When Mitt Romney lost in 2012, there was very little discussion of blame.

Everyone assumed Romney simply lost because he didn't do a good enough job of convincing voters to punch the ballot for him.

He didn't debate Obama properly.

He didn't stand up to Candy Crowley.

He backed off the Benghazi issue or botched it completely.

He gratuitously insulted 47% of Americans.

Romney lost Republicans generally believed because Romney deserved to

lose, even if he deserved to win morally. That's not so for Donald Trump. Never has a presidential

candidate had so many ready-made excuses for his mess of a campaign. Since the primaries, Trump's

defenders have justified every single gaffe by saying, well, he's just a businessman. His anti-conservative heresies have been excused with a wave of the hand and a comment of, well, conservatism has never accomplished anything anyway. His general ignorance with regard to basic issues has been shrugged away. He's learning. His general unpopularity has been attributed not to his own narcissistic nastiness, but to an unnamed group of

conspirators out to get him. Sometimes it's the evil cuck-never-Trumpers, like me, hiding in their

holes waiting to strike him down at any moment. Sometimes it's the Machiavellian establishment,

seeking to crush this supposed change agent. Sometimes it's a suspiciously defective earpiece,

forcing him to go soft on David

Duke and the KKK. Now, after his airplane vomit bag of a debate performance, a performance in which

he spent the first 30 minutes bloodying Hillary Clinton, only to revert to insecure, incoherent

defenses of birtherism, his business record, and his Iraq war opposition, Trump has a whole new

set of excuses. First, Trump's defenders attack his microphone. Yep, his microphone. According to Trump,

some nefarious conspiracy took place to sabotage his weapon of mass instruction, throwing him off

his game, which seems both implausible and kind of irrelevant. More realistically,

Trump's defenders point out correctly that debate moderator Lester Holt hit Trump far harder than he hit Clinton, which is true.

Holt interrupted Trump way more frequently, although in Holt's defense, Trump bulldozed both him and Clinton routinely.

...