Twisting Knots for Profit

"In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I've often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net."
"Now I'm letting my guard down."
Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Now free from the constraints of running [?sic], Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules."
"In these pages [forthcoming book, 'What Happened'], she describes what it was like to run against Donald Trump, the mistakes she made, how she has coped with a shocking and devastating loss, and how she found the strength to pick herself back up afterwards."
Simon & Schuster publishing bumph

"Hillary Rodham Clinton has written a new book. Except maybe she hasn’t. It all depends on what the definition of 'written' is."
"The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state had some help on her new memoir, 'Hard Choices.' Clinton employed a phalanx of aides and associates in producing the volume, which is being released Tuesday."
"But don’t expect to hear much about Clinton’s 'book team', as she calls those who helped her write the book, which carries her name alone on its cover."
"Clinton’s acknowledgment of her three-man team — Dan Schwerin, a former Senate and State Department aide to Clinton; Ethan Gelber, another State Department aide; and Ted Widmer, a Clinton adviser and Brown University historian — appears in just a few sentences on Page 597 of the 635-page book. Their exact contributions, however, aren’t spelled out."
"Such is the lot of the ghostwriter."
Paul Farhi, The Washington Post, June 9, 2014

HiIlary Rodham Clinton listens before signing a copy of her book, "Hard Choices" at Barnes and Noble bookstore in New York. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)

On Thursday the announcement of this latest work of fiction from Hillary Clinton was made public.
Instant sensation. The title of her new book leaped forward from its position number 3,350 to 17 on Amazon.com. It is now the 'must-have' tell-all of the month, presumably. Ever hopeful, people who plan to read the exculpatory tome written by someone, certainly not Hillary Clinton, though viewed through her personal lens, will be treated to a version of events that put this woman in high dudgeon until she managed to recover, consoling herself with the assurance that it wasn't her fault.

That Ms. Clinton, the infamously famous woman who imagined herself entitled through a long apprenticeship to sit in the White House, not as a 'first lady' but a First Lady, wrote yet another book is a risible absurdity, and an insult to those who actually labour at the task of writing books. Her name is always front and center as the author of the books in her name, while sometimes the actual name of the person who wrote the book, like the writer of 'It Takes a Village', Barbara Feinman Todd, Georgetown University lecturer and writer who spent 7 months writing it, went unnamed.

These incidental oversights appear to be endemic to Hillary Clinton. She has a casual approach to so many vitally important nods to responsibility and honest revelations, with a penchant toward portraying herself as misunderstood and under-appreciated. Clearly she was misunderstood when she spoke of the type of wretched American voters to whom Trump appealed as presidential material. Just as she was massively under-appreciated when so many of the U.S. voting public felt her past performance revealed too much about her personal style that was unappealing to them as presidential potential.

And perhaps it somewhat stuck in the craw of the ordinary American who struggles to make ends meet living in a society that favours the enterprising and the wealthy -- a nation that prides itself on its exceptionality as a democratic republic that views all its citizens with equanimity in an equal light of opportunity, however disadvantaged a large demographic is when seeking health care, unable to afford what they need to remain healthy and able to maintain employment -- that this woman never missed an opportunity to enrich herself.

And good gracious, here she is, doing it again. Letting her guard down in a mission to explain her lapses in judgement, not those lapses that painted her as unlikely presidential material, but those in failing to understand and connect to the needs of those not as privileged as she. To whom her adversary did appeal and connect with, an issue that in the larger scheme of things, made all the difference. Her defeat at the polls, a 'stunning blow' to someone who expected to breeze into the Oval Office was definitely not her fault. Cue the Russian card. And then-FBI director James Comey; both scuppered her, undeniably.

She talked a good line in excusing herself, from her email server to her State Department response on Benghazi, and her embroideries about being under fire in a field of combat. The field of combat that really mattered to her might have seen a lot of people souring when word of her use of State Department contacts to embellish the charitable enterprise of her husband certainly did her no good. She has a certain way of evincing indignation at suspicions of her self-interested motivation; there we go again, misunderstood.

A flawed candidate in capital letters. In capital letters though she would not have enhanced the status of president while basking in the euphoria of representing the first American woman to hold that position, surely her win at the polls that fateful election day would have been preferable to the election of that uncouth, ignorant, vengeful, egotistical habitual liar whose lack of knowledge and certainty of his personal wisdom is destroying whatever is left of the dignity of political office in Washington.