Oh, For Fuck's Sake: A Gentle Talk With My Republican, Democrat, And Undecided Friends
It’s hard to look at the headlines when you’re facepalming. But I see my Facebook feed alight with various opinions on the election, all of which are wrong – so rather than screaming OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE at all of you individually, let me pull you into the corner and have a brief but compassionate talk:
To My Moderate Conservative Friends:
This is a tough time for you. For years, I’ve said “The Republican party is saturated with racist jerks who’d like to raze the Constitution to the ground,” and you said, “No, no, that’s not who we are, we believe in firm laws and equality.”
Then you wake up to discover that your official candidate’s a guy who literally doesn’t know how many articles the Constitution has, and David Duke is so thrilled by Trump’s candidacy he’s come out of the woodwork. You’re not a racist – I wouldn’t be friends with you if you were – but you’re realizing that Trump is representing an ignorant, anti-science, pro-white wing of the party that you tried very hard to convince me didn’t exist.
Worse, those people you claimed didn’t exist (or were just background noise) are, in fact, dominant.
That is a moment for soul-searching. And from what I see, y’all are doing it. And I commend you for that. And a lot of you are refusing to vote for Trump, as is correct.
However, while you’re soul-searching, take a moment to reflect deeper.
Because the party elders tried very hard to convince you that all of your fellow Republicans were as upstanding as you were – because they knew you might leave the party if you actually understood a lot of the people who stood with you were racists waiting for an excuse to stand back up again. This uncomfortable dissonance you’re feeling right now is because they knowingly suckered you into believing that your reasonable concerns were what most Republicans felt – and now you’re seeing that yeah, maybe not all, but a lot of Republicans are pulling that lever out of nationalistic white pride and foreign hatred.
You’ve been suckered already. This is a fact. It’s not shameful unless you refuse to learn from it.
Now.
I’d like you to ponder the fact that a lot of your hatred of Hillary Clinton may come from the same people who misled you about your fellow voters.
You’re not obliged to like her, of course. But consider that much of your reflexive “NEVER HILLARY!” information came from the same sources that told you yes, all your fellow Republicans want is what you want. Consider that a lot of the scandals around Hillary come from a thirty-year, well-funded, unending campaign to turn up dirt on her, and that campaign stemmed from the guys who suckered you.
I’m not saying she’s great. (Oh boy am I gonna unload on her in a second.) But if you’re seething with reflexive Hillary Hatred after years of headlines, take a moment to remember who fed you those headlines, and the other things they were feeding you. Then reexamine that from a more sober point of view.
That’s all.
(And if you’re starting to type your frothing answer on WHY HILLARY IS THE DEVIL within five seconds of finishing this discussion, you have failed to ponder. Try again. Try harder.)
To My Liberal Friends Saying “There’s No Difference” Between Hillary and Trump:
There’s no delicate way to say this, but do me a favor:
Look down at your hands.
Yeah, every one of you who said that and looked down at your hands will have noticed that you’re white.
It’s pretty easy to claim there’s no difference when you’re not the one he’s targeting. I get that you’re mad, and it’s a legitimate anger; Hillary’s a prickly candidate.
But do you think the Supreme Court Justices that Trump will nominate – and he will nominate them – will make no difference in your lifestyle ten years down the line? (Go look up Antonin Scalia’s record, then ponder Trump’s statements of Our Beloved Scalia, then ponder what the court would rule with four of him on the team.)
Do you think that your LGBTQ friends will be treated the same in a Hillary-as-President world versus a Trump-as-President world?
Do you think that Hillary will respond exactly the same to Putin’s invasion of foreign countries, when Trump has said explicitly that he won’t?
Do you think police reform and Black Lives Matter will be exactly the same in a Trump world versus a Hillary one?
Sure. Get mad. Claim that Hillary’s an awful candidate. But saying “There’s no difference” is the most selfish kind of tantrum, the kind where you don’t get the candidate you want and you overlook the many and manifest differences between “Not good” and “apocalyptically awful.”
I know you wanted to vote for someone, but all too often we vote against someone to keep the Seventh Seal plugged nice and tight. And I’m trying to say this nicely, but your sputterings of “There’s no difference!” comes from the quiet white privilege where the only hardships you’ll deal with are the economic ones. A lot of people who don’t share your skin tone will suffer if Trump gets elected, and they’ll suffer in ways that a Hillary election will not cause.
There is a difference between the two of them. What you’re actually saying is, “I don’t want to choose between a terrible option and total annihilation.” I’m sympathetic.
But that is the choice on the table, at least in terms of electability, so stop saying there’s no difference. There is a difference. You just want all good choices, and you’re not getting that, so please. Wake the hell up.
To My Bernie-Loving Friends:
The leaked DNC mails are ugly, it’s true. But I have to wonder:
Have you guys ever watched a political campaign?
I suspect if you had leaked emails from the 2008 campaign, you’d find the DNC equally biased against Barack Obama, and people asking all sorts of ugly questions about how to handle his blackness. But we don’t. Why?
Well, because Putin didn’t want McCain elected as badly as he wants Trump in office. That’s the guy who leaked this stuff, at a time proven to be maximally damaging, and so when reading those emails you should get mad but you should also a) consider who wanted you mad and why, and b) wonder what the RNC emails would look like if they were leaked.
Because guys – this is how the sausage gets made. It’s ugly. It’s never pretty. They’re going to discuss voting blocks in ugly, reductive ways, and they’re going to figure out lines of attack, and yes the DNC absolutely needs reform…
But do you notice one thing?
Notice how Bernie never won the black vote?
You know, that black vote that’s literally the only thing holding Trump back right now?
Fact is, Bernie had the odds stacked against him, but he fucked up by not funding enough of his black outreach team, and bobbling easy questions on race. Yeah, I know you think he should have convinced the black vote, but the fact is that black voters have had a lot of guys promising vast change and then tossing them away once they got into office, and Bernie was unable to connect with them.
If Bernie had won the black vote, guess what? He’d be the damn nominee right now. And yes, he had some hurdles to overcome, but it’s like Gore vs Bush in Florida – yeah, the votes got miscounted, but if Gore hadn’t sold out to the right-wing and alienated the left then no hanging chad could have stopped him.
Say it with me, folks: Bernie fucked up. The odds were stacked against him, but he knew that black voters were key to the nomination – or should have – and he kept putting his foot in his mouth.
And Bernie is not an unassailable candidate right now anyway, and I wish y’all would stop saying that he is. Hillary went after him with kid gloves. And the Republicans stayed away from him because he was such a soft target that they were eager for him to get into office. If you thought Hillary was nasty, ponder ads saying that “BERNIE SANDERS WANTS UNDERAGED CHILDREN TO MOLEST EACH OTHER,” and yes, you think Trump would be afraid to go there if he wasn’t trying to siphon away your vote right now?
My point is that yes, the DNC did shitty things. But that’s all of politics, and your idea that it’s only the DNC that did something reprehensible is part of that conspiracy theory myopia you have. The RNC also does shitty things. Leaked emails from Bernie’s campaign would probably make him look terrible. Nobody looks good while debating how to get people to vote for them, and yes, this is awful, but it’s the kind of awful that’s so commonplace that experienced political operatives are going, “…okay, yeah, that’s how this works.”
Get mad! But don’t get mad as if this is a special thing that the DNC did because they are their own unique flavor of evil. Get mad because politics is shitty.
And then remember that Barack Obama likely had it just as bad in 2008 and he won. The system is rigged, but all systems are rigged, and you can win it with a flood of votes just like Trump did.
Unfortunately, Bernie didn’t, so stop talking about him like he was the unqualified best choice. The “Unqualified best choice” would have gotten the most votes in the end. (Which isn’t the only thing that would make a candidate the “unqualified best,” but it sure as fuck is the start.)
