You did it! You lost the sure-thing. You handed victory to a candidate who couldn’t possibly win the Presidency of the United States. And you have no one but yourselves to blame for it.

You had the perfect foil to run against, you had the press abandoning their last shreds of journalistic integrity to throw the election your way, you had the sitting president, all the taste makers, the media and Hollywood elite, and all the “good” world leaders vocally on your side. You had your anointed candidate, one whom you adored, one you stacked the deck in favor of, one you saw as the salvation of your party and the driver of the final nail into the coffin of the Republican Party.

Despite all that, you lost the Presidency. You lost to an untethered id, who broke every rule of politics, who shoved his foot in his mouth repeatedly, who sold a decidedly unsavory blend of protectionism and nativism, and who was arguably the weakest of the 17 GOP primary candidates.

You also failed to capture the Senate, despite having a rather respectable chance to do so. You’re in big trouble in 2018, where you have 25 Senate seats running for re-election vs eight on the GOP side. You may very well have doomed yourselves and your party to the super-minority status the GOP had the first two years of Obama’s presidency.

You went from talk of wiping out the Republicans, of the rendering and destruction of the GOP, to irrelevance and existential peril. How did this happen?

You picked a corrupt, lying cheat as your standard bearer. You ignored all the negatives, all the lies, all the deflections, the giant cloud of smoke. You insisted that there was no fire, that she was innocent of all she was accused, that she was the victim of an unprecedented and relentless decades-long Republican witch hunt. You plugged your ears to the steady drip-drip-drip of revelations, you denigrated with great prejudice anyone who spoke against her, you whitewashed her history and personality.

The sordid saga of Hillary Clinton and the inconceivable rise of Donald Trump are just, however, the manifestation of the seeds you’ve been sowing for the past 8 years. You elected Barack Obama, a truly historic point for America. You also gave him the keys to the kingdom, with a fully Democratic Congress. You then stood, basking in the messianic glow you ascribed to him, as he pursued an agenda that was at odds with what the country actually wanted. He spent like crazy, he rewrote the rules for one seventh of the economy, he pushed agendas that rankled half the nation and left them feeling abandoned. He went around the world saying bad things about America, he chose to be a leader for only the people who sided with him.

He was rebuked for his excesses in the 2010 elections, but rather than take a lesson from history (Bill Clinton suffered the same rebuke in 1994 and tacked to the center), Obama entrenched, and drove forward with his agenda despite the message from the voters. You loved this, you cheered him on, you excoriated all those who disagreed with him. You put him back in office in 2012, watched him lose the Senate in 2014, and watched him ignore the collapse of his signature legislation. Still, you held onto your divisiveness, denouncing the Right and treating them and their concerns with contempt.

You roared in approval as your candidate for 2016 echoed the same notes and tones as Obama did. You embraced her denouncing of “the deplorables,” you refused to see the deep and obvious problems with her candidacy, you pressed her towards policies even further away from the American mainstream than Obama’s.

In all this, you emboldened all those who were and are “not-you.” You created an energy that seethed under the radar. Your ever-more-austere social justice and political correctness demands drove people to mask their opinions and underplay their justifiable resentment of your peacock-strutting condescension. Your contempt for American values and the people that embraced patriotism motivated them to voice their true opinions in that safest of ways: via the anonymity of the ballot box.

So, as you cry in your milk this morning, try to finally let a little intellectual honesty into your lives, intellectual honesty you’ve steadfastly refused throughout the litany of Clinton scandals. Realize that President Trump is an outcome of your making. Your contempt for your fellow Americans did this, and you have no one but yourselves to blame.

• About the Author

About Peter Venetoklis

I am twice-retired, a former rocket engineer and a former small business owner. At the very least, it makes for interesting party conversation. I'm also a life-long libertarian, I engage in an expanse of entertainments, and I squabble for sport.

Nowadays, I spend a good bit of my time arguing politics and editing this website.

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