In “The Comeback,” a much admired “Seinfeld” episode, George Costanza obsesses over the fact he missed what he is sure was the perfect comeback when a colleague at a staff lunch, watching him gluttonize a bowl of shrimp, quipped that “George, the Ocean called, and they’re out of shrimp!” George wishes he had said, “Yeah? Well, the jerk store called, they’re running out of you!” The problem is that much success in life is based on timing. If you miss your moment, it’s gone, and coming back later to explain that you had the perfect response and didn’t use it is trolling for sympathy, when you don’t deserve any.
Now Hillary Clinton, in her post-Presidential-run botch excuse tour, is channeling George as she muses about whether she missed the perfect comeback when, she says, Donald Trump was “invading her space” during the town meeting style debate.
In an audio clip to promote her upcoming book (above), Clinton reads the section in which she recounts her thoughts as she claims she considered telling her Republican adversary to “back up, you creep” as he roamed the stage behind her during the second presidential debate.
“My skin crawled,” Clinton reads. “It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching ‘well, what would you do?'” Just two days before, Clinton says, “the world heard [him] brag about groping women.” She says she decided against telling Trump to “back up, you creep, get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me,” and instead gripped the microphone “extra hard.” Now she wonders if she made the right choice.
Hey Hillary, the loser store called, and it’s out of you!
Since Hillary lost, it’s facile, lazy and unethical for her to dodge responsibility for the many, many ways in which she paved the way to the Presidency by running such a terrible campaign. Those free-roaming debate formats are perilous, as a competent trainer—like me— could and would have told her….except we have learned that Hillary didn’t listen to advice. Physical positioning on stage, or in a courtroom, or in a meeting or a conference, is a crucial management and leadership skill. Trump is good at it; he is good at some things, you know. I noticed his movements during that debate, and it was simply deft strategy, and completely within the rules.
Sure, Hillary could have tried that comeback, but Trump might have had a comeback of his own ready to go. He might have shot back with, “Gee, is that what you told Juanita Broaddrick and Paula Jones that they should have said to your husband?” She might have sounded shrill or defensive, or like she was afraid. Would she act like that when Putin loomed?
There were better, more effective, less risky responses to Trump’s tactic than Hillary’s unused ad hominem attack. If she didn’t have the non-existent performing instincts of a Florence Foster Jenkins, she could have pulled off one of them. (Making a joke about it was the ticket, but Hillary can’t make jokes.)
In retrospect, after the horse has fled the barn, the milk has been spilled and the fat lady’s sung, Hillary’s wistful regrets (“I could have been someone. I could have been a contender…”) are today nothing more than a way to call President Trump a creep. How professional and civil of her.
Hey Democrats, see if you can send Hillary back to the jerk store and get your money back.
By the way, George gets a second chance to score a comeback with the same staffer, and he is ready. It backfires horribly.
But the comeback never backfires if you don’t have the courage and wit to launch it when it counts. (It’s like Obama’s Syria policy.) As President or as any kind of leaders, one gets credit for reacting boldly, on time and effectively. Saying months later that you now know what you should have done is not only pathetic, it is strong evidence that you aren’t qualified for leadership anyway.
Ethics Alarms 
Hillary who?
You remember, the dame who spent all that money to get Trump elected.
“My skin crawled,”
Now THAT’S saying something, because she surely has an incredibly high tolerance for disgustingly boorish behavior.
C’mon, she’s stayed glued-to-the-hip with a serial sexual harasser/abuser/predator/rapist for how long now?
The French call it “esprit de l’escalier” and the Germans call it treppenwitz; the concept of recalling the perfect thing you should have said long after you should have said it. Churchill was a master of it, having been told by one woman if she was his wife she would poison his coffee he said “if I was your husband I’d DRINK it!” and having been confronted while lurching through the halls of Parliament stinking drunk by MP Bessie Braddock with “Sir, you are drunk!” retaliated with “Yes madam, I am drunk and you are ugly. In the morning I shall be sober, but you shall not be beautiful.”
Hillary could wield a quip, but it was usually only funny to her sycophants, notably “like, with a cloth?” when asked if she had wiped down her drive, when it was obviously not funny and obviously an attempt to give a non-answer. Face to face on stage, and with no one else to help her, she showed herself to be powerless against the very man she time and again dismissed as a clueless buffoon and a sexist pig. He was stupid, he was out of touch, he was a clown, he was this he was that. Going by that, a steely-willed high-level lawyer and diplomat like her should have run circles around him. She not only didn’t run circles around him, she could barely keep up with him, and didn’t have the courage to stand up to him when it counted, just like Paul Ryan let himself be run roughshod over by Biden in 2012. She couldn’t have handled Putin or worse, and the world saw it. Just like her jokes, only her sycophants will believe this crap.