There’s reason Bernie is still choosing to go after Trump instead of Hillary, my friends. Examine that.
To Hillary:
You….
You fucking hired Wasserman less than four hours after she got kicked out of the DNC?
Are you even trying to look good, woman?
Jesus, I’m voting for you and that looks bad. Cut it the fuck out.
To My Enthusiastically-Voting-For-Trump Friends:
OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
(EDIT: And for all of those who’ve shown up to tell me how your protest vote in this election will “Send a message,” I wrote Why Your Presidential Protest Vote Is A Wretched Idea.)
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http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/25/1551930/-Debbie-Wasserman-Schultz-did-not-get-promoted-and-she-s-not-running-Hillary-s-campaign
It still undermines the message by making the removal of DWS look insincere and grudging. This week is supposed to be about cleaning up the breakage of the campaign and starting to present a unified front, and giving DWS such immediate validation basically says it was no big deal. If I were HRC, I would’ve left her to fend for herself until after her primary against Canova, and then if she won that, QUIETLY bring her back into the fold for the general election. But I sure as shit would’ve have called a bunch of attention to how wonderful I think DWS is when a huge swath of Sanders supporters want her head on a pike right now.
(And I also say this as a Hillary supporter.)
I sometimes wonder whether the following might have been the substance of the conversation between two admitted long-time friends:
“I didn’t do anything wrong, Hillary! All I did was express my opinion. Privately! So what? I didn’t influence or ‘fix’ anything. No one did! Everyone knows that. I just don’t understand why people are so upset!”
“Look, Debbie, it doesn’t matter whether you had good intentions or bad intentions. It looks bad, and appearance is reality. Just ask my husband and Loretta Lynch!
“So I think you need to step down. I’ll bring you on with my campaign, where you can feel free to be as supportive as you like. But you can’t continue to be the face of the DNC after this. It just doesn’t look impartial.”
Pure speculation, I know. But it seems to me at least generally consistent with the premise that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is not a complete idiot.
She brought Wasserman-Schultz into her campaign IMMEDIATELY. Yes, Hillary Clinton IS, in fact, a complete idiot. And she has lost my vote, one of those crossovers from Bernie that were VERY hard to get.
I saw an interview that said that was false. Do not know myself, but I think we are in an era that we need to confirm before believing.
First of all, she is not the nominee yet, unless something has been announced in the last 2 hours. That premise you referred to is very debatable to me. Bernie is so much more intelligent than Clinton thinks she is. The frustration and anger is not just about the emails, it is more about all the election fraud Clinton and Debbie colluded over to rig the primaries for Hillary in 21 states, for which several lawsuits have been filed! If they had not done that, Bernie would have been the nominee months ago! And the FBI case that she skated on was also rigged in her favor. From a legal standpoint, she should have been indicted. None of which anyone will hear about from MSM. They are still trying to protect her ass and cover all her “mistakes.” The entire election process this year is the worst I have ever seen, from the candidates down to all the corruption no one is even trying hard to hide anymore!
Oh Puh-lease. Bernie was a super long-shot from the start. I voted for him and spoke in his favor at my caucus, but forget about it. Politics is not a winner-take-all game. It’s about compromise, and he got some great compromises on the platform. You don’t get everything you want unless you’re a dictator.
Uh..yeah she is.
You realize that you’re talking about the Democratic National committee here. You do realize that Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat, right? Maybe he should have just run as a Socialist. I love Bernie. I sent him, and Hillary, my $10 a month for a long time. I think that if you expect the DNC to support a Socialist like they do a long time Democratic, you’re crazy.
You brought to light something that has been bothering me lately and that is the fact that the corruption is not being hidden as carefully. I realize that part of it is because, this being the ‘information age,’ certain information more easily becomes public.
There IS an attempt to deal with it. For instance, Comey (or his puppeteers) knew it would be foolish to lie about the extent of the email crimes. So he was truthful, at least to a degree, then made that lame statement. Well, there was outrage and now it’s third-page news. The scary thing is, most of us will not do anything about the corruption. “They” know that; therefore, why worry too much about what we think?
I have a strongly unsettling feeling that blatant corruption is a last step before some kind of government we don’t want.
I agree with this..comment. I’m sure that is exactly what happened. Though I also agree that it didn’t look good. Lol Hillary by all accounts is super smart. She is also tough and seems to be motivated by what is good for others. I want a candidate like that. ☺️☺️☺️ Btw…I think the convention theme of Love was a fantastic idea. It sends a great message!
Consider the trouble DWS could have caused if she weren’t given a face-saving out. Giving her a meaningless, powerless title was a small price to pay for smoothing this out.
By doing this it doesn’t smooth things out at all, just makes people more angry. How tone deaf can she be???
She had the choice of giving Wassermann an out or having Wassermann try to stay on, and how would that have looked?
@Resuna
According to insiders, Wasserman fought tooth & nail to stay on, & this was the least she was willing to settle for. It seems to me that DWS cares a lot more about her own welfare than she cares about the campaign, or the country.
Agree, bad form!
I respect Hillary for making the tougher choice to give DWS a fig leaf instead of throwing her under the bus. DWS was magnificent this morning shouting down the delusional mob that would rather see Trump win than Bernie lose. In a campaign where Hillary’s character is relentlessly trashed from the right and the left, LOYALTY is one of her many positive character traits, (ask Huma), that should not go unmentioned. DWS played according to the same rules and job description that every (male) chair of a major political party has followed since there have been chairs of political parties. And that includes Tim Kaine and Rience Priebus, only their emails weren’t hacked by Vladimire Putin and published by Julian Assange on convention eve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
What is bothering me is that I only saw this about Hillary and Wasserman when I happened to check in on my rabid Bernie supporter friend who I had to unfollow. My friend has a point about the press. We are all in danger of living in our preferred political silos and missing important news.
Okay,okay. Are you actually watching the actual convention or are you depending on the mainstream media or some other source? Because I have noticed that the media are looking for negative stories that will get people’s attention but they are not reporting any of the good stuff. The Democrats had a very good day today.The usual big names, so what. But they had some just regular people whose lives were made better by Hillary, and I for one was touched
You can’t have it both ways. You are asking people to feel touched by thengood things and discount the bad. This has been what the Democrat party has degenerated into since Bill Clinton’s first term. We have been told to put away our critical thinking skills and bathe in his crocodile tears. Sorry, but I am all cried out. The way this convention is going, arsenic is looking pretty good as my drink of choice to rehydrate. The bottom line is if you don’t want your stupid crap to overshadow the good, then stop doing stupid crap! Tonight it was a tribute to our military against the backdrop of the Russian Navy. Sigh…this is getting to a point where it is beyond holding our noses, we are moving into chopping our heads off before pulling the lever.
Pay attention. The new role for. DWS is honorary. Eva Longoria had that title foe Obama. It’s just a puny little face saver. Let it go.
DWS did her job and she did it well. Politics ain’t Tiddly Winks. Putting their finger on the scale is part of the job description for the chair of a political party organization. So here we are, again, taking down a woman for playing hardball doing her job the same way it’s been done by her predecessors since the beginning of time. At least credit HC with not throwing her under her under the bus which is what the headline would be if she had. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
The DNC’s bylaws prohibit favoritism. “Playing hardball” is not the same as violating the rules.
No. The DNC committed election fraud. To vote for Hillary is to vote YES to election fraud. Would you ever accept an award you and the rest of the community know you had not won fairly? I would not. It’s unethical. If Hillary Clinton had an inch of honour she would refuse the nomination and concede the race to Sanders. We know she has non, so let’s not hold our breath.
Agree completely !
Doesn’t matter, it’s “PERCEPTION”.
