Call Hillary Clinton the Hiroo Onoda of American politics.
More than a month after her defeat to Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton continues to wave the bloody shirt instead of the white flag. Of course, as her votaries challenge the election results, the candidate poses for pictures on sylvan hikes, at the Chappaqua Village Market on Thanksgiving eve, and in Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar saying “hi” to Christie Brinkley and Fat Joe. She’s so over it, the photo-ops convey.
The instructive photo-op, or photo-missed-op, remains the empty podium on election night. Mrs. Clinton refused to concede. Her words offered belated congratulations the following day. But her subsequent actions, and inactions, meshed with the image of that empty podium.
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta demands an unprecedented national security briefing for Electoral College members now “that the CIA has determined Russia’s interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump.” Robert Reich, a classmate of the Clintons at Yale Law who took Hillary out on a date in the 1960s, cites Trump’s failure to release his tax returns as a disqualifier. “Before the Electors submit their ballots for president next week,” Reich writes, “Trump must release his tax returns and the CIA must make public its report on Russia’s intervention in the U.S. elections in support of Trump.”
Do Clinton confidantes come any closer than Podesta and Reich? Two men doing the Clintons’ bidding for decades don’t suddenly become freelancers wandering off script.
Clinton called the idea of a candidate contesting an election “horrifying” in October. “That is not the way our democracy works,” she said during the third presidential debate. “We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”
But she said that when the polls showed her comfortably ahead. Once the polls closed, she began behaving the way she imagined Donald Trump would. The Left followed her example, and a national brat-fit ensued.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein lost for a second time in a single election, when she sued for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The Keystone State rebuffed her efforts. Trump actually gained votes in Wisconsin, and in Michigan, the recount disturbingly found more votes than listed voters in numerous Detroit precincts.
The same Hollywood crowd that proved so counterproductive during the campaign seeks to redeem itself in the campaign after the campaign.
“Republican members of the Electoral College, this message is for you,” Martin Sheen says in a video seeking to change the outcome of Monday’s vote. “As you know, our Founding Fathers built the Electoral College to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue, and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is to an ‘eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.’”
California Democratic Party activist Daniel Brezenoff launched an online petition garnering support from more than four million and ads in major newspapers to “make Hillary Clinton president on Dec. 19.” Perhaps an overlapping lot of sore losers sent an Arizona grandmother more than 50,000 emails since November 8 in an effort to change her vote in the Electoral College. An anonymous electronic correspondent threatened to murder 22-year-old Republican elector Michael Banerian.
The idealistic actually imagine Hillary Clinton, or someone other than Donald Trump, taking the oath of office on January 20. The cynical pursue means fair and foul with the hope of discrediting the incoming president and ginning up the base. It’s good for direct-mail returns. For the country? Not so much.
Surely Trump saw this coming. In the second debate, Trump answered a question about the positives he saw in his opponent by stating, “She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t give up.”
Japanese 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda eventually offered his flag of surrender but only when his commanding officer traveled to the Philippines in 1974 to tell him that the war had ended — 29 years earlier. Hillary Clinton could similarly inform her followers to go home and give it up. But that comes only when she finally decides to give it up. But as her vanquisher noted, “She does fight hard and she doesn’t quit.”
