Hillary plays blame game

In a rare post-2016 public venting on CNN, Hillary Clinton made it perfectly clear last week why she lost the presidency to the unprepared, unlikely likes of Donald Trump.

The defeated Democratic presidential candidate firmly and unequivocally blamed her electoral loss on unprecedented interventions by two culprits who couldn’t have been more effective if they had planned to act as a tagteam: FBI Director James Comey and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But neither of those now-familiar facts, which indeed contributed to her defeat, are the jaw-dropping Clinton revelation we will be talking about here. No, we are focusing on yet another blame-claim she made in a half-hour-long interview on CNN — one that is so mind-numbingly wrong it is surely in the category of whatever it was that inspired one of the earliest internet gurus to coin the shorthand “OMG!”

Onstage in front of the Women for Women International humanitarian organization, Amanpour told Clinton, “(Y)our supporters are sad, they’re devastated, they’re disappointed, and some are angry. And some say … Could the campaign have been better?” She asked: “Do you take any personal responsibility?”

“Oh, of course — I take absolute personal responsibility,” Clinton replied. “I was the candidate.” She blamed the debate media questioners for failing to ask about her solutions for creating jobs. Which, she says, is why she never got to tell voters about all these great job solutions she was locked and loaded and ready to announce in a debate.

We all know the bottom line of this blame game: If Clinton had great solutions and wanted to be America’s Jobs President, all she had to do was give a speech and say them. Better yet, many speeches.

But in the very first question of the very first fall campaign debate, NBC’s Lester Holt asked her: “Beginning with you, Secretary Clinton, why are you a better choice than your opponent to create the kinds of jobs that will put more money into the pockets of American workers?”

Clinton began with the importance of building for the future. Then this: “Today is my granddaughter’s 2nd birthday, so I think about this a lot.” She wallowed, wandered and tap-danced on a quicksand of cliches and generalities — but no solutions. All un-memorably, for the nation’s voters and — quite obviously — for herself.

DShe’s apparently still wallowing in the muck of strained rationales and self-denial.

Sad.