“Face saving sop,” yes. Meaningless? No. It was … kind. DWS has been a sh** show for years, but I’m trying to imagine the horror, the utter humiliation of presiding over the wiki leaks scandal, being booed by your own delegation, being stripped of your gavel hours before the show you spent years planning started, oh, and just coincidentally being publicly and brutally canned to a chorus of cheers, jeers, gasps, and pearl clutching by a moralizing lynch mob … It was kind, even brave when you consider the potential for immediate backlash, and the folks judging it better hope they’re never in need of that kind of gesture.
A great overview and analysis. However, your last point, although accurate in its general assertion that Clinton has often not done herself any favors, is overstated:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/25/1551930/-Debbie-Wasserman-Schultz-did-not-get-promoted-and-she-s-not-running-Hillary-s-campaign
I didn’t say she gave her a promotion. She gave her a job.
Maybe not a paid position, but it’s still a job with some authority, and God, that looks bad.
You’re still wrong. HRC did not give DWS a JOB. She gave her an honorary title. Empty. Meaningless. A sop.
If it’s “empty, meaningless, a sop,” then it should have been nothing at all to, you know, not give her any title at all.
But she did. And that carries weight.
I heard Trump on NPR, literally minutes ago, calling Hillary a “traitor” who threw her best and most loyal supporter Debbie to the wolves because Hillary doesn’t care about even her loyal followers and blah blah blah. My point is, Hillary can literally do nothing right, so far as Trump and her die-hard haters are concerned. There some kind of anti-Hillary loonacy that makes certain people rabidly attack her no matter what. So what was she supposed to do?
Yes. HRC did NOT give DWS a new job. She was never going to resign until after the convention, and her honorary title just allows her to pound the gavel at the beginning and end of ceremonies. Don’t add fuel to the fire with unfounded rumors.
So she made a big “screw you” statement to the people she needs to vote for her over something that is “empty” and “meaningless?” What would be the point of that? Is the hatred of progressives so great that she’s willing to dump that whole block of voters just for the personal satisfaction of giving us the middle finger?
Oh yes. It was all about you.
No, really, it’s not. It was likely the result of political bargaining to get her out as quickly as possible. Because that’s what happens in politics.
It’s an acceptance of her misdeeds is what it is. If Hillary was agaINST ELECTION FRAUD SHE’D DISTANCE HERSELF FROM DWS. GUESS NOT. Sorry my caps lock was on, too tired to retype.
she has no authority. She is like a Hollywood Starlette in an honorary position. It’s a face saving place where she can sit until they decide what she should really do – or until the berning people get a freaking grip and read a little about our nation’s political campaign history. If they think the DNC has been hard on Bernie, it just means they know nothing of every single campaign since the first one.
Is that sort of like how black people should expect to be shot by the police, when you look back at the history of oppression and systemic racism in our country? (I’m not saying the scale of injustice is even comparable, but I’m painting a picture that will hopefully have you understand how insulting your line of thought is.)
The DNC was caught doing something wrong, regardless of whether it’s the way the game has always been played, and now it’s in the public eye. At least in the past, there was plausible deniability.
The fact that they didn’t just quiet DWS, remove her from the role, apologize, and then *leave it at that* was a mistake, and tone deaf. End of story.
She didn’t save face, she spit in peoples’ faces.
It’s not a paid position, it has no authority, and she is sharing it with a stack of other people.
I do agree that it looks bad, but I don’t think it actually is bad. Much like the other stupid shit Clinton has pulled.
It looks bad, sure. But I this this gave it enough perspective that it at least makes sense, at the same time:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/25/1551930/-Debbie-Wasserman-Schultz-did-not-get-promoted-and-she-s-not-running-Hillary-s-campaign
The position she was given has no staff, budget, or responsibilities. Apparently Obama had 24 of these Honorary Chairs. It’s a way to ease an old friend out to pasture gracefully. I agree with every other line in your story. Hopefully people will listen. I shared it to my FB.
Maybe that was part of the deal, the cost of doing business… W. is poison in the media convention coverage if she stays in as chairman, so she’s offered a small saving grace by Clinton to step down.
Really. DWS didn’t get thrown completely under the bus for basically doing her job after getting swift boated by Putin and Assange on convention eve.
She has a job. She’s a US Congresswoman. She’s paid a lot of taxpayer money. She oversaw a corrupt and dirty primary season and got caught for “some” of her transgressions. The leaked emails only hinted at what was going on. We all know the river ran much deeper than a few racial slurs of subordinates. It is more than just appearances.
If an honorary title counts as a job, I’ve got a great idea of how we can solve unemployment.
If that’s not what you meant, don’t use a misleading word that implies she’s being rewarded financially.
Might as well, 90 million other Americans have an honorary title: Sir Not Counted in the Unemployment Figures.
I thought you said you were going to unload on Hillary? If that’s the best you can do, I’d suggest you take your own advice and try harder. Trump shouldn’t be the president, but taking it easy on Clinton explains how she still has a political career.
Fair.
Oh yes. Because god knows everyone has taken it easy on Clinton for the last 25+ years.
So it’s ok – what the supposedly unbiased DNC did- because it could have been much worse?
Or because that Bastard’s in the White House MAY have faced the same treatment from the DNC?
And Hilary’s blatant unsuitability is a product of 30 years of deliberate brainwashing?
What the hell is in your medicine cabinet?
Lest you assume things of me as you have of the world in general, I’ll at least be honest: I will not EVER vote for a socialist.
Voting for Trump is like playing Russian roulette with a Colt Peacemaker.
Voting for Hillary is like playing Russian roulette with a Colt 1911A
Voting for Bernie is simply shooting yourself in the head with no pretense of playing a game,
Only the dangerously insane play that game.
And Hilary’s blatant unsuitability is a product of 30 years of deliberate brainwashing?
Part of is, yes. She’s not a great candidate, but on the other hand having Republicans willing to waste millions of taxpayer dollars to keep her on trial continually is a part of the reason people dislike her. And those people did so because, well, they fear and hate Hillary and have waged an unprecedented campaign to blow up her every misstep into a prosecution, regardless of whether the facts supported that.
If you can’t see that, then I’m pretty sure what’s in your medicine cabinet is “wood alcohol,” and you’ve clearly drunk the entire bottle, because you’re blind.
Well one thing for sure, whenever I want to convince someone of my righteousness, I do my best to sound like Trump by insulting them!
Trust a Republican to bring guns into their reply.
Oh brother.
“the supposedly unbiased DNC”
The what now? That’s your fundamental misunderstanding right there, that the DNC has ever been thought to be or is supposed to be unbiased.
Neither the DNC nor the RNC has ever been “unbiased”. As TheFerrett said, “all systems are rigged”, and the DNC has never claimed it doesn’t play favorites. The entire Superdelegate system is a machinery for biasing their own Primaries.
But that bias has been there all along, so suddenly flipping out about it only when your candidate loses shows equal bias. If people have a problem with the DNC and how it operates, get involved, push for reform — absolutely! But don’t act like these peeks inside the sausageworks expose some sort of previously-unknown corruption that justifies burning the entire Primary system to the ground.
More importantly, for this election, don’t pretend their business-as-usual (biased) process somehow taints the nominee. The same people crying “bias” now would’ve been perfectly content with the DNC, if the votes had gone the other way and Bernie was the one on that stage accepting their nomination.
Mosr folks don’t seem to understand thar’s not between Hillary and Trump — it’s between socialism and saving the republic.
We had a “socialist” in Obama and that hasn’t been so bad. Given the choice of another “socialist” and a guy who wants to torture family members of suspected Muslim terrorists, and tank the economy with a trade war and blackmail Europe,
I’ll take the “socialist”
How bad does it have to get before you relent? I want to prepare.
