Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Re-Litigation

Rich Galen

Monday November 6, 2017

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It became one of those sayings that someone said, others heard, and everyone repeated: "I'm not re-litigating the 2016 Presidential election
Except the "Re-Litigation Game" has been flying off the shelves of Politics-R-Us stores all over Our Nation's Capital.
There have been a number of books that have already been published about the 2016 election.
You may remember, the principal plot point is: Hillary Clinton was supposed to win. Donald Trump won. The rest has been like outtakes of a Marx Brothers movie.
Whether the Russians tried to hack the election is no longer in question. Whether they had an effect on the outcome, is still a big question.
But, putting the Russians aside for a moment, the books have been focusing on the campaigns themselves, especially Hillary Clinton's campaign.
The first book out of the gate, as I remember, was titled "Shattered" a well-sourced book by journalists Johnathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The full name of the book is: "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign."
In the National Review of "Shattered," Jim Geraghty quotes the authors' summary thus:
"We started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly. Hillary's campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We're not allowed to have nice things.
The internal hand-wringing of "Hillary's Doomed Campaign" appears to be the common theme. Although the notion of her campaign being "doomed" wasn't so apparent until long about 2:30 Wednesday morning when the networks called Wisconsin for Trump pushing him beyond the 270 Electoral Vote victory line.
Hillary, her own self, published a book, titled "What Happened" which has the unfortunate effect of making me imagine Hillary waking up, blinking in the mid-summer light of a Chappaqua morning, thinking she is in the White House. Upon realizing, again, she is not, she slurs "Wha' happened?"
Jon Mecham's review in the New York Times includes this:
"Clinton lists the sundry reasons she believed she lost (the overblown email issues, the F.B.I. Director James Comey, Trump's blend of populism and nativism).
The latest entry in the list is by Donna Brazile. Its somewhat wordy title is: "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House."
In a lengthy pre-publication summary in the Washington Post earlier in the week, Brazile (who is a pal of mine) makes it absolutely clear that the campaign was put together to operate like mission control in Houston. All technology, no heart.
According to reporter Philip Rucker, this is how Brazile describes the Brooklyn HQ of the Clinton Campaign:
"Calm and antiseptic, like a hospital. It had that techno-hush, as if someone had died. I felt like I should whisper. Everybody's fingers were on their keyboards, and no one was looking at anyone else. You half-expected to see someone in a lab coat walk by."
Brazile, Rucker reports,
"paints a scathing portrait of Clinton as a well-intentioned, historic candidate whose campaign was badly mismanaged, took minority constituencies for granted and made blunders with 'stiff' and 'stupid' messages."
It seems like the Clinton campaign's principal strategy was to run out the clock beginning even before she announced her candidacy on April 12, 2015.
The books about the Donald Trump campaign? Who knows. With the well-documented Non-Disclosure Agreements that people are required to sign even walking by Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, it may well be there will be no insider-authored books.
Then again, the whole Trump campaign operation may be revealed in federal court transcripts.
But, what do I know? I'm out on bail from the court of public opinion.
the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the Subscription Drive page as well as to each of the books mentioned above.
The Mullfoto is of the kind of thing you find when you have been ordered to Clean Up The Den.

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