I decided after all to read "Shattered."

I'm 16% of the way into the book that goes "Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign." (I know the percent because I'm reading it on Kindle (in combination with the "whispersync'd" audio version, useful when walking around).)

I just wanted to quote 3 things:

1. At the 5% mark, the unholy mess: "The campaign was an unholy* mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much."

2. At the 9% mark, Huma, the croc-filled moat: "[Huma Abedin] had the final say on where Hillary went and who had access to her. Rather than just being a gatekeeper, Abedin took on the role of channeling Hillary for the rest of the campaign... That made her indispensable to both the candidate and the rest of the team... But many feared speaking their minds around her. She couldn’t be counted on to relay constructive criticism to Hillary without pointing a finger at the critic. If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign — and she was — Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The Royal Huma Guard made it harder for Hillary’s senior- and midlevel aides to get time with the candidate, and that made it impossible to really know the woman they were selling."

3. At the 14% mark, the Brianna/Bianna screwup: "In May [2015], as Bernie was starting to campaign in earnest and it was becoming clear that the press wouldn’t let the e-mail story go, Hillary’s aides began planning her first national television interview of the campaign, a chance to strike back at the widely held perception that she was hiding from the press. Palmieri asked Abedin to find out which newscaster Hillary would prefer, and the answer that came back was 'Brianna.' That meant CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and Palmieri worked to set up a live interview on CNN. Only it turned out that Hillary had said 'Bianna'— as in Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, the wife of former Clinton administration economic aide Peter Orszag. By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late to pull back. Hillary went through with the interview on July 7, and it was a disaster." Here's what her own people perceived as a disaster:



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* The use of the word "unholy" to just mean awful or dreadful interested me. I wondered how long that completely nonreligious application of the religious-seeming word had been around. The OED finds the first published use in a letter written by Charles Dickens in 1842: "I am reminded of my promise to see to the Pantomime, and am called out at this unholy hour." A similar word is "ungodly," first recorded in the nonreligious meaning in a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Olalla" (1887)(whole text here):

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar, would not suffer me to sleep. I lay there and tossed, my nerves and senses on the stretch. At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time. But it must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries. I leaped from my bed, supposing I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and discordant that they shocked the heart. It was no illusion; some living thing, some lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully tortured...