In a Sunday piece whose headline began “A Letter to Historians of the Future,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias mused that “some of us found it hardly credible” that the key issue in the 2016 presidential election was “something as trivial as which email address [Hillary Clinton] used. Future generations must find it even harder to believe.”
Later on Sunday, blogger Heather Digby Parton (also a columnist for Salon) seconded Yglesias’s emotion about the unimportance of the e-mail story. In fact, Digby contended that, given the media’s hostility toward Hillary, that “it’s actually a testament to her rectitude that [Emailgate] was all they came up with. They had certainly tried over the course of 25 years to come up with something real and they ended up having to make up this ridiculous fake scandal to justify their Javert-like obsession. Unfortunately, it worked as perfectly as any Clinton-scandal ever worked. It…added up to nothing but fit the ‘didn't pass the smell test’ narrative for the media so they pimped it and pimped it and pimped it like it was Watergate.”
To Digby, Hillary was an even more inviting target for the media than her scandal-prone husband: “After all, she was always the uppity one who was asking for it, not good old Bill. They didn't get the indictment they were promised but the FBI did manage to be the instrument of her destruction so it's almost as good. Plus they can keep kicking her whenever she has the gall to show her face in public so it's the gift that keeps on giving.”
And, of course, it’s not just that Hillary lost, but also that someone else won:
Now we have Trump, the horror story some of us were screaming about until we were hoarse for the last 18 months, knowing that he could and might very well win unless the media, the Republican establishment and some very silly voters sobered up. They didn't. And now we all have to deal with the hangover.
