By Herbert Finderman
With the release of her new book, What Happened, Hillary Clinton has shown once again that she is unwilling to do what Americans have wanted her to do for years: get out of politics and move on, to a place where she is still just visible enough for me to siphon all of my negative feelings out of my heart and onto her.
Many young people forget that prior to being a failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton was a scourge on our country through the 1990’s. She was there for disastrous welfare reform, the expansion of the prison industrial complex, and both of my divorces.
From the moment she took the national stage, Hillary couldn’t stand not being in the spotlight and grasping for power, much like my older sister, who would make me go to bed when I didn’t want to. Time after time, she has forced us to listen to her drone on in answers to questions about why she didn’t make cookies and why she didn’t change her name, about deals she made as a corporate lawyer, or events leading up to Benghazi, or the most intimate and painful aspects of her husband’s affair, all so she could selfishly continue to be a politician. We get it. You like to talk. Just like the doctor who explained to me that I had diabetes and couldn’t drink coke anymore.
While many if not most politicians as high-profile as Hillary write books about their experiences in office, with her, it’s different. She. Lost. It is 100% her fault that we now have to live with Donald Trump as president. We can all agree that explaining herself in a book after the fact is a luxury reserved for Americans who make honest mistakes, like OJ Simpson, Charles Manson, and the Unabomber. If I wanted to listen to a woman explain why she failed, I would call up my mother and ask her to tell me about the time she promised my brother and I she would quit drinking.
Ideally Hillary would abandon her book tour and get back to her hikes in the woods, returning to my facebook feed only about once a month so I can lose my shit during a fb comment war about her with my niece’s college friend.
In sum, Hillary Clinton needs to stop acting like she is an inspiration to millions of women and girls and accept that she exists solely as an existential threat to a relatively small number of men.