“Hillary could wield a quip, but it was usually only funny to her sycophants”
She’s even fucked THAT up.
Recall when wikileaks was breathing down her lyin’ thieivin’ deceivin’ neck?
(bolds mine throughout)
” ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’ Clinton openly inquired, offering a simple remedy to silence (Julian) Assange and smother Wikileaks via a planned military drone strike, according to State Department sources.
”The statement drew laughter from the room which quickly died off when the Secretary kept talking in a terse manner, sources said.
“Clinton said Assange, after all, was a relatively soft target, ‘walking around’ freely and thumbing his nose without any fear of reprisals from the United States.”
Doesn’t HRC get some sort of outrageous pension from the Senate and/or the State Department? Can’t she just go away? And take Jim Clapper with her? She’s like the guest at a party who refuses to leave even though everyone else has and it’s late.
[This comment is just a placeholder. I’ll give you my real comment next June.]
Sounds like she was intimidated by Trump.
-Jut
Exactly. Somehow, she believes that it makes her look good to admit that she was intimidated into not saying that she was not intimidated. She was intimidated by a guy on a stage in a debate and she thinks she was ready to stare down Vladimir Putin. What? (Jack alluded to this but I think it is worth repeating.)
This doesn’t make Trump a creep (though other things might.) “Invading Hillary’s space????” It’s the name of the game: Gore did it to Bush during their debates. He did it badly, so there was a lot of commentary on it. And, Gore did lose, BTW, so I guess Bush didn’t mind the space invasion. Hillary and Gore have much in common: they deserved to lose and just can’t live with it. Hillary needs to just retire and live off her Foundation’s ill-gotten gains. And Gore — who as “Mr. Global Warming” uses in one year enough energy to light and heat 21,000 American homes (verifiable) — should shut up about his “concern” for global warming. He needs to walk the environmental walk; she needs to stop the endless talk. She lost because she was a horrible candidate. Period.
Bush didn’t even need to say a word, his expression just told the audience “what, are you kidding me?” Gore didn’t help himself with his endless sighing like he was letting the air out of a balloon and had nothing but contempt for GWB. That said, guy on guy is a different dynamic than guy on gal, or should be. Hillary is one of those hybrids that results when an otherwise ordinary-looking (in her case downright frumpy) woman tries to act like a man when it suits her, but retreat into the woman’s zone of protection when it suits her. It doesn’t work. You can’t shriek like a harpy one day and expect men to defer to you the next.
There’s still this dim view on the left that women are somehow morally superior to men, and that might be the case if women were still just “angels in the home” who spent their lives raising their children and caring for elderly members of the family. It no longer is – women run big corporations (HP)…and they also get fired when they fail (LL Bean). Women hold top posts in government and the military, and they get relieved when they don’t perform up to snuff. Women try cases, and sometimes they lose, and their male opponents cut them absolutely no slack, as I can say from personal experience, having defeated a frankly evil woman in court a few times.
Hillary was not morally superior unless you are one of those idiot true believers who still thinks she was the most qualified candidate ever, in fact she was morally INFERIOR to most ordinary people as we’ve discussed at some length. She lost the right to the female zone of protection a long time ago, and she didn’t man up and deal with the man she held in ultimate contempt when she had the chance. She was unfit.
Jack said:
“Would she act like that when Putin loomed?”
Putin’s a short little guy. It’d be hard for him to “loom” over anybody.
Not hard for him to do in the figurative sense.
Just shows how misplaced her instincts are.
If she had told Donald to back up, or reacted in any way, she would have won that round. She didn’t know what to do then. She didn’t know how to handle NK a 3 am.
I remarked about the “that’s what Paula jones said to your husband” when I first read it. It’s a softball that trump would not have missed. And really, you’ve had all this time and back off creep is what you came up with?
Is there anyone out there who still thinks she was the dream candidate (a coworker of mine is still going with this – you know who you are).
You’re their all-time best seller.
Oh, yeah? Well, I had sex with your wife!
Oh I dunno, William Jennings Bryan, who kept running and falling short, might be a better seller. I was going to peg Carter as a best seller, but at least he got as far as the Oval Office, and not to service its occupant – oops, sorry, Bill was using someone else or a few someone elses.