The Biggest Losers of the 2016 Presidential Election

At this point, it is clear that the third party wasn't a factor in this presidential race. It could have been. All of the advocates of the third-party vote were just shouting into the wind. Everyone else was locked into the two-party mentality and didn't think a third party would make any difference.

Are you kidding me? Donald Trump was pronounced the winner with just 276 electoral votes. If only one third-party candidate had won seven electoral votes, it would have made all the difference in the history of the world.

So the most obvious losers in this contest were Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. But the American people were also losers. We were losers as soon as Clinton and Trump were nominated by their respective parties.

But no - this post celebrates three other losers, three First Class, Grade A Idiots, three long-eared jackassses, who by their actions managed to royally screw up the campaign. Like Grover Norquist four years ago, nobody voted for these people, and yet they managed to insert themselves into the election process and make a royal mess of it. If they had just used their brains, things would have happened differently.

Here, for your reading enjoyment, are The Biggest Losers of the 2016 Presidential Election.

1. Reince Priebus

This is the chairman of the Republican National Committee. In a totalitarian state like the USSR, the chairman of the ruling party is the Man Behind the Throne, and the most powerful man in the country. By hitching his wagon to the Trump star, Priebus may have really enhanced his cred, and he may yet become the most powerful political figure in the country.

But with Trump, Priebus is like a little kid taking a Great Dane for a walk: the dog drags him around wherever it wants to go, despite the child's cries of "Heel! Heel!"

In the days before the Republican national convention, and in the days that followed, Priebus missed several opportunities to take Trump behind the woodshed, give him a good whipping, and make him fall into line. Instead, he was cowed and bullied by Trump, and both blindsided and intimidated by Trump's popular support, and he chose to follow instead of to lead. He has allowed Donald Trump to lead him around by the nose since July.

Reince Priebus surrendered his brain, his spine, and his manhood to Donald Trump. He may yet come out ahead, politically speaking, but as a person, he is an idiot, and a loser.

(UPDATE: On November 13, Trump named Priebus as his White House chief of Staff. He resigned on July 27, 2017, having served the shortest term of any White House chief of Staff in the history of the republic.

For the record, Priebus was actually forced out of the White House by Anthony Scaramucci, Scaramucci was the newly-appointed White House Communications Director, a position which he held for only six days — also a historical record —before being fired by the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly. This makes Scaramucci an even bigger jackass than Priebus.)

2. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

This is the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. She is also a member of the House of Representatives, representing a district from Florida. (Florida, by the way, voted for Trump, so that makes her a loser already.) Since she is still in Congress, she may consider herself a winner, but ...

What makes her a loser is that she and other DNC executives were exposed as having been instrumental in denying the other candidate, Bernie Sanders, a fair shot at the party's nomination. In fact, she fumbled the whole pre-convention campaign effort, and was responsible for an unelectable candidate getting nominated. Here's the way Wikipedia puts it:

2016 Presidential election

Clinton's opponents, Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders, separately criticized the decision by Wasserman Schultz to schedule only six debates in the 2016 Presidential Primary, fewer than in previous election cycles, as well as the timing of the debates.

In May, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski called on Schultz to step down over the DNC's bias against the Bernie Sanders campaign. The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak revealed that Schultz was furious at the negative coverage of her actions in the media, and she emailed [NBC News political director] Chuck Todd that such coverage of her "must stop". Describing the coverage as the "LAST straw", she ordered the DNC's communications director to call MSNBC president Phil Griffin to demand an apology from Brzezinski.
ResignationSee also: 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak

After Wikileaks published Democratic National Committee emails which suggested that DNC staffers had inappropriately backed Hillary Clinton in the primary campaigns while criticizing the Bernie Sanders campaign, Wasserman Schultz tendered her resignation as the head of the DNC, to become effective as of the close of the nomination convention in Philadelphia. According to reports in the Washington Post, Wasserman Schultz strongly resisted suggestions she resign, requiring a phone call from President Barack Obama to finally force her resignation.

Following a speech at the convention before the Florida delegation where Wasserman Schultz was "booed off stage" the DNC announced she would not gavel open the convention. She was subsequently appointed honorary chair of the Clinton campaign's "50 state program."

It wasn't gettting caught that makes Schultz a loser. It was engaging in those blatantly preferential and, frankly, self-centered and childish, activities in the first place.

The rest of the Wikipedia article about Schultz is not very complimentary either, She may be an elected member of Congress, but as a person, she is an idiot and a loser.

(UPDATE: Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still in office. But she won the Young Turks' 2016 Jerk of the Year award.)

3. James Comey

This is the director of the FBI. He was appointed to the office in 2013. He will serve a ten-year term, and he cannot be removed from office except by voluntary resignation. Well, perhaps he can be fired.

He came under fire in July for his mishandling of a criminal investigation against then front-runner candidate Hillary Clinton. Then he inserted himself into the political process in the last 10 days of the campaign. He was alternately praised (by both sides) for his professionalism and his integrity, and criticized (by both sides) for his partisanship, his poor sense of timing, and his clumsiness. Whether he was praised or criticized depended on who benefited from his public pronouncements.

By making any public announcements at all, he flouted FBI and Justice department protocols and interfered with both due process of law, and the election process. Someone said that he was "putting his thumb on the scale," one hamfisted man tilting the election first one way, and then the other way.

There is no doubt that he got too close to the action, stuck his nose where it didn't belong, and influenced the election. Clinton may be able to lay the blame for her loss squarely at his feet. Maybe he deserved the praise for his professionalism, maybe not, but as a person, he is an idiot and a loser.

(UPDATE: James Comey was fired by Trump on May 9, 2017, in a move that was both clumsy and controversial on Trump's part. That's par for the course.)

So there you have it: Three Big Losers

Many other people lost something in this election, but Reince Priebus, Susan Wasserman Schultz and James Comey have all earned the right to walk around in public with giant paper dunce caps on their heads, proclaiming to all the world: "THIS PERSON IS AN IDIOT. THIS PERSON IS A LOSER."