative facts she’s peddling.

 She lost because the Democratic National Committee didn’t help her. “I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean it was bankrupt. . . . Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”

.. She lost because she was “swimming against a historic tide. It’s very difficult historically to succeed a two-term president of your own party.” She lost because she was “the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” She lost because the news media ignored her policy positions.
.. It tells you something about our own power to hypnotize ourselves, to invent reasons that avoid the real reasons. It is a tribute to the power of human denial.
.. The truth is Bernie Sanders destroyed Mrs. Clinton’s chance of winning by almost knocking her off, and in the process revealing her party’s base had changed. Her plodding, charmless, insincere style of campaigning defeated her. Bad decisions in her campaign approach to the battleground states did it; a long history of personal scandals did it; fat Wall Street speeches did it; the Clinton Foundation’s bloat and chicanery did it—and most of all the sense that she ultimately stands for nothing but Hillary did it.
.. “when Clintonworld sources started telling us in 2015 that Hillary was still struggling to articulate her motivation for seeking the presidency.” Her campaign was “an unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority . . . distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose.” “Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.” “Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”
.. Mrs. Clinton has shown herself to be largely incapable of honest self-reflection
.. People are always doing bad things to her, she never does bad things to them. They operate in bad faith, she only in good.
.. It is one thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and follow that up with a list of things you believe you got wrong. It’s another thing to say, “I take responsibility,” and then immediately pivot to arguments as to why other people are to blame. “I take responsibility for everything I got wrong, but that’s not why I lost,” is literally what she said Wednesday.

Megyn Kelly saw an aggressive, peeved Vladimir Putin. That behavior could hurt him.

Russians probably liked Putin’s combative performance: That’s part of his brand, and he’s indisputably popular at home. But the day’s events also showed how allegations of Russian meddling abroad, though they’re seen here as evidence of Russia’s revived power, also cloud Putin’s efforts to lure more foreign investment and expand Russia’s global role.

 .. Kelly questioned Putin bluntly and repeatedly about hacking and other controversial topics. This drew various pained responses, including an exasperated jab at “hysterical” critics: “Maybe someone has a pill that will stop this.” At another point, he said that the U.S. media should “stop this idle prattle” about Russia, which was harming diplomacy.
.. “Institutions are not well developed,” said Andranik Migranyan, a politics professor and former government official. “It’s a highly personalized system,” which Putin feels he must steer “manually.” And Russia is still too dependent on energy exports, even though Putin said in his speech Friday that the export share of other industries is rising.
.. Corruption also remains a big problem, despite talk here of more independent and dependable legal institutions. Sergey Karaganov, the director of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, addressed this issue head-on in a conversation earlier this week in Moscow: “I would agree that institutions are weak” and that contracts often go to “those who play the game.” The problem, he said, was that in 1991, “we introduced capitalism without the rule of law.”
.. That’s Putin’s problem, in essence. His tough-guy, strongman style has certainly helped him to govern Russia. But it may also obstruct his desire to move the country to a more advanced and prosperous state at home and in global markets.
Video: Putin says that accusing Russia of hacking was like Anti-Semitism and that the hack was invented.
In another video, he conceded that a hack could have happened, but was done by Russian freelancing patriots.
This is similar to the argument that the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine were patriotic freelancers.

Trump thinks he’s under attack. That’s very dangerous.

President Trump believes he is being persecuted, and that is a frighteningly dangerous mind-set for a man with such vast power.

.. portraying himself as a victim

.. “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,”

.. “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!” he tweeted.

 

Bill O’Reilly’s Self-Aggrandizing Sense of Persecution

the portrait that has emerged of Fox News as a geriatric frat party where the rewards for being a top dog included ogling, propositioning, and groping the women who worked there, from clerical temps to news producers to star anchors like Megyn Kelly.

.. five women who had accused O’Reilly, now sixty-seven years old, of harassment that included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”

.. More than one said that O’Reilly had threatened to wreck their careers

.. Fox producer Andrea Mackris told the Times that O’Reilly vowed that if she complained about his behavior, he’d make her “pay so dearly” that she’d “wish she’d never been born.”

An internal Fox investigation turned up still more accusations

.. O’Reilly’s self-aggrandizing temper, his fondness for the phrase “shut up” when he’s speaking to or about people he deems insufficiently patriotic or submissive.

.. someone with a personality not unlike our President’s—thin-skinned and pugnacious, with a tendency to treat women as chattel.

.. The book, which my colleague Jia Tolentino recently wrote about, recounts, in gory detail, the murderous rampage unleashed by a pugnacious Irish-American news anchor after he is fired.

.. You’re either Old School or you’re a Snowflake—no in-betweens

.. “Instead Mr. O’Reilly blamed others, embracing the victimization he so ridiculed of the American left.”

.. Bosses who treat their workplaces as their harems are, among other things, lazy. They can’t be bothered with taking the time and effort to get to know someone well enough to, for example, tell whether that person might at all be interested in having sex with them. They crudely leverage their power over people’s livelihoods rather than courting them

.. his new mode regarding the sexual-harassment allegations against him—to drop cryptic little references that create a sense of persecution and of the supposed silencing of conservative voices.