Today's Must-Read: Let's Beat Up on Hillary Again

Via Digby, this piece by Paul Waldman. Digby leads off thusly:

I'm going to change the channel and skip the tweets, posts and articles about Clinton's book because I'm sick to death of hearing the media demand that she don yet another hair shirt and flagellate herself for their amusement. I've never seen anyone in politics so relentlessly required to repeatedly debase himself before the media. It's beyond uncomfortable at this point. It's sick.

It's the latest chapter in the twenty-plus year old hate campaign against the Clintons, which I've been sick of forever.

Waldman:

Hillary Clinton’s book about the 2016 campaign, “What Happened,” won’t be out for a few weeks, but this morning a few brief excerpts from the audiobook were played on “Morning Joe.” And as usual, a great deal of the focus is on whether Clinton is taking sufficient responsibility for her defeat.

So we need to ask ourselves: Why is it so important to so many people that Clinton perform a ritual of self-abasement?

If you don’t recall a chorus of angry calls for Mitt Romney or John McCain or John Kerry or Al Gore to get down on their knees and beg forgiveness for their failures every time they appeared in public after losing their presidential elections, that’s because it didn’t happen. Only Hillary Clinton is subject to this demand.

And when she takes responsibility, as she has before, her words are carefully scrutinized to see if she’s being self-critical enough. When she said in May that she took responsibility for her loss but also pointed out that she would have won had James B. Comey not made that dramatic email announcement 11 days before the election — which is almost certainly true — the comments were greeted by a round of scolding from reporters who obviously felt that she was not sufficiently humbled.

At the risk of repeating myself, the press deserves as much credit for Trump's win as the Russians do -- maybe more.