Interesting… What I’m reading basically says that we should vote for the lesser of two perceived evils – HRC. Unfortunately, that is the reality. However, I’d rather vote for a known quantity as opposed to an unknown quantity – and we really know very little about Trump.
Bernie Sanders would have had a hard road to the White House. That said, he would have been a better candidate than Hillary because he tapped into the same frustration and anger that Trump taps into – and Bernie’s message is better thought out.
It’s a shame that the third party candidates largely go unnoticed. Maybe that will change someday…
Bernie Sanders would have had a hard road to the White House. That said, he would have been a better candidate than Hillary because he tapped into the same frustration and anger that Trump taps into – and Bernie’s message is better thought out.
As noted, the “better” candidate had a host of weaknesses that were never actually exposed. Ignoring that is to ignore, you know, what I wrote.
Regardless of who did or did not court the most votes (Which, given the new evidence of DWS influence in the process is suspect in itself), Sanders scored SIGNIFICANTLY better in every poll vs Trump than Clinton did. Every. Single. One.
Her move to give DWS an honorary title mere hours after her being exposed looks like an endorsement of her corruption and complicity in a rigged primary. She couldn’t poll better than Sanders before, there’s no way she’s uniting the party now.
Sanders scored SIGNIFICANTLY better in every poll vs Trump than Clinton did. Every. Single. One.
As noted, this is a pretty dumb argument, because the Republicans unloaded on Hillary, but did not on Bernie.
If you’re only counting polls where Bernie Sanders has NOT been called a child molester, or had all of his greatest hits of Communism unearthed for public debate, you’re not actually running in reality. He’s done well because the Republicans haven’t unleashed the attack dogs on them. Read the article.
Truth. Burlington College, war funding votes, votes against child porn protections, courting military manufacturing to his state, VA scandal under his Senate leadership, failure to release full tax records, allegations of campaign money going to his family… there was plenty of dirt that was never fully unearthed because HRC never went there, and neither did the mainstream media.
I disagree. Bernie would have done better against Trump because the people who are sick and tired of politics as usual would have had a real choice and would have gone to a candidate espousing a positive image of our country and our future. Now many of those people are considering Trump and will not a lot more convincing that Trump is the Devil before voting for yet another career politician (or maybe GJ or JS, at least).
Well ignoring what you wrote is a pretty decent option. Much better than Hillary v Sanders.
Third party candidates go unnoticed because the parties don’t lay the groundwork. The Green Party, for example, currently holds less than 0.1% of the ~550K elected positions nationwide, but every four years, they throw up a candidate for the national election, and expect that they can somehow win it, or get even 5% of the popular vote? Ridiculous. Work from the ground up.
In many local and state elections in order to run a candidate your party MUST have a national candidate. You can not get on the ballot at all, in those locations, if you do not. The Green Party does run local and state candidates all the time, you just haven’t bothered to look or to find out how complicated it is to get on the ballot. Both parties create and enforce the rules that make it nearly impossible for someone who isn’t with them to even get on the ballot. Here in PA until just a few weeks ago the Green Party needed 20,000 signatures to get on the ballot. Furthermore the courts ruled that the rules applying to minor parties in PA were unconstitutional in particular areas. Though this decision only applies to the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, not other minor parties, for now.
The Green Party has been laying the ground work for decades, as have other “third parties”, but this is what gets in the way: (From Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_major_and_minor_party_candidates):
“In order to become ballot-qualified, a party must meet certain requirements. For example, in some states, a party’s candidate for a specific office must win a certain percentage of the vote in order for the party to be ballot-qualified in the state. In other states, a political party must register a certain number of voters in order to achieve ballot status.”
I am in no way saying vote for a third party this go around, but it is false and misleading to say they aren’t running local candidates or don’t have local/state candidates in office, or aren’t doing the ground work. They do, but the existing system puts every barrier in their way to favor the two dominant parties. Their nominating signatures are constantly challenged, in the case of the Green Party by Democrats. Why/How? Because it is elected officials from those parties who write the rules and laws and it benefits them to keep others out.
“However, I’d rather vote for a known quantity as opposed to an unknown quantity”. Yet, I’m pretty sure you voted for Obama for his first term, when he was completely unknown. And then voted for him again when he didn’t fulfill any of his campaign promises in his first term.
My problem with your reasoning on the emails is that you compare DNC emails and emails within the campaign organization of Bernie. If the emails had come from Hillary’s campaign, it wouldn’t be a problem. You are correct there…it is what campaigns do. DNC was supposed to be neutral, by their own rules.
Yeah, and the point is that every “neutral” campaign is tilted on some level.
Can you say with a straight face that IF the RNC’s emails were hacked, there wouldn’t be anti-Trump emails aplenty? You know there would be. Part of politics is overcoming those biases.
Perhaps the difference is that I would expect it from the current class of Republicans but I am still holding out for integrity from Democrats, at least. I guess even in my old age I still have ideals and a little Pollyanna in me.
There’s a big difference between some anti-candidate emails, and emails about actively working against a candidate’s campaign. I would expect the former from the RNC emails, and not the latter, which is what the DNC did.
I suspect you would find the same thing in the RNC emails as well and if you did, that would catapult Trump into the White House if you know what I mean. Unlike the DNC, theirs would not be working in his favor which would prove one of his main contentions but thanks to the DNC, HE DIDN’t have to worry about it as they did all the heavy lifting and removed all doubt.
To those of you saying DWS’ position is honorary or even meaningless, that does not matter to the vast majority of potential voters who see it only as one more example of the DNC and Hillary taking care of their own. After everything else that has been done during this campaign, it reeks of even more cronyism to the average voter. Most people don’t care or know, or would even think to find out about how past campaigns have worked.
The average voter will see, and only cares about, what is obvious and out front. Hillary and her staff have displayed an incredible ignorance of this, or downright stupidity towards it, and it verges on blithering incompetence.
I absolutely despise Trump and will not vote for him. But, sadly, I would have voted for Bush, or even Rubio, over Hillary at this point, as badly as Hillary has campaigned.
I find Donald Trump so offensive and scary that I would vote for Francis Underwood (of Netflix series House of Cards) before I would vote for Donald Trump. Yes Francis Underwood is a caricature of the unethical (at least he’s fictional!) but he is better than Trump/ Made up shirts to advertise my revolution. All proceeds go to Hillary Clinton campaign fund.
https://www.booster.com/underwoodovertrump
So, you haven’t realized that the Underwoods are based on the Clintons?
The Underwoods are based on the Clintons? That would be weird, since the Netflix House of Cards is a remake of a British television series.
Why would the British writers who created the original House of Cards base characters on the Clintons? That’s not relevant to them.
Please tell me you really aren’t that oblivious.
The Underwoods are 100% based on the Clintons.
Dude omg i know right? Also the original HoC was filmed in the 70s iirc
Specifically, the original HoC was written in the 90s but set in the 80s, in Thatcher’s Britain. Nobody had heard of the Clintons back then
As you said, it is a remake. This version is for an American audience and so topics relevant and familiar to American’s are included instead of those familiar to a UK audience. Another example of this is The Office. There are things in the original that just wouldn’t be funny or as appealing to an American audience. So the new writers, American writers, write a show based on their target audience.
It isn’t weird at all if the Underwoods are based on the Clintons, because it was written for an American audience, in an American context.
Maybe you don’t know the meaning of the word “remake”?
Are we soon to be former Democrats allowed to get mad that our oh-so-not-racist party refers to Hispanic voters as “taco bowls?”
The emails were not referring to Hispanics as taco bowls. That email came out in the days after Donald Trump tried to impress Hispanic voters by eating a taco bowl in the Trump Tower dining room, not long after he called Mexicans rapists. The DNC emails were regarding channeling the rage over Trump’s taco bowl stupidity. Thus “taco bowl engagement”.
