The only thing worse than America's quadrennial exercise in pretending to care who gets to be president is the books that come afterward.
The distinguishing feature of these books is that they are not really books at all in the sense of being something that people read for pleasure. They exist for the sole purpose of being speculated about, excerpted, chopped up, and pasted into hundreds of scooplets by breathless journalists days and weeks before they are actually published.
The latest 2016 rehash is Donna Brazile's
Hacks, a book we should all ignore. Slapdash, pseudo-confessional ("I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music"), and full of strained dialogue that might have appeared in one of the
Star Wars prequels, it is the kind of thing that only people who have written more books than they've ever dreamed of reading could not feel insulted by. If D.C. insiders believe unscripted human beings really talk like this in private, they are dumber than even Trump voters give them credit for being:
"What?" I screamed. "I am an officer of the party and they've been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems." [...]
"No! That can't be true!" I said. "The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers." [
Hacks]
When an excerpt from Brazile's memoir appeared in
Politico, it was greeted with enthusiasm and even praised in some quarters for its candor among other literary qualities. At first Brazile seemed happy to accept this characterization. Then something changed and she began to appear on television
lashing out at any reporter who suggested that she had claimed the Democratic primary was "rigged." Has she actually read her own book?
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement. [
Hacks]
If you say that you could not find "evidence" of something at first but "then" you did, you are, in fact, saying that you found the something in question. It is not even possible to interpret this seeming about-face as a result of sloppy writing on her part that led to misinterpretation from readers. The fundraising agreement between Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC was public knowledge last year before the DNC leaks; to have written about it in this ludicrously sensational manner — she tells us that she sobbed when she first called Bernie Sanders to tell him about it — means you were going out of your way to argue that there was "rigging."
Surely her backtracking could have nothing to do with the publication of an
open letter signed by John Podesta, Robby Mook, Huma Abedin, and other Clintonite pals (or ex-pals as the case may be) dismissing her non-allegations and claiming that Brazile was a dupe of unnamed Russian propagandists. Nor is this likely to be the only point in the book about which she changes her mind post-publication; having claimed that she seriously considered replacing Clinton with Joe Biden in September 2016, it must no doubt have come as a shock to her that the former vice president has no memory of such a thing ever being floated. How long before she starts insisting that she made no such claim?
) Bernie encouraged such behavior. He pouted and complained, and refused to whole-heartedly back Clinton. He failed to insist that his ardent supporters do the right thing or risk Trump. (see, how Tom Pieriello when on the full offensive for Northam in Virginia after he lost the primary) I'm actually convinced that many of the Bernie supporters believed, "fine, have Trump, then we'll get somewhere." I heard it from my kids, and from their friends. 
