Hillary Clinton... former first lady, former secretary of state, former presidential candidate, sometimes described by her supporters as
the smartest woman in the world,usually described by the rest of us as a crook...
imagined.
When the skies finally opened up on Friday and rain began to fall over the US Capitol, Clinton's turn to stand before the thousands gathered on the Mall and take the oath of office as the 45th president never came.
Instead, she remained seated with her husband, Bill Clinton
...former Democratic president of the U.S. Bill was the second U.S. president to be impeached, the first to deny that oral sex was sex, the first to have difficulty with the definition of
is...
, by her side. And she watched a man whom she believes is fundamentally unfit to hold the highest office of the land get sworn in as her next president.
Donald Trump
...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
's inauguration on Friday and the ceremonial passing of the baton by Barack Obama
I inhaled. That was the point...
crystalized before a watchful nation the deeply personal loss that Clinton had suffered in November.
For the former Democratic presidential nominee, the decision to attend Friday's ceremony was not an easy one.
Clinton anticipated that it would be painful for her to watch Trump become the next president, according to a former aide, but felt she had no choice but to attend given her role both as former first lady and Trump's challenger. It weighed on her, this aide added, that her presence symbolized the peaceful transition of power, regardless of her own emotions about the day.
The Clintons arrived on Capitol Hill shortly before the swearing-in. At the same time, the presidential motorcade was making its way down Pennsylvania Ave. towards the Capitol. In one car sat two men who had each taken away Clinton's dreams of becoming president -- Obama and Trump.
Clinton wore a white coat -- something she did often on the campaign trail to represent the color women wore during the suffrage movement. She and Bill Clinton were introduced to the inaugural stage by the announcer as "the 42nd president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, and the honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton."
... sometimes described as
Deplorable, Irredeemableand at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another William H. Seward...
For Clinton's supporters, both were painful reminders of how close Clinton -- the first woman to clinch a major political party's nomination for president -- had come to becoming to the president of the United States.
With the exception of when she exchanged pleasantries with other dignitaries on the stage, Clinton, for the most part, appeared stoic.
Trump, with his former political opponent seated behind him, delivered an inaugural address reminiscent of his campaign speeches, vowing that the "forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer."
"This American carnage stops right here and stops right now," Trump said.
Anthony Weiner, the Gotham flasher who quit Congress when his night job, starring in his own show on his own private porn channel ("the stars come out at night in the Twitterhood"), closed out of town. Now he's running for mayor of New York City to test F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that there are no second acts in American lives.
The Weiners and the Clintons have more in common than marital malarkey. Like Anthony Weiner, the Clintons were once left for dead on the side of the road in New Hampshire, and with sheer determination and a sufficiency of gall Bubba recast himself as "the comeback kid."
Mr. Weiner understands, as Bubba did in his day, that "this is going to be a difficult slog, and I'm going to have to have a lot of difficult conversations with people along the way."