It’s funny how easy the Left can be swayed by the media, and not the facts. He did NOT say all Mexicans are rapists. http://www.salon.com/2015/12/21/the_media_needs_to_stop_telling_this_lie_about_donald_trump_im_a_sanders_supporter_and_value_honesty/
You’re misreading the email. They were literally talking about Trump’s taco bowl tweet and how to engage with voters on how dumb it was. Look at the time stamp, it was the next day.
Hello…eating a taco bowl is not racist. Using the term taco bowl engagement is regardless of the motive or context. The appearance of impropriety will get you every time. The cold irony is that the Clinton team obviously learned nothing from Bill or were not alive back then.
There are some issues with what’s being leveled at Bernie supporters in this article. It’d be nice if we could say, Barack Obama had the same kinds of dirty tricks used against him and he won, but that just isn’t true. The fact is, Hillary learned some things when she ran against Obama when she was a sure thing. Hillary started lining up Super Delegates way in advance of when anyone has done it before. While this probably isn’t illegal, it is new. So, Obama didn’t face that. Also, assuming we don’t know politics is dirty and that Republicans have skeletons in their closets is ridiculous. To assume that Barack Obama’s campaign did the same kinds of underhanded things to get elected without offering up some sort of proof and expecting us to accept that as something that makes what Hillary did OK in the long run is absurd. There are a lot of reasons Bernie lost, but none of them have to do with Clinton running a better campaign. I would say the main reason he lost is there aren’t enough states with open primaries yet. Only 20 states have open primaries. In the other thirty, independents, who outnumber Democrats and Republicans, can’t vote in the Democratic primaries. Had they been able to, Bernie would have won. And perhaps if all the votes were counted in every state, he did. We’ll never know. Considering the number of holes in the logic of this argument, I can only guess there were some in the rest of this essay. but I was glad to see this person gets that hiring Wasserman-Schultz was a dumb idea.
There are a lot of reasons Bernie lost, but none of them have to do with Clinton running a better campaign.
Well, even if we discount the idea that “Clinton worked her ass off to appeal to black voters” – which, you know, she did – then you still have your tacit acknowledgement that she was better at rounding up lifelong Democrats out to the polls, which means that’s at least one thing she did in running a better campaign.
Really. Don’t let your loathing make her win a luck-based mission. She had some appeal.
Bernie’s supporters (and I am one) could have gotten off their duffs and changed their party affiliation for the primary instead of complaining and expecting everyone else to conform to them.
You think Bernie ran a great campaign? I was at the poles during the primaries. I stood in a huge line of forty year old, professionally dressed women. Devoted Hillary voters, one and all. Do you know how many people under 30 I saw there? None. Not one. Hillary got her people to the poles, not just reposting internet memes. That’s why she won.
Don’t discount her supporters and her campaign because your candidate lost. That’s one of the reasons Bernie lost.
Speaking as one of those women who voted for Clinton, pay attention to them as well. We noticed when Sanders’ message focused on a rising tide lifts all boats, without acknowledging that women and especially women of colour are usually in smaller boats with low freeboard. We noticed that ALL of his top staff were me , and all but the one guy he hired for the sole purpose of talking to Latinx voters in Arizona were white men. We noticed when women would press him on these questions and he would punt. And we voted for Clinton.
>I would say the main reason he lost is there aren’t enough states with open primaries yet.
The math says you’re wrong. Even if every single state had open primaries, it would have given him a four point bump at best. He still would have lost, decisively.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-system-isnt-rigged-against-sanders/
You never unloaded on Hillary.
I will note that this analysis completely ignores Gary Johnson ( the Libertarian candidate… Check him out! )
Yes, he is a long shot, but to be honest with you, so was Donald Trump, to win the RNC title!
And, if enough people decide to choose him, well, we will have a real race on our hands!
Third party candidates go unnoticed because the parties don’t lay the groundwork. The Green Party, for example, currently holds less than 0.1% of the ~550K elected positions nationwide I doubt the Libertarian numbers are much better — but every four years, they throw up a candidate for the national election, and expect that they can somehow win it, or get even 5% of the popular vote? Ridiculous. Work from the ground up.
This year’s Libertarian candidate has more executive elective office experience than the R & D candidates combined. Polling shows Gary Johnson in double-digits despite a near-total media blackout. And more than half of Americans polled want an alternative to Clinton & Trump. Johnson warrants inclusion in all analysis of this year’s election.
I’d certainly like to see him in the debates.
I have: he wants to get rid of both the Department of Education and the corporate income tax. A world of no.
what would have happened to an everyday Joe who did the things Hilary did and then lied to congress under oath? I am sure Hilary was someone with more than “average competence” this the FBI said so she should have been held more accountable by the justice department.
I believe Barack Obama once declared he had been to all 57 states. I submit most people know there are 50 states and if you took a poll, almost none would know how many articles are in the Constitution. And we could all spend pointless hours researching all the dumb/inaccurate things politicians have said over the course of the past 100 years, but why waste precious time? What difference does it make?
We all know and have witnessed the fact that Hillary will tell anyone anything they want to hear (especially if it will garner her cash or a vote), whether it’s true or not. Reminds me of my favorite story! The one when she had to race off the plane in Bosnia ‘under a hail of sniper fire’. Didn’t the poor woman realize photos were documenting the beautiful sunny day, the 7th grade girls assembled on the tarmac to greet HRC, as well as a military contingent? And not a bullet to be found. Anywhere. Why ever would someone lie about something so benign? THIS is what you get with HRC. Lies for no reason. What happens when shit really does hit the fan? How does anyone trust this woman? Boggles the mind.
And yes, Todd – what about Gary Johnson? Or Jill Stein? HRC is one of the most corrupt politicians ever to run for president – surely we can do better.
So, you accuse conservatives of lying about Hillary for decades, when her dishonesty and evil character is well documented by liberal media sources, and then have the audacity to start of your article with blatant lies about Republicans that you’ve apparently been telling for years. Get to a therapist right away to deal with your severe delusions.
Vote your conscience. I’m tired of our Foreign Relations from Viet Nam on. Democrat and Republican leaders have kept us in this mess my whole adult life. Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson are the only people I’ve heard mention this sad fact. If either of these two parties candidates are elected we’ll have more of the same.
You want me to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to vote for someone who represents my values.
You need to read this re: the “hiring” of DWS. Nope. NOT.
ALOT of people need to read this so that they are clear about what really occurred.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/25/1551930/-Debbie-Wasserman-Schultz-did-not-get-promoted-and-she-s-not-running-Hillary-s-campaign
LOL at the title “For fuck’s sake: a gentle talk”
You can’t even stop yourself from dripping the condescension of your article into the opening title.
Here, let me follow your formatting for my response:
“Fuck your condescension/disengagement: A civil rebuttal of this terrible article”
Even better was:
“There’s no delicate way to say this, but do me a favor:
Look down at your hands.
Yeah, every one of you who said that and looked down at your hands will have noticed that you’re white.”
It’d be nice if straight white people stopped grandstand politicizing my race and orientation to make political points on my behalf that I disagree with.
Like the article says “for fuck sake” folks. Defeating Trump matters. It matters a lot. No insult to your sensitivities and love of Bernie can match the insult that will be inflicted on all of us if Trump becomes President.
So, for the sake of having a 46th President of the US, forget about everything but defeating Trump.
Define racism? The US is a very racist country. People of any background of any colour live separate side by side. Religions sometimes work but often drama are the only things that connects them occasionally. You are right neither Trump nor Hillary will make a difference ,Obama didn’t. He was slightly more popular that is all. The real decision makers are behind the scene. However the world is fed up with PR rubbish and secret decision makers. Elite against the taxpayers. Who will win? Good Luck !
