Donald J. Trump is now President-elect of the United States of America, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is not. Under normal circumstances, a measure of magnanimity would be desired towards the defeated and excessive gloating would be unseemly, but we are not living in normal circumstances. Therefore, my fellow Americans, it is time to gloat.
Hillary Clinton was easily the most corrupt, personally repulsive, and genuinely dangerous candidate to win the nomination of a major American Political Party in living memory. She was a woman who dedicated her entire life to one thing and one thing only: the naked pursuit of power for its own sake. She was willing to pursue this goal by whatever means necessary, no matter how cynical or corrupt.
As is by now well known, even her personal relationships were merely a vehicle for her pursuit of power. She put up with, or rather enabled, her husband’s philandering and his exploitation of powerless women whenever it suited her purposes and frequently engaged in acts of character assassination and intimidation against his numerous mistresses and victims. When she tediously bleated rehearsed platitudes about wanting to see women “achieve their dreams,” she was referring only to one woman in particular: herself.
She was a woman who hated a large portion of the very people she wished to rule over. Whom she referred to, in a public speech to her affluent sycophants as “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” One can, of course, only imagine what she said in private.
Speaking of privacy, it was something she was quite fond of. Her obsession with secrecy, after all, is what led her to set up her own private email server, against the recommendations of nearly everyone. A private email server with which she regularly compromised classified information, and in which she deleted over 33,000 emails after they had been subpoenaed. A crime for which anyone else would have been immediately sent to prison for.
She was a dedicated grifter who never met a big pocketed donor she wouldn’t take from, however ethically dubious their intentions or checkered their human rights record. A woman who openly peddled influence and access during her time as Secretary of State in exchange for generous donations to her family’s slush fund: The Clinton Foundation. An organization which took tens of millions of dollars in “donations” from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, countries which routinely execute homosexuals and in which women (the group Clinton claimed to be a champion of) are banned from even driving a car. Countries that also fund the operations of the barbarous Islamic State, a fact which Clinton herself has admitted and was aware of.
A woman who voted for the Iraq war, a war which cost the lives of almost 5,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, because it was the fashionable thing to do at the time. A woman who encouraged the President to attack the legitimate government of Libya, a nation which has now descended into a state of murderous anarchy, and then gloated that “We came, we saw, he died.”
She was a woman who was willing to engage in cynical, Neo-McCarthyite games of Russia-bashing and war mongering, thus tempting a Third World War, in a vain attempt to distract the public from her own transparent corruption.
She was a woman who never should have been the Democratic nominee for President, due to her own immense and well-known unpopularity. Who worked, though her own campaign as well as through her friends at the DNC, to undermine the candidacy of the beloved Populist Bernie Sanders, a genuinely honorable man. A man who dedicated his life to public service and, ironically enough, would have surely beaten Donald Trump in a general election contest.
Hillary Clinton’s entire public life was nothing more than one grand Faustian bargain, a thousand deals with a thousand devils over the span of many decades. Thus, it is, without a doubt, immensely satisfying to see her reap her just reward: abysmal failure, and humiliation.
She will forever be known, not as the first woman President, but rather, as the candidate who lost the contest for President of the United States to Donald J Trump, a reality television star with zero previous political experience. Not only did she manage to lose to Donald Trump, a candidate almost any other Democrat would have surely walked over with ease, but she lost in what appears to be nothing less than an electoral landslide. She, also, somehow managed to pull off this loss in spite of the fact that she vastly outspent her competitor as well as having the advantage of receiving the endorsement of almost every major newspaper in the country.
Thus, the saga of the Clinton family draws to an end. Clinton will now live out the rest of her days in private life as a shunned or, at best, a pitied figure. With no more influence to pedal, donations to her foundation will slow to a trickle. Her policies of neoliberal corporatism and Neo-conservative interventionism will be discarded as well, along with Clinton herself, into the proverbial “dust bin of history.”
So, my fellow Americans, let us gloat. Let us laugh and sneer whenever the name “Hillary Clinton” is mentioned, even in passing. Let us heap scorn upon a candidate who was undone, not by Putin’s Hackers or a “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy”, but by the weight of her own arrogance. For no one is more deserving of that scorn than Hillary Rodham Clinton.