The irony.  So rich it could give you gout.

At a fundraiser on September 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton made a soul-baring gaffe.  With uncharacteristic candor, she stated that half of all Trump supporters are a "basket of deplorables," that they're "irredeemable," as well as "racist, sexist homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it."

Naturally, with her epic lack of self-awareness (see What Happened book tour, 2017) and a blind spot about herself that rivals a covered wagon's, she said this adjacent to a banner pimping her slogan, "Stronger Together."

Because Hillary Clinton is all about the unifying.

I checked.  Page 1 of How to Get People to Like You begins with the following sound advice: "Don't insult, belittle, demean, diminish, castigate, or otherwise excoriate people you want to like you."

Stands to reason.

And yet, if you're Hillary Clinton, apparently this helpful truism is much harder to glean when you have a steady stream of smoke being blown up your symbol for the Democratic Party.  Accomplished as she is, the Queen of Pantsuits fell prey to the fawning sycophants surrounding her.  You'd think the most qualified candidate in history would've figured out it was a bad idea to middle-finger middle America – but you would've thought wrong.  Helpful truism, part 2: The only thing that rivals Hillary Clinton's bred-in-the-bone penchant for lies and corruption is her reliably flummoxed efforts to GPS a clue.  She just doesn't get it.

This is sad.  And astonishing.  And hilarious.  And exhausting.

Clinton's dirty bomb that day wedded her forever to the sneering elite tribalism so memorably fire-started by Barack Obama a few years earlier, when he casually derided the desperation of the flyover states with his comments about bitter people clinging to guns and religion.  When these two blue-chip democrats revealed their true selves, the curated façade of caring cultivated by the left for years finally yielded to the dark bigotry beneath.  It was a clarion call to the progressive left that the extreme bias against which they loudly and incessantly claim to take the moral high ground is actually warranted and welcome – as long as it's leveled against the right.

The left got the message, like a bat signal in the sky.  The cordial, buttoned up, stealth loathing of yesteryear gave way to pitchforks and torches.  The left's hatred of Trump now goes to 11, and by the associative property of partisanship, they hate his supporters with nearly the same level of fear and loathing.  Gone are the Golden Rule, the idea of understanding "the other," and any effort to walk around in someone else's shoes, as per Atticus Finch.  They have all been jettisoned in favor of an almost apocalyptic mission directive to destroy the president of the United States of America by any means necessary.

So Clinton finally let her hair down and said what she really felt that night – which is the divine right of grandmothers everywhere.  She was never really interested in being the president of all Americans anyway – just the president of the Cool Kids on the Coasts.  When Hillary Clinton coughed up the hairball that was her deplorables comment, it was id-based, gasp-worthy, and gross.  But it was also the opening salvo in a new war that allowed leftists permission to be their worst selves.

This was clearly freeing for them – and eye-opening for the rest of America.

Given the kraken-level nightmare known as the Weinstein scandal, and the horror show of entrenched corruption that is the DNC (recently affirmed by former DNC chair Donna Brazile – herself an admitted cheater and liar), the progressive left and the Democratic Party are lately doing a good impression of something craven, crumbling, and near collapse.  The moral posturing, virtue-signaling, and imperious judgment ended up not being a good look for them.  But that's all they appear to have now.

The ink-black irony of that fundraising night has spawned a siege of similar inversions.  With the recent Uranium One, Steele dossier, and Podesta collusion exposures, not to mention the Wasserman Shultz I.T. imbroglio, it is worthwhile to once again note the mind-bending irony of the Jan Brady-like "Russia, Russia, Russia!" hysteria in which leftists have steeped themselves for over a year, as it now gives way to what might be a bona fide Russian scandal – implicating (wait for it) Clinton and the DNC.

The hits keep coming.  Will our elected officials get to the bottom of the Clinton Foundation's pay-to-play schemes?  Will we ever know what was in those bleach-bitted Hillary "yoga" emails or the many thousands recovered from sexting enthusiast Anthony Weiner's computer?  What about the nexus of conspiracy suggested by the Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton "grandkids chat" on the tarmac as it dovetailed with James Comey's premature decision to not indict Hillary for her "grossly negligent" choice to set up that private server?  Do James Clapper, Donna Brazile, and Susan Rice merit Get Out of Jail Free cards for their straight-faced, verifiable lies – Clapper while under oath?  And now that Tony Podesta has stepped away from the lobbying firm he ran with his brother John, will the special counsel even bother to expose their Russian affiliations when it has a clear agenda and bigger fish to fry?  

All of them look a little...well, deplorable.  And all of them have Hillary Clinton in common – the author of their despair.  She has maelstromed all those around her into her vortex of deceit.  But how much longer will the Manchurianed faithful who carry Hillary's water continue to do so, even as it breaks their backs?  When will the dam finally break and drown Clinton's vaulting ambitions once and for all?

Hillary Clinton now evokes Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – stuck in time, muttering away to herself in a darkened room about what might have been, on a hopeful night long ago, gone terribly wrong.  She cast her own shadow across all those people who think differently from how she does in the American heartland.  She condemned them, because she was never possessed of the strength of character, honesty, or self-awareness to condemn herself.  

But this is hardly a surprise, as her political calculus was established early on: whatever it takes.  With her attempts to shame and silence her husband's accusers even as she asserted the right of all rape and sexual assault victims to be believed, Hillary Clinton made her deal with the devil of political fortunes.  With her nimble side-stepping of the avoidable tragedy in Benghazi, complete with stone-faced lie about the origins of the attack to the parents of murdered soldiers – while attending their funerals, no less – she made her peace with being beneath contempt.  And with the news of her commandeering of the DNC to hamstring Bernie Sanders and game the system, the circle is complete.  Clinton's ongoing health issues turn out to be an infection of the soul – and she is beset.

Like the oblivious irony of her fundraising night slam on red-state America, even as she sought be their president, Clinton continues to live a life of hypocrisy and desperate careerism.  Recall how she pearl-clutched at Trump's "horrifying" debate comment when he said he'd keep us "in suspense" about whether he'd accept the election results?  With a straight face, Clinton has now almost literally spent a year blaming Russia, the DNC, sexism, misogyny, Bernie Sanders, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Barack Obama, uninformed voters, voter suppression, self-hating women, the media, and the Electoral College for her loss – and has never accepted the results of the election.

Every day, I thank America for dodging that bullet.  It was Matrix-like.

With each new revelation, the kismet she brought on herself relegates Clinton closer to political oblivion.  Her reductive bigotry said more about her, after all, than it ever did about her intended targets.  Hillary Clinton took aim at those she deemed "irredeemable" that fundraising night and let fly her weapon of choice.  Her words boomeranged back to crown her in the end.  Let the record show – Hillary Clinton is the real deplorable.

It's a twist ending you saw coming all along.