Connie Yates and Chris Gard’s legal fight for their son Charlie reached a tragic, but consistent, and in this case all but unavoidable end earlier today. The judge handling the Gard case rejected their bid to take their son home, ordering the couple to reach an agreement on hospice accommodations by noon London time today (7 am ET). The couple withdrew their request, and the judge ordered the hospice transfer:

A British judge ruled Thursday that terminally ill baby Charlie Gard can be transferred to a hospice, marking the end of a months-long legal battle centered on the infant’s right to life.

The 11-month-old’s life-support machines will be turned off shortly after he is moved following the ruling at the High Court in London. Judge Nicholas Francis has banned the identification of the hospice or any of the medical staff treating Charlie.

Chris Gard and Connie Yates, Charlie’s parents, were seeking permission to let him die at home, but they gave up on that after objections from the judge who worried about the practical implications for a patient with complex care needs. Charlie has a degenerative genetic disorder that has left him unable to move. He needs a ventilator to breathe.

Gard and Yates had also petitioned for a delay in the removal of the life-support system to give them a few more days with their child. That also got denied, and the judge set a timetable for the transfer and removal of support:

Mr Justice Francis has set a timetable to govern the final period of the boy’s life. Doctors at Great Ormond Street hospital and Charlie’s parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, disagreed over how long he should receive life-support treatment.

Medics said he should move to a hospice soon and life-support treatment should end shortly after his arrival.

His parents wanted more time with him and said he should receive life-support treatment for a number of days. The judge on Thursday made public details of an order that will result in Charlie dying shortly after moving to the hospice.

That’s a consistent action from the court, which has taken the position all along that Gard and Yates had needlessly prolonged Charlie’s life. Both a transfer to the family home and extra days in hospice would have been, in the court’s eyes, a continuation of the status quo they sought to change all along. If one accepts that Charlie has no hope of recovery, and even the doctors who sought to treat Charlie apparently accept that now, then there certainly is a rational basis for questioning the point of either request.

It’s a tragic end for all of the obvious reasons. It has an added sense of tragedy because it seems clear that the court was not willing to accommodate Gard and Yates at all in this final phase. Judge Francis’ position was that Gard and Yates had to negotiate a different plan with Great Ormond Street Hospital by the noon deadline, or that he would order them to follow GOSH’s plan. That left Gard and Yates with no leverage at all; GOSH could simply stand pat and know they’d win in court. That doesn’t allow for much negotiation, which is probably why Gard and Yates withdrew their requests.

Keep everyone involved in the fight over Charlie Gard in prayer. It’s easy to see heroes and villains in this fight, and there are certainly lessons to be learned from a culture where parental rights and desire to provide care can get so easily abrogated by the state. However, we should also acknowledge that this had to be heartbreaking for all involved, and when hearts get broken, an opportunity for grace and knowledge emerges. We can pray for that, and pray for Charlie and his parents as they undergo their real trial in the hours and days ahead.

Hillary Clinton’s new memoir about the 2016 election is titled “What Happened” and will be in book stores in September. NBC News reports Clinton is ready to let her guard down:

“In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net,” Clinton writes in the books opening, “Now I’m letting my guard down.”

According to a press release from her publisher, Simon & Schuster, “she speaks about the challenges of being a strong woman in the public eye, the criticism over her voice, age, and appearance, and the double standard confronting women in politics.”…

The memoir is also billed as a “cautionary tale,” about the adversarial forces that might have had a hand in the “stranger-than-fiction” election.

So it turns out those interviews Clinton gave at a couple of big conferences earlier this year were really just a preview of her book. In May she told a conference in California, “I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” She then went on to list a number of factors that caused her defeat: misogyny, Russia, James Comey, the Democratic Party, etc. She spent almost no time talking about her own failings. The 2016 loss was something done to her by others.

There’s another way to look at that though. Maybe what happened is that Hillary was just a terrible candidate who ran a terrible campaign. How else to explain the vast amount of money she raised and the failure to pull out what everyone assumed was an easy win? And there is plenty of support for this alternate theory.

A state operative for the Clinton campaign told Huff Post, “It was arrogance, arrogance that they were going to win.” And that arrogance led to a half-hearted approach to campaigning (though Hillary’s pneumonia may have played a role as well—she did collapse in the street). From NBC News:

Trump out-campaigned Clinton by 30 percent in Florida, winning by 1.3 points a state that had gone Democratic in 2008 and 2012.

In Pennsylvania, Trump made 23 percent more visits and won the previously blue state by 1.2 points.

The biggest disparity came in Ohio, where Clinton made 17 stops and Trump made 26. He won the state by more than 8 points. In North Carolina, Clinton made 16 stops as Trump made 23, and he took the state by a little under 4 points.

And in what may prove to be this cycle’s most stunning 11th hour upset, Michigan hosted Trump 13 times in the last 100 days. Clinton visited just six times in comparison…

And of course, Clinton never visited Wisconsin even once in the 100 days leading up to the election. Simply put, she didn’t work nearly as hard as her rival. And as this study of her campaign advertising shows, she also failed to air ads in Michigan and Wisconsin in the weeks leading up the election.

Even the director of the DNC data operation pinned the loss on Hillary’s team and their failure to recognize what DNC data was showing. In a public spat on Twitter Andrew Therriault wrote, “irony of her bashing DNC data: *our* models never had mi/wi/pa looking even close to safe. Her team thought they knew better.” Oops!

Joe Biden summed it up in May when he said, “I never thought she was a great candidate.” Or as Chuck Schumer recently put it, “When you lose to somebody who has 40 percent popularity, you don’t blame other things — Comey, Russia — you blame yourself.”

That’s true for most people, but if you’re Hillary Clinton, you not only blame everyone else you make millions selling a book blaming everyone else.

Skip to 5:30 in this clip to hear about the infighting within the campaign and the lack of a coherent message from the very start. Toward the end of this clip, Brian Williams asks, “How could she not have a tactile feel for politics after so many years in politics?” The answer: Because she’s was a terrible, terrible candidate.