The Clintons have always carried around an enemies list the size of an unexpurgated 19th century encyclopedia. Hillary's latest book, What Happened (It wasn't my fault) is the closest they'll come to putting that list in print.
Apart from the FBI, the Russians and sexism, Hillary also blames Bernie Sanders for her defeat. How dare he, or anyone, oppose her in the election. He may have campaigned for her, but she never forgets.
She complains that he ran too far to the left of her...
“Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie’s attacks, I was told to restrain myself,” Clinton writes. “Noting that his plans didn’t add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe-dream — all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn’t a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn’t want to alienate Bernie’s supporters. President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straitjacket.”
She noted that Jake Sullivan, her top policy aide, told her that Sanders' campaign strategy reminded him of a scene from the movie "There's Something About Mary," where a hitchhiker says he has a plan to roll out seven-minute abs to top the famous eight-minute abs.
"Why, why not six-minutes abs?" Ben Stiller's character asks.
Clinton wrote: "That's what it was like in policy debates with Bernie. We would promise a bold infrastructure investment plan or an ambitious new apprenticeship program for young people, and then Bernie would announce basically the same thing, but bigger. On issue after issue, it was like he kept promising four-minute abs, or even no-minutes abs. Magic abs!"
What she can't quite say is that Bernie pushed her too far to the left. And that did significant damage to her political prospects. But it's not as if it was just Bernie. Hillary retaliated by pushing Bernie further to the left on immigration (Bernie had once denounced open borders) and on identity politics.
That tug of war pushed both Hillary and Bernie to the left. Which delighted the left, but alienated plenty of Americans.
Hillary made the decisions to embrace the racist black nationalist hate group, Black Lives Matter. And if you think that didn't cost her votes among the white working class Dem base, look closer at the NFL situation. And she did it in part to hurt Bernie who had been under attack by BLM.
So, Bernie pushed Hillary to openly affirm Socialist positions. Hillary pushed Bernie into the open borders/identity politics swamp that killed any ability to attract the working class white voters he claimed to want. Between the two of them, the Dems were about as appealing to working class white voters as an off-Broadway play about depressed sexually confused New Yorkers.
"When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn't come up with anything," Clinton wrote. "Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump's 'Crooked Hillary' campaign."
"I don't know if that bothered Bernie or not," Hillary goes on to speculate. "He isn't a Democrat."
"That's not a smear, that's what he says," she wrote. "He didn't get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party."
1. Hillary is calculatedly attacking Bernie right during his book tour. This isn't an accident. And she's undermining any future presidential bid by him. The timing of their tours is odd. They're sucking each other's oxygen. Again. And it telegraphs that the hostility isn't over.
2. Hillary never stops to consider that maybe it was her financial issues that might have led to that attack, rather than Bernie mildly hitting her over her speaking fees. But Hillary is never responsible for anything. Not her corruption. Or her own irresponsibility. It's always someone else's fault.