general

Some people who considered Clinton the "lesser evil" candidate tarred everyone else (Sanders supporters, Greens, Libertarians) as "Trump voters." They're still doing it -- a less contrite bunch you will not find.

As Carl Beijer notes, Sanders himself is taking the high road after Clinton's defeat but that shouldn't stanch criticism of a lousy campaign by his supporters. (Which the news media is predictably tut-tut-ing about.)

It's pretty easy to understand why they would be angry: by just about every metric imaginable, Hillary Clinton led one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history. It was a profoundly reactionary campaign, built entirely on rolling back the horizons of the politically possible, fracturing left solidarity, undermining longstanding left priorities like universal healthcare, pandering to Wall Street oligarchs, fomenting nationalism against Denmark and Russia, and rehabilitating some of history's greatest monsters - from Bush I to Kissinger. It was a grossly unprincipled campaign that belligerently violated FEC Super PAC coordination rules and conspired with party officials on everything from political attacks to debate questions...

The mainstream news media was "all in" for the Clintons right up to the last.
Here's one blogger's account of some of the coverage:

My mom-in-law was watching CBS all night, so that’s what we watched. All the pundits/anchors spoke in the hushed tones of a funeral. For two hours, the only images of campaign workers shown were the sad faces of Clinton supporters; not one image of jubilant Trump supporters was broadcast until Trump gave his acceptance speech. When one of the talking heads noted that Hillary never generated the enthusiasm of the Sanders or Trump campaigns, his comment was followed by a stony silence. That he had given voice to a self-evident truth was not welcome.

via Naked Capitalism, one of the few voices of sanity in the election season.

The Queen of Chaos was so sure she was going to win she didn't have a concession speech prepared; she gave some maudlin remarks the next day, aimed at "young women and young girls" (per the Washington Post) to let them know they, too, can eventually earn $225,000 per speech despite "setbacks." OK she didn't say that but what a role model for the young -- good riddance to that. Given how she treated young women and girls who supported Bernie Sanders, it's hard to get worked up about her and Bill "wiping away tears" after she lost. (The word "tears" appears five times in the CNN article.)

Update, November 15: After conceding, Clinton blamed James Comey's late-breaking letter for her campaign loss. Classy. It wasn't the server, it was that letter. Fortunately for us, factions within Comey's shop of horrors ultimately couldn't bear rubber stamping criminality. Hill and Bill almost got away with it. Please let this be the end of them.

Village Voice writer turned Clinton suck-up Joe Conason was obsequious to the bitter end. Way to call'em, Joe.

Update: Graceful in defeat, ready to acknowledge how poorly he misread the popular mood, Conason's follow-up blog post to the above is titled "What Do We Tell the Children About Their Country Now?" Presumably he's not referring to the children of Trump voters.

Update 2: m.po found another example of using children as vehicles for adult whining: a Washington Post story titled "They existed in a girls-can-do-anything world. Then Donald Trump won the White House." Eventually these girls will read about the Clinton Foundation and be mad at Mom for writing this.

Dear Tom,
My Hillary-supporting friends are driving me crazy! The latest thing they are saying is "Show me some proof Clinton Foundation did quid-pro-quo ... name me corporations/actors that were q-p-q ... show me some proof Hillary was aware." How can I respond to this? Is there an article that proves quid pro quo?
K.P.

Dear K.P.,
Asking for a "quid pro quo" is an unfair debate tactic. You're not a prosecuting attorney with subpoena power, and even if you were, the Clintons are adept at wiggling out of "smoking guns." The FBI is in an uproar over this right now. The issue is not what you or I or the FBI can prove in court, the issue is whether there is an appearance of impropriety or corruption. I'd say taking $153 million in speaking fees (the Clintons' combined haul since the early '00s) while remaining in politics, capable of returning favors, is improper.

The Clinton Foundation Timeline (maintained by a Democrat) aggregates so many suspect maneuvers that by the time you've finished reading the smell is overpowering. Here's just one example. It's not what Hillary did or didn't do at State, it's Bill selling himself for access to world leaders or other powerful contacts under cover of a charity.

Also see this review by a left-leaning commenter of the right-wing film Clinton Cash (links are in my post). She finds support for a lot of what's said. In particular, scroll down on this page to the section called "Red Shadows: Kazakhstan, Uranium One & the Long Arm of Vladimir Putin." Pretty outrageous, especially in light of all the red-baiting the Clintons have been doing to distract from the Wikileaks revelations.

It's fine if our Hillary-supporting friends want to ignore all this but when they start insisting we prove Hillary's guilt according to legal standards they are just jerking us around. (I get this too.) If this were a Bush no one would demand a quid pro quo -- the appearance of corruption would be enough. Proving quid pro quo is much harder if potential evidence is on a private email server and was destroyed as "personal correspondence" -- to insist that we resuscitate that information is especially galling.
Tom

For those lesser-evil voters spreading the talking point that, 25 years after the Cold War, Russians are once again hiding under our beds, poisoning our water, and influencing our elections, here's James Howard Kunstler:

The “tell” in these late stages of the campaign has been the demonization of Russia — a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s, since there is no longer any ideological conflict between us and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad relations is America’s fault, in particular our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia’s border. Hillary has had the full force of the foreign affairs establishment behind her in this war-drum-banging effort, yet they have not been able to produce any evidence, for instance, in their claim that Russia is behind the Wikileaks hack of Hillary’s email. They apparently subscribe to the Joseph Goebbels theory of propoganda: if you’re going to lie, make sure it’s a whopper, and then repeat it incessantly.