Trump is going to win. I hate it, but the fact of the matter is there’s so many people scrambling to vote for “not Trump”, but since none of them can agree if “not Trump” is Clinton, Johnson, Sanders, Stein, or someone else, the votes are going to be too divided to matter.
Trump will win, and we are doomed.
Blame the DNC. They did it to themselves.
I have one word for you, Johnson. I am voting for Trump who is a crooked billionaire and I’m not voting for Hillary who let our people die in Benghazi.
From writer Mark Summer :
Being an honorary chair of a campaign—a position that involves no responsibilities, no employees, no budget, and no duties—is not a promotion from being chair of the DNC.
Being an honorary chair does not mean that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is “in charge of” Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It doesn’t mean anything. That is, unless you think President Obama’s 2012 campaign was run by actress Eva Longoria; or former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee; or high school guidance counselor Loretta Harper—all of whom were among 24 people who served as honorary co-chairs of Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Being an honorary chair is not a job. It’s a courtesy. It’s the associate producer of politics. It’s an empty title handed out to help ease Debbie Wasserman Schultz out of her chair and make it slightly more palatable for her to leave a job she’d done (badly) for five years without putting up a fuss.
It’s a face-saving sop.
But it’s not nothing. It’s a gesture extended to a old friend in a bad moment. It’s a moment of being empathetic and trying to both ease the pain for everyone caught up in bad situation while acting to preserve the peace.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz does not DESERVE a courtesy. You see these are the fundamental differences we will not get past to party unity. Not only did DWS rig the election from the inside, she took every chance possible to go to the national media to denigrate Bernie Sanders and praise Hillary Clinton. What she did was wrong and unethical. She does not deserve any concession or honour! As an American citizen I am horrified so many people are just fine with election fraud.
I think you stumbled bymusing the term honorary.
Hillary did not HIRE Wasserman-Schultz… she made her one of her Honorary chairpeople (Honorary as in unpaid!) … just a nice gesture to let someone who had worked hard for the party for years have a little bit of dignity…
You can do nice things and still appear stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Sanders didn’t fuck up. The simple fact is that it was the superdelegates already deciding on HRC long ago and not even giving him a chance is what led to all this. Once people saw the the significant majority was already voting for HRC they decided to hop onto the bandwagon wanting to feel like they’re voting for a winner regardless of her shady history. With that said, superdelegates are simply a joke and it’s their way of rigging all this.
No, Sanders fucked up. The Superdelegates decided on HRC in 2008, too, and guess what happened when the majority of the vote swayed to Obama?
Really, not a smart comment.
.You may vote for one of the two choices the major parties allow you–take it or leave it, sucker–but you will have to swallow your integrity to do so. And if the other guy wins an election you sanctioned with your vote, the Trumpster will be YOUR ruler for the next four years. As a “good citizen” who takes voting seriously, you will be obliged to treat him with the respect due the President of the United States? Good luck with that, citizen
I personally will accept no responsibility for the actions of Trump or Clinton, some of which will be grossly immoral resulting in many deaths, nor will I conform myself in any respect to the dictates of the majority, which has never demonstrated a sense of morality or integrity. The fact that Trump may be more immoral than Clinton is the most ridiculous motive for voting I have ever heard.
http://voluntaryist.com/nonvoting/index.html#.V5eJsY-cGdI
Oh look! Another moderate that doesn’t give a damn if the US kills and maims innocent Middle Eastern families. And just like the rest, he thinks he’s such an original thinker and so so superior.
I do give a damn.
I think Trump, who’s said “nuclear war” isn’t off the table, is far more hazardous to the Middle East, even though I’ve spoken out officially about my dissatisfaction with Obama’s drone policies on several occasions.
Sorry to,inform you but nuclear war has been on the table since before JFK assumed office. Try to stay current.
So basically: Vote hillary, get behind her, stop complaining, or you’re an idiot.
Thanks.
Well, I never said to stop complaining, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that conservatives had to vote for Hillary, but yeah.
Hillary wasn’t that great at outreach to the black vote either, and didn’t mention Sandra Bland’s name in the campaign until way after Bernie spoke about, and met with the victim’s families. Hillary is working with party apparatus, and the African American voting bloc constitutes the MOST loyal voters in the party… which, I’m afraid, Hillary will take for granted after November, just as President Obama did. Not enough is being done to alleviate the suffering within their communities. Broad based social policies like a national minimum wage of $15/hour, publicly funded education, private prison reform, and debt reform would do a lot for the underclass in this nation, which because of our legacy of racism, disproportionately affects minorities within the U.S.
So basically, what you’re saying is that black voters are too dumb to know who’s best for them?
Gosh. I can’t imagine why the black vote didn’t run to Bernie with people like you on their side.
Are you saying that everyone you’re trying to convince yourself is too dumb to know who’s best to vote for Ferrett?
That’s not a particularly good argument, for obvious reasons.
Thanks for writing this article overall. I feel like I’m just sniping at the few points I disagree with.
I’m not a democrat. I’m an independent. I was able to vote for Bernie Sanders in my state because I am in a state were you don’t have to pre-register with a party.
I’m not just a Sanders supporter, I support Sanders because I believe in the ideas and values he’s expressed, not because I’m some raving fan. I’m not going to vote for someone who has vastly different values just because he says so. That would be stupid.
I’m going to vote for someone I believe in even if that’s not one of the major party candidates because frankly, this year I believe the major parties have failed to nominate a viable candidate between them. That’s not my fault.
Hillary has made it perfectly clear that she’s not interested in middle-class progressive values voters and even said in a speech that she doesn’t need our votes–she let us off the hook then and I’m not getting back on for anyone. I’ll take my vote elsewhere where it’s appreciated and where I can vote my values and interests.
If Hillary is the nominee and she loses to Trump, that’s not my fault. I’ve done everything I could to get someone decent into the office and it wasn’t enough. I don’t live in a swing state, so my vote doesn’t count anyway. I’m sick of being told that since I voted for someone in the democratic primary, I’m somehow obligated to vote for the democratic nominee even if it’s someone who I’d never vote for otherwise.
I do plan to vote for progressive democrats in state and local elections–and maybe some third party or independent candidates who share my values and care about my interests.
I wish the rabid Hillary supporters would calm down and leave us alone. We never promised to vote for a lesser evil and we won’t. You’re just making yourself–and Hillary Clinton, look desperate. It’s not a good look.
Alas, not a rabid Hillary fan. Merely a practical one.
And basically, what you’re saying is that “If Trump wins, we’re better off than if Hillary wins.” Sure. Let’s assume that your Bernie principles would be better served with Trump in office. You don’t have to vote for a lesser evil, but you do have to shut the hell up if the greater evil wins and you don’t like what he does.
As you do as well!
How odd, considering Sanders and Clinton voted the same 93% of the time http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/upshot/the-senate-votes-that-divided-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2015/sep/02/11-examples-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders-hol/
Every person who contributed to Bernies campaign should contribute money to Canovas campaign to make sure DWS is held accountable for her actions.
What the author is failing to see is just because “we have always done it that way” doesn’t make it right. It’s time for a change. When 1/10th of the top 1% of the wealth in this country make almost as much as the other 90%, something is wrong. (Stats Bernie stated in his speech last night)
You claim that Hillary is a better choice for those of color. Fortunately, she’s had a long career in politics for us to examine. Perhaps the most glaring thing that comes to mind is her husbands crime bill. Which she fully supported (obviously) and is widely regarded as the very thing that started the problem we see with police officers showing a negative predication towards black people.
I don’t claim she’s a better choice; I claim she was the choice of the black voter overall, which is the critical topic at hand when discussing what Bernie needed to do to win.
