The Bubble: Hillary Clinton's new book gets hit from the left and the right
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders commented on Hillary Clinton’s book ‘What Happened’ when asked whether or not President Donald Trump will read it.
USA TODAY
Each week, USA TODAY’s OnPolitics blog takes a look at how media from the left and the right reacted to a political news story, giving liberals and conservatives a peek into the other’s media bubble.
This week, pundits from both sides of the political fence heaped criticism on Hillary Clinton’s memoir What Happened, which examines her 2016 loss to President Trump. Commentators from the left and the right slammed Clinton for blaming everyone but herself for her historic defeat. But some Clinton supporters came to her defense, implying the calls for her to fade away are partly rooted in gender.Â
Last week: ‘Trump sold us out’ say conservatives after deal with ‘Chuck and Nancy’
From the left: ‘Hillary Clinton doesn’t get it’
What Happened is a “fairy tale,” writes Sarah Jones for the New Republic. “The great tragedy is that Clinton seems to think it’s true.”Â
Jones says Clinton shows “a fatal lack of awareness” in her book and that she “cannot admit that she — and her party — bear some responsibility” for her losing “to the most unqualified and most loathed presidential candidate in modern history.”
The book, with references to partying in the Hamptons and vacationing with Oscar de la Renta, has a “proud one percent vibe,” Jones says. And “Clinton seems unable to grasp that voters may have grown tired of realist politicians and their cynical pose,” she adds.Â
“If the Democratic Party is to move left, if is to emerge from the rubble of the 2016 campaign with invigorated purpose, it has to leave Clinton behind,” Jones concludes. “If only she’d let it.”
From the right: Clinton names 43 problems with her campaign, but she ain’t one
Clinton’s campaign memoir “bears no resemblance to the truth of what happened in her losing quest for the presidency,” writes Fox News’ Greg Jarrett.
Jarrett accuses Clinton of engaging “in what psychiatrists call ‘projection’ — when people persistently blame others for their own failings. They view themselves as chronic victims, refusing to accept personal responsibility for the decisions they alone make.”
Clinton has blamed 43 causes for her defeat, according to a list compiled by Jarrett. But, “the truth is Clinton was an uninspiring candidate who ran a flawed campaign,” he writes.Â
From the left: Clinton took being a hypocrite ‘to a whole new level’Â
Clinton is flagrantly guilty of hypocrisy in her “baffling decision” to go after Bernie Sanders in her book, writes Branko Marcetic for Jacobin. Marcetic says Clinton’s conduct in her 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama was “inarguably far worse than anything Sanders did in 2016.”Â
Clinton complained to NPR this morning that the “consistent pounding” she took from Sanders and his supporters “really was hard to break out from.” But Sanders’s criticisms of her association with Henry Kissinger and Goldman Sachs pale in comparison to the kind of gutter politics she engaged in against Obama.
From the right: Clinton’s ‘laugh-inducing’ media analysisÂ
“Hillary Clinton continues to make a mockery of herself in her efforts to regain the spotlight,” writes The Daily Wire‘s Aaron Bandler. “She’s now claiming the media environment is skewed against the Democrats.”Â
In a podcast Tuesday, Clinton called Fox News, Breitbart Newsand Infowars conservative “propaganda channels,” Bandler reports.Â
Citing a study from the Media Research Center that network news coverage of Trump has been 91% negative, Bandler says, “It’s the Democrats who have a monopoly on the media.”Â
Fox News, Breitbart, and Infowars are convenient scapegoats for Clinton, but it’s abundantly clear that the media is overwhelmingly biased toward Democrats. The media is actually one major advantage the Democrats have, which is why so many on the Right have railed against media bias for years.
The fact that Clinton lost to Trump despite having an advantage in the media once again shows what a terrible, awful candidate she was.
From the left: Clinton isn’t going anywhere
Clinton supporters fired back against the criticism.Â
“With the release of her new book, What Happened, Hillary has been speaking out and the uproar for her to shut up and go away from the main stream media and pundits has been infuriating,” writes W. Island for the Huffington Post.Â
Island points out that male politicians like Sanders, Mitt Romney and John McCain were not attacked for continuing to speak out after their defeats.
She also blasted the media, saying “maybe the political pundits want Hillary to go away because it reminds them of their role in helping to elect Donald Trump.” Island argues that “if the media had done their job in the 2016Â election, instead of being the unpaid public relations firm for the Donald Trump campaign,” Clinton would have won.Â
But it doesn’t matter what the pundits, Bernie, or Trump supporters say. There are millions of supporters still with Hillary… So Hillary can write whatever she wants, she can give as many interviews as she wants, she can be as angry as she wants, and not smile ever again if she wants. Like it or lump it, Hillary Clinton isn’t going away, and her supporters aren’t either.
From the right: Everyone is ‘sick of hearing from her’Â
What Happened shows Clinton is “more concerned about her own desparate quest for vindication than about the Democratic Party itself,” writes the National Review’s Katherine Timpf.Â
Timpf says Clinton’s claim that Sanders cost her the election is “the perfect example of the kind of self-indulgent dead-horse-beating that’s got everyone sick of hearing from her,” and calls it “hilariously hypocritical.”Â
“If Sanders’s comments really upset Clinton because she thought they damaged party unity, then she wouldn’t be going out of her way to continue the fight long after it was over,” Timpf says.Â
Now, I do understand that such a shocking, humiliating loss must be difficult to process. But if Clinton really cared about her party, then she’d find a means of catharsis other than a publicly damaging Tour of Petty that threatens to drag Democrats down even further. Her self-serving hypocrisy is clear to anyone who’s watching, and the fact that she lacks the self-awareness to see it is so Hillary it hurts.
Read more:Â
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