TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, SAM: Sam Kass of the Huffington Post on “What Should Have Happened In Hillary Clinton’s Useless Book:”

It’s like a self-care book written by a serial killer. Aside from the alternate-nostril breathing, she drinks plenty of Chardonnay but refuses antidepressants. (“Wasn’t for me. Never has been.”) She redecorates her other mansion, the one next door to the mansion she lives in. She retreats from her quest for world domination, returning to the simple joys of being a multimillionaire. In one revealing anecdote, a well-wisher sends her a thousand origami cranes. Hanging them up inside your house, the accompanying note tells her, brings you good luck. Clinton hangs them on her porch.

* * * * * * *

In literary terms, the book could be classed as a Mary Sue self-insertion fanfic. Reading What Happened induces a horrifying claustrophobia, the feeling of being pent up in a small room as someone delivers an unending lecture about how much better they are than everyone else. Like every horrifying little room, this one is cluttered with cutesy sayings on every wall. Each chapter begins and ends with an inspirational quote about believing in yourself and reaching higher, 25 epigraphs in total. One (“It is hard to be a woman. You must think like a man, act like a lady, look like a young girl, and work like a horse”) is attributed to “a sign that hangs in my house.”

Ordinarily, I’d snark, “When Hillary’s lost the Huffington Post” – but as we saw in 2008, she had never won them, and eight years before her “Deplorables” smear against Trump’s supporters, the Huffington Post was declaring her own voters as racist white men. Used cars rarely succeed as Democrat party presidential nominees – they like their candidates with that shiny new presidential smell, and as minimal baggage as possible to used against them, but hey, as the Hillary campaign moronically debated as a slogan in 2016, it was her turn…