I mean, if we’re claiming that the victor is inevitably the better choice, I have some issues to pick with the triumph of Bush in 2004.
You also made an incorrect rhetorical statement to open your passage to Democrats. “Look down at your hands”. I’m mixed race, and I’m gay, and I couldn’t disagree with you more.
That’s the problem with making paternalistic statements of behalf of minorities you don’t agree with: It politicizes the problems of marginalized communities to make political points in support of whatever agenda white/straight people have, it chips away at the self-determination of marginalized people to speak for themselves, and it isolates/alienates those in the marginalized community who disagree with your opinions.
So please, don’t co-opt the marginalization of minorities to push your own political agenda.
Keep in mind that the discrepency between Bernie and Hillary by black voters was not one in which black voters viewed Bernie significantly more negatively, but one in which they were undecided/had no opinion when asked of their favorable/unfavorable opinions of him. In large part that can be drawn back to the DNC’s intentional timidity in scheduling primary debates in time slots that would see the least exposure.
To this black gay guy, Bernie is better in nearly aspect that is closely tied to minority rights: pot legalization, criminal justice reform, response to BLM, income equality. Unlike DSW, he doesn’t take payoffs from payday loan lobbyists and unlike HRC, he doesn’t profiteer off the private prison slave labor industrial complex. On a personal note, he’s been way better historically on civil rights activism as well.
All that is true.
But Bernie’s not on the ballot.
What Bernie *has* done is stuck some solid, progressive policies onto the Democratic policy platform.
If you’re worried about HRC not following through on that platform, vote for progressives downballot, and let your representatives hold her to account.
Meanwhile, the Republican platform talks about a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. Bathroom bills everywhere are the order of their day. I genuinely cannot conceive of why *any* LGBTQIA+ individual would support that kind of platform (except Milo Y, but he’s just shitheel troll scum)
I don’t want Hillary to win, I don’t want Trump to win either. I think they are both indicative of larger problems in American politics. I also view elections as iterative, and I think choosing to opt out of them when presented with two awful candidates is best.
PS, I do not like Trump and would never vote for a bigot such as him, similarly to how I won’t vote for a warmongering interventionist center-right fake progressive like Hillary, but he opposes both the NC bathroom transgender restroom bill (the only Republican primary candidate to hold that position) and while he wants Obergefell overturned, he doesn’t support a federal amendment banning gay marriage either. And Hillary has spent a lot of time advancing her political positions by demonizing gays and supporting legislation that was destructive to them, and I’m unwilling to gloss over that because she realized 3 months before an imminent SCOTUS ruling legalizing it that it was politically expedient to support it.
Corrected for formatting:
— Because the party elders tried very hard to convince you that all of your fellow Republicans were as upstanding as you were —
I’m not surprised by this characterization, given that it’s such a typically and condescendingly liberal thing to do, but the facts tell a very different story. Party elders didn’t believe this about the GOP base either. Everyone was shocked about the size of Trump’s support, especially after those party elders kept condemning him and assuming that he would go away. It is terrible to be a rational Republican right now because Trump is embarrassing, but if there is any silver lining to come out of this debacle, it should be that people like you will no longer be able to claim that the GOP is monolithic and that the Koch brothers are pulling the strings. Trump’s fund-raising has been incredibly anemic precisely because Republican donors hate him as much as the party leadership does. The only group that actually likes Trump and his demagogic rhetoric are the ~47% of registered Republicans who voted for him.
— I’d like you to ponder the fact that a lot of your hatred of Hillary Clinton may come from the same people who misled you about your fellow voters. —
The Vince Foster stuff and similar allegations are ridiculous propaganda, I agree, yet anyone who pretends that Hillary Clinton is just the innocent victim of a smear campaign is spouting even more vacuous propaganda of their own. Hillary Clinton lives on the edge of the law. She has been at the heart of scandal after scandal because she constantly pushes the boundaries of what she can get away with in order to advance her ambitions. You can keep making excuses for her and pretend that every single one of her many scandals has been blown out of proportion, but at some point the responsible thing to do is stop and admit that someone with a past this checkered doesn’t have clean hands.
— A lot of people who don’t share your skin tone will suffer if Trump gets elected, and they’ll suffer in ways that a Hillary election will not cause. —
Your argument conveniently ignores Hillary’s history of not supporting anything until it’s politically expedient. She opposed gay marriage and she responded to BLM with “all lives matter.” For that matter, President Obama has presided over the conditions you’re decrying. When the Democrats controlled the presidency, Senate, and House, did they do anything about LGBT protections? North Carolina continuously gets battered for HB2 when HB2 specified the exact same protected classes as the federal government. Donald Trump is a pretty blatant racist in ways that other politicians are not, yet the idea that Hillary Clinton will risk significant political capital to stand firm on issues stands completely at odds with her history.
— Well, because Putin didn’t want McCain elected as badly as he wants Trump in office. —
This is such an annoying distraction. First, there is no actual proof yet that the Russians were behind the dump to Wikileaks. That was a rumor put forward by someone who supposedly spoke on background with someone who works at the FBI. But even assuming it is true, that doesn’t change the fact that this happened. The Democratic National Committee intentionally sabotaged Bernie Sanders and crowned Hillary Clinton. If only the Republican National Committee had been so undemocratic, right? And by the way, we’re all still waiting for the part where you “unload on her” instead of making incredibly weak excuses for her record and behavior. You’re right that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not “the same,” I’m just not sure one is actually better than the other. They’re reprehensible in different ways, and the people who voted for each in their respective primaries should feel ashamed.
Thank you for this. It was very timely as I just ranted on my facebook page for folks to stop being so certain of things. We all need our perspectives shaken and stirred.
Why shouldn’t the DNC have been biased toward HRC in the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination? Bernie Sanders may caucus with the Dems in the Senate, but he was never a member of the party until he threw his hat into the ring to run for POTUS. Hillary Clinton has been a force for the Democratic party for decades. She has raised millions of dollars to help finance the campaigns of those running for office throughout the entire country. While Bernie was raising those millions $27 at a time, I never saw anything about him supporting those running for Congress, state offices, local elections, or any other causes. I feel like Sanders is a good guy, but he is not the most qualified candidate by any stretch of the imagination. That would be the next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton. I’m with her.
Because he was accepted as a Democratic nominee by the party in the start of the primary season when they thought they could capitalize off of him, and because by doing so they were bound legally by neutrality agreements which they broke the law by violating, and because tampering despite those neutrality agreements is a form of disenfranchisement, especially in conjunction with the ways in which they moved to limit exposure to primary candidates, most prominently by intentionally scheduling debates during times of lowest possible viewership.
“The black vote is the only thing holding Trump back right now”?
What planet are you from? Somewhere where black voters would actually vote for him? Or somewhere where pissing off black voters would be a minus, rather than a definite plus, for his campaign?
Bernie didn’t “fail to connect” with black voters. He had Killer Mike as his (excellent) spokesman and did his due diligence. Black voters made a bad choice, choosing the traditional Dems with their government cheese instead of a man who got hosed and arrested marching for civil rights. Short-sighted thinking and I’m not gonna lie, it lowered my respect for them.
Bernie didn’t “fail to connect” with black voters. He had Killer Mike as his (excellent) spokesman and did his due diligence.
So basically, your idiot’s logic is that his “not getting voters to vote for him” is somehow not “a failure to connect.” And rather than asking “What does appeal to black voters?” you then decided to think less of black people.
I can’t IMMAAAAAGINE why black voters would be turned off by Bernie with supporters like you.
(And if it was up to white voters alone, Trump would win in a landslide. It’s black voters that’ll make the difference, if they can.)
