It has been a rough few months since November 9, 2016. It may come as some surprise to our dear readers, since I’ve been so very quiet about it, that I was not happy with the result of the election. I was in the good company of about 65 million U.S. voters (give or take), despite how many times we’ve heard that the person they voted for should just “go away.” As much as I disagree with that stance, I also was not quite ready for her to go on The Late Show and talk about her loss.
As she explained to host Stephen Colbert—who I’m still kind of mad at for that whole Sean Spicer at the Emmys thing—her book about the election, What Happened, is about making use of that very knowledge for the future. The book, by the way, has had the highest-selling nonfiction book debut in five years. That comes amid complaints that she’s too focused on re-litigating the election, because whatever Hillary Clinton does, it’s wrong. (See: People complaining that she didn’t do enough to help the “resistance” post-election, but also telling her to go away and/or shut up.)
Not only is that a silly accusation when we still have an active investigation into that very election, as well as endless analysis from others—including a president who is way more hung up on it than she could ever be—but it ignores the importance of knowing history so you don’t repeat it. As she points out to Colbert, new revelations continue to surface about how Facebook, for example, played a role in allowing Russia to influence the election with misinformation. There’s a new report today that a Russian Facebook group mobilized trump rallies in the United States, and the Senate’s intelligence committee wants Facebook to testify.
She also talked to Colbert about some sexism from Vladimir Putin himself, which feels particularly relevant when it played such an important role in the election.
Colbert also gave Clinton a packet of the show’s unused jokes that they’d written to use if she’d won the election, which hits particularly close to home. The first woman to be president of the United States would’ve been a big deal here at The Mary Sue, and we had our own thoughts lined up and ready to go—ones that sat there, staring at us in private, for months after the fact. As Clinton wants, we’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen the next time around.
(image: CBS)
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