Earlier today, I published a piece reflecting on the Democratic Party’s refusal to learn a single lesson as a result of its 2016 losses. The extent to which Hillary Clinton, in particular, is committed to exculpatory narratives that alleviate her or her allies of any blame is as breathtaking as it is cringe-inducing.

“I was the candidate,” Clinton said in a post-election interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I take absolute personal responsibility.” If she had left it at that, it would have been a boring interview. It also might have facilitated the kind of growth and healing of which Democrats have been deprived in their state of denial. But she didn’t stop there. What followed was a cascade of excuses for Clinton’s behavior that laid blame at the feet of everyone but herself.

“If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president,” Clinton said. “I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off.” Clinton blamed the press for failing to provide context in reporting on the FBI director’s letter to Congress. That letter informed the legislature that the FBI had discovered emails originating in Clinton’s illicit server on a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, who was under investigation for allegedly having improper contacts with a minor. How’s that for context?

The FBI didn’t create those emails, nor did they force Clinton to use a personal server exclusively when she served as the Secretary of State. Clinton did that herself. Congress did not vest in Comey prosecutorial discretion in the Clinton case, rendering him Congress’s point person on this investigation. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch did that when she took an ill-considered private meeting with Clinton’s husband. These weren’t exogenous events over which the former first lady had no control, no matter how desperately her committed supporters would like to rob her of agency.

Clinton insisted that the debate moderators failed when they did not ask both candidates precisely how they planned to create new jobs—a gripe grounded in her implicit suspicion that the press was generally harder on her than her opponent. That was, in fact, the very first question of the very first presidential debate. When asked why she was a better bet than Trump on the issue of job creation, Clinton rambled off a litany of government projects, which she insisted would be outsourced to small businesses. “How are we going to do it?” she declared. “We’re going to do it by having the wealthy pay their fair share and close the corporate loopholes.” It isn’t the moderator’s fault this rote performance failed to compel.

“Were you a victim of misogyny and why do you think you lost the majority of the white vote?” Amanpour asked. “The books coming out in the fall,” Clinton answered unhesitatingly: “Yes, I do think it played a role.” One wonders how misogynistic the country was on November 8 if, just 12 days later, Clinton believes she would have won.

It is remarkably coincidental that the specter of misogyny was raised in the first question Hillary Clinton was asked at a hastily-arranged press conference at the United Nations in March of 2015, following the discovery of her secret server. “If you were a man today, would all this fuss being made be made?” asked a Turkish reporter. In her response, Clinton was coy: “I will leave that to others to answer.” Clinton need wait no longer for an answer.

Earlier this year, the international business school INSEAD organized an experiment in which two professors of educational theater tested the proposition that Clinton suffered as a result of the public’s inherent anti-female bias. With a man playing the part of Clinton and a woman playing Donald Trump, the experiment revealed something shocking: Clinton was being judged unfairly—the audience was grading her more positively than she deserved based on her gender. “I developed empathy for people who voted for [President Trump] by doing this project, which is not what I was expecting,” said one of the experiment’s crafters.

Though it still constitutes unlovely excuse-making, Clinton was on firmer ground when she attributed responsibility for her loss to the Russian intelligence laundering operation WikiLeaks, and its benefactors in Moscow. It was not Clinton’s fault that a hostile foreign power targeted her and her campaign, or that a “phishing” attack snared her campaign chairman, John Podesta. But hacking attempts are not unique to 2016. Both the Obama and Romney campaigns were repeatedly targeted by hackers utilizing “spear phishing” attacks. “Secret Service officials warned both campaigns of cyber-threats, at times providing specific chatter related to attempts from foreign governments,” TIME reported. The emails uncovered by WikiLeaks proved an unwelcome distraction for the Clinton campaign, but the impact those revelations had on the race is next to impossible to quantify and, as such, isn’t likely to have been decisive.

“Did we make mistakes? Of course, we did. Did I make mistakes? Oh my gosh, yes. You’ll read my confession and my request for absolution,” Clinton said flippantly and to the crowd’s laughs. “But the reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last ten days.” As they say about statements like this, everything before the “but” isn’t honest.