My point is that putting the blame for a huge swath of voters voting against their own interests on the candidate, instead of the voters, is simply an arbitrary choice to give you something to write about.
Thanks for linking to the articles where apparently you get your opinions wholesale. One of them contains this journalistic gem: “Bottom line, Hillary Clinton has street cred on the racial issue that Bernie Sanders lacks”. The other says “He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa”, without pausing to consider – just as you do not – that his refusal to pander was a mark of principle, not “fucking up” as you eloquently put it.
Bernie was the one to give up his mic to the BLM girl, HRC was the one who told her to shut up and wait. I guarantee that viral video had more hits than whatever bullshit you and the other opinion-slingers are talking about.
In the end, the black electorate “fucked up” by voting against their interests. Comparing Sanders’ past record and his future intentions vs. Clinton’s, this is true almost almost on an objective level. Your false charge of racism does not answer that charge, nor provide a meaningful alternative explanation.
Again: Trump’s election does not “hinge” on black voters any more than it does on the first 40 million people in the phone book. There is NO chance of them voting for trump. But kudos to you if your nonsense gets you more clicks.
What exactly is your metier? You trawl the internet for opinion pieces, then cobble them together into something putatively your own? Seems to me your opinion is as good as the next asshole; only hope he can express himself more clearly.
Oh good, another Hillary supporter talking down to me.
Hillary is scum.
No thank you.
Stein 2016!
Insanely great writing and assessment. Shared to my Facebook page. I was reading along with that feeling of dreading when you got to me because I knew truths might be thrown at me that I might not like. I imagined myself in these other categories and how I might feel being served humble pie. I was ready. Because what you said thus far was 100% on the nose. But then – and this is not a criticism but actually a request – you never got to me. Me, the Liberal Bernie Supporter Who Always Liked Hillary but Wanted to See if a Revolution Was Possible but is Now Happy to Vote for Hillary. I don’t see her through rose-colored glasses, to my knowledge. I see the errors. But what I don’t see is this demon in league with Satan that some people paint her as (and wow! I was just spell checked for not capitalizing “Satan?” ). I see a woman who has spent her life helping others. I see someone who is tough, who fights, who takes all the shit people can throw at her and never buckles or sinks to their level. I see a person who is in this for all the right reasons – namely, to help people. Am I wrong?
I would argue that Bernie’s “fuck up” had nothing to do with appealing to African American voters. In fact, unless I missed something during this past year and change that I’ve been following him, he said nothing wrong at all, except for that one “ghetto” reference at a debate.
I say this as someone who is not enthusiastic but WILL vote for Hillary. Bernie’s main problem is that he didn’t take off his gloves. Hillary used kid gloves? So did Bernie. He has too much class to be a presidential candidate, and I say that wishing he would have won and unloaded on Trump. But he is too classy of a guy to sling mud the way Hillary was. So many times during the debates he probably could have sent her reeling, and he didn’t because he has too much class.
Which is why the system is broken. Politics should be about the policies, not about the mudslinging. If you are a die hard progressive, DON’T give up just because the choices are between two relatively unlikeables (for different reasons. Clinton IS a puppet of the Corporate Interests, Trump IS the Corporate Interest, and the former can actually change.)
Vote for progressives in the Senate and in the House. You want to continue this revolution that Bernie started? Good. So do I. Vote. Go to the polls. Vote progressive democrat up and down the ballots. Hold the next POTUS responsible. Make sure that minorities and women are protected, that campaign finance and wall street reform are passed. Get money out of politics period. Do these things, and then maybe we can actually have an election one day in which the Democrat and Republican are actually legitimately debating the issues, and not hurling insults.
In fact, unless I missed something during this past year and change that I’ve been following him, he said nothing wrong at all, except for that one “ghetto” reference at a debate.
Well, for one thing, you missed reading the two links that pointed out exactly what Bernie did do wrong, so one questions your capability of seeing what happened when there’s links to be read that you didn’t.
Those crappy articles you link to (written by people little more qualified than you to make what are basically opinions) don’t offer a substantive alternative, they just offer Monday-morning quarterbacking and not very sophisticated at that. All of us watched the same speeches and internet sound bytes. This commenter’s explanation of what happened is, a priori, as good as either columnist or you – and frankly a more cogent and elegant explanation than all three.
You like to post links? And to scold people who are too busy to click them? How about posting a link to where you actually saw any of this coming before it happened? You know, to give you, like, credibility as to some kind of expertise?
“You like to post links? And to scold people who are too busy to click them? How about posting a link to where you actually saw any of this coming before it happened? You know, to give you, like, credibility as to some kind of expertise?”
Sure.
Bernie Sanders – my hope for the 2016 flagbearer – either will [address the black vote] well, or he’ll become an also-ran. He’s more likely to be an also-ran at this point thanks to Hillary’s momentum, so my hope is that he becomes so adroit at addressing [blacl] issues that it becomes such a strength of his that it winds up being a factor Hillary doesn’t have.
Written in July 2015.
So yeah. Fuck your credentials, buddy. I got mine. You?
Wow. Do you really think people want to read 9 paragraphs of verbal contortions about expressing an opinion as a white guy? Just get it out already.
Fine. You’ve established that you’ve spent a long time following this race.
So back up your assertion: did HRC really do a better job addressing black voter’s concerns? In any verifiable way, on any specific issue?
She did, however, have “superpredators” and the Clinton welfare reforms/mandatory minimums of the early 90’s on her resume. Which were often enough pointed out.
I never witnessed her skillful handling vs Bernie’s mishandling of racial issues that would make your point true.
Back up your statement without sidetracking or insulting, and I’ll concede.
And, silence. You had so much ink to spill, until asked to actually back up your assertion with fact.
Your writing and your thinking suffer from the same painful contortion — the overcompensatory stance that minorities can do no wrong but that which the white man forced them to do.
Really just paternalism in the latest garb. Too bad your public mouthpiece doesn’t inspire you with the creativity, honesty or courage to go beyond it to the necessary truth.
I’m sure African-American voters will line up to thank you for defending their right to make self-harming choices, while HRC continues to build private prisons stuffed full of black and brown people.
One of us is focused on solutions and the future; the other is focused on appearing palatable to absolutely everyone. Which one of them writes a column?
Two words: Never Hillary
Why?
1. If the dems were truly serious about winning, they should have followed the polls and supported Sanders who has always had the best chance of beating Trump.
2. Why be afraid of Trump? Hillary has already done what folks are afraid Trump will do.
If the dems were truly serious about winning, they should have followed the polls and supported Sanders who has always had the best chance of beating Trump.
If you were truly serious about thinking anything through, you’d have listened to my point about Bernie Sanders having baggage and reading the fucking article I linked to.
Alas, you’ve proven you didn’t.
Baggage/No baggage: Your opinion
Nothing to do with the consistent polling showing Sanders winning.
Not when you’re ignoring the fact, WHICH I POINTED OUT, that those polls are only showing Sanders doing as well because he hasn’t endured the level of attack ads that Hillary has.
“Oh, hey! This prizefighter is heavily favored to win this competition!”
“Has he been in a ring with anyone who’s thrown a serious punch at him?”
“No, but… HE’S CONSISTENTLY WINNNIIIING!”
I agree with most of the article. It shows some rational thought and attempts to understand and explain our “situation”. I have to say though, the several curse words make it sound crude and un-intelligent. Is that a millennial thing? I’m in no way a prude, but I dislike that for the reasons I have stated. Yes, no one cares what I think, but I refrain from reading that stuff. IF such language ever becomes mainstream our society has slipped another notch downward.
I’m forty-fucking-seven years old, so I’d be pleasantly surprised at the new concepts involved with math it would take to be a millennial.
Another article that should have come with knee pads considering it tells us to bow down not rise up.