As the curtain draws
With each new interview on the presidential election, President Barack Obama seems to grind his foot on the campaign of the woman he so desperately wanted to succeed him.
The latest is in the upcoming edition of The New Yorker, where he opines that Hillary Clinton's highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms "might have reduced her advantage, the normal Democratic advantage, in the eyes of the working people, that we were standing for them." Indeed, he said, "Hillary may have been more vulnerable because she was viewed as an insider."
White House staffers, who like their boss wanted a successor who would prop up what the president sees as his accomplishments, also were candid to article author David Remnick.
"In a retrospective mood," he wrote, "staffers said that, as Obama told me, Clinton would have been an 'excellent' President, but they also voiced some dismay with her campaign: dismay that she had seemed to stump so listlessly, if at all, in the Rust Belt; dismay that the Clinton family's undeniable taste for money could not be erased by good works; dismay that she was such a middling retail politician."
Ouch!
Fake hate on the rise
It happened throughout the presidential campaign, and apparently the election result hasn't put an end to it. Supporters of Democrats and left-wing causes are faking racial incidents and blaming them on Republicans and right-wing causes. Fortunately, many of the perpetrators are like the gang that couldn't shoot straight and get caught.
A recent one took place at Bowling Green University, where a 24-year-old black student filed a police report alleging three white men wearing Trump shirts assaulted her and shouted racial slurs as she was collecting yard signs. Only problem was it never happened.
Eleesha Long posted her saga on Facebook but never called police and reported it. But her father saw the post and contacted law enforcement, which then had her come in to tell her story. During the telling, she changed her story multiple times, tipping off investigators. They, in turn, obtained search warrants for her Facebook and phone history, which proved she was never at the site where she claimed the incident occurred. And her text history showed her racial and hateful remarks about people who supported Trump.
"I hope they all get AIDS" and "I haven't met a decent Trump supporter yet" were two of the milder ones.
Long is now facing charges of falsification and obstructing official business, which could earn her up to 180 days and 90 days in jail, respectively.
Backbone flagging in Massachusetts
When students at Hampshire College in Massachusetts who were upset at the results of the presidential election recently stole and burned the United States flag flying over the campus, school officials threw gasoline onto the problem by securing another flag and raising it to half-staff.
Instead of demanding the arrest of the thieves and kicking them out of school, officials - in a Facebook post - said the flag at half-staff was an effort "to create the space for meaningful and respectful dialogue" amidst the "current environment of escalating hate-based violence."
Of course, the hate-based violence, as in other instances across the nation, was being perpetrated by supporters of the political side screaming about the hate on the other side.
In time, military veterans and their families contacted the school, pointing out the shame of equating the symbol of a flag lowered to memorialize someone in death with an effort "to create space" for whiners who didn't like the results of a fair election.
Eventually, college officials lamented the failed attempt and removed the flag altogether.
Seeing the light
CNN "New Day" host Chris Cuomo, who is used to praising Democrats and slamming Republicans while pretending to remain unbiased in his reporting, apparently has realized a Republican recently won the presidency.
In an interview last week with Karen Finney, a former spokeswoman for the Hillary Clinton campaign, the host suggested her party may be out of touch with blue-collar voters.
You think?
"The criticism of your party," Cuomo said, "is you're talking about which bathroom to use, you know, more than what jobs people have in the middle class, and that's why your party objectively - I mean, there's zero opinion about this. It used to be Republicans, white-collar, Democrats, blue collar. Now that's flipped."
Finney acknowledged the party needs "to do a better job of understanding" why voters selected Trump over Clinton but then reverted to the party's usual blame-speak.
"I'm very concerned about some of the hateful rhetoric we heard from Donald Trump and whether or not that was also a motivating factor, Chris," she said. "I don't think we can ignore that."
Even Cuomo, the reliable left-winger, didn't let that stand.
"The alt-right didn't get him elected," he said. "The alt-right, it's a small group That's not why you lost."