I can't tell you how thrilled I am that the various institutions my profession that went around the bend on the Clintons during the 1990s now have a new book from Hillary Rodham Clinton to chew over. Maureen Dowd must be blowing the dust off her well-thumbed volume of Cheap Shots For Dummies. Her newspaper, The New York Times, which has been deranged on the subject of these uppity Arkansans for 25 years now, can dispatch its legions again to justify how putting a bustling bouquet of stories on James Comey's 11th hour letter about E-MAIIIIIIIILLLLLZZZZ! on the front page was perfectly reasonable news judgment. (There was a lot of that on the electric Twitter machine over the past few days.) Chris Cillizza is going to need to buy a new abacus to total up everything he's going to have to say and write about this latest appearance of somebody he already has dismissed. Oh, the kids are going to have fun playing down at the old familiar mudhole again.

The excerpt from the book that seems to be getting the most run right now is HRC's description of how the president* haunted her across the stage at one of their debates. On Wednesday morning, the MSNBC Morning Zoo crew ran the excerpt from the audiobook. Per CNN:

"It was incredibly uncomfortable," she said, describing the moment. "He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, well, what would you do?" She continued: "Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren't repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, 'Back up you creep, get away from me?' ... I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with men trying to throw me off."

I'd have paid cash money to see her tell the creep to back up. (It might have saved the entire country the trouble of having to say it right now.) The debate in question was the second one, the one that they held at Washington University in St. Louis, and it was a Trump-arranged shitshow from the minute it began. This was the debate where the Trump people arranged a press conference for four women who'd accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment (and worse) at one time or another, and then sat them in the the hall. (Why the organizers allowed this remains a mystery.) So this was the situation when, not long into the debate, HRC found her opponent looming behind her like Nosferatu with a combover. I can assure you that every female journalist sitting in my immediate area expressed some form of visceral discomfort at the scene. (In the hall, morons, of course, got a kick out of it.) That fundamental creepiness hangs on the president* like a second head.

But, of course, her e-mails.

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Paul Waldman has the right of it here. No politician in my lifetime has faced so many constant demands that he or she apologize simply for being there. HRC ran a very average campaign. You know who ran a bad campaign? Michael Dukakis in 1988, and so did Richard Nixon in 1960. More to the point, in 1972, George McGovern ran a bad general election campaign, but you'd have to be a complete ignoramus not to place considerable importance while making that judgment on the fact that McGovern was being ratfcked from inside the West Wing of the White House.

HRC ran a campaign that was good enough to get three million more votes than her opponent. That is not a "bad" campaign. It was a decent, if flawed, campaign that had more than its share of the bumps in the road customary to such enterprises. However, just as you'd have to be stupid not to mention prominently the role of, say, Gordon Liddy in the defeat of McGovern, you simply have to give pride of place in what went wrong last November to the bizarre involvement of the FBI's New York office, the flea-on-a-griddle performance of James Comey, the meddling of Russian cyberwarriors, and, yes, the persistent grudge that has warped the elite political media's approach to the Clintons right from the Times's misbegotten first Whitewater story.

Yes, she probably should have gone to Wisconsin.

But the ghoul in the White House shouldn't have stalked her, and neither should have The New York Times.

She gets to write a book. She gets to have a say. Deal with it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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