It’s her hair
We’ve been hearing a lot about how Hillary Clinton should just sit down, just shut up, just go away. That thought has an oddly familiar ring to it, somehow…
There’s still a brutal fight, 10 months after Election Day 2016, for control of the narrative of what happened. On one side, you have Hillary and her supporters pointing to the media’s overt hostility, Russian interference, 25 years of Republican smears, James Comey’s ill-timed letter to Congress, and, last but not least, Bernie’s scorched earth war on the Democratic Party. There is a mountain of irrefutable evidence that these things happened and, combined, they cost Hillary just the tiny amount of votes needed to put Trump in office.
On the other side, you have Bernie’s followers (and a good deal of the press) that look at that mountain of evidence and, like climate change deniers, howl that it’s all a lie.
Even though you had on the one hand an intelligent, informed, experienced, educated, responsible adult with a mix of liberal views and corporate loyalties, and on the other hand a stupid, ignorant, sadistic child who had no views but only self-serving urges. There’s something badly wrong with a population that even comes close to choosing the second.
Biut still journalists are lining up to tell her to shut up.
CAN HILLARY CLINTON PLEASE GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT? – Vanity Fair
Cluelessness, thy name is Hillary Clinton – New York Post
Democrats are not looking forward to Hillary Clinton’s upcoming book tour– AOL news
Bernie Sanders Tells Clinton to ‘Move Forward’ on ‘Colbert’ – RollingStone
That last one is particularly rich as Bernie says, with a straight face, “[Clinton] ran against the most unpopular candidate in the history of this country, and she lost,” Senator Sanders said. “But our job is not to go backwards.”
This is coming from the man who lost to Hillary by 3-4 million votes in the primary. What does that say about his ability to win elections? (Hint: Everything. None of it good) Curiously, when Bernie put out his post-primary book that he spent time writing instead of campaigning to keep Trump out of office, there was very little discussion about whether or not the losing primary candidate should fade away into the background. In fact, the cable news shows still regularly have him on to lambaste the Democratic Party. Truly, he is the picture of good will and unification.
Well that’s different. Because he’s…good, and she’s…annoying.
Right?
But the double standard is, well, standard when it comes to Hillary. Bernie has been bashing Hillary and the Democratic Party for the past two years and that is acceptable. Hillary takes a mild, and verifiably true, swipe at Bernie and, somehow, she’s the most divisive figure in modern political history.
…
After the election, a study showed that the press went insane with reporting on the nothingburger of Hillary’s emails. They put very little effort into the Trump-Russia scandal, his numerous crimes, conflicts of interest and boorish behavior but every tiny detail of those emails was covered exhaustively. In light of the how huge the Russia story is, how corrupt and dangerous Trump is, and how little the email story amounted to, it is inarguable that we witnessed the worst journalistic malpractice in American history.
If you were Chris Cillizza and wrote 50 different articles attacking Hillary over smoke and mirrors, you’d favor the narrative that Hillary lost the election all on her own, too.
But she didn’t lose all on her own. She didn’t even really lose. So why, exactly, should she sit down and shut up? Her vision was supported by the majority of Democratic voters. The primaries, despite the phony horse race generated by the press and Bernie’s supporters, wasn’t even close.
…
The answer, of course, is “I hate her so she should shut up” which is to say there is no real answer at all.
Well, there is, but it’s not very respectable.
I’d be really happy if all those Republican candidates who lost against Trump would come forward to vociferously denounce what he’s doing. Isn’t it in the interest of public service, of country above party, to speak up and speak out about abuses of power? I find it astounding how the people he ridiculed as candidates lined up at his trough to continue eating his swill.
Is Bernie fighting harder against Clinton against Trump’s corruption and destruction? Clinton, having not come into the presidency, is a target of lower value at this point. Trump is a much greater threat to the American Way of Life than Clinton is or ever will be.Hell, at this point The American Way of Life is the greatest threat to The American Way of Life.
Wouldn’t it be nice if corporations which already follow environmental regulations stood up and said gutting them is a bad idea? If rich people for whose tax cut things are being gutted would stand up and say, “No thanks, I like clean air and water and people having safe jobs with decent pay and decent health care.”Is this happening at all? Is anyone doing this?
But…but…pantsuits!
Here’s a link to an interesting Twitter thread comparing HRC and Mitt Romney: https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/907387115008348160
There’s something badly wrong with a population that even comes close to choosing the second.
IMO, this is the most overlooked point. It reminds me of a relatively common pattern in sports matches: one team is leading the other team, often by many points, all game long. Then, in the final stretch, the score draws close. And as the clock ticks to zero, a last-second shot hits to give the trailing team the victory. Without fail, people walk away from such games analyzing the “comeback”. How the first team – obviously the better team – choked in the final minutes. How the underdogs “stepped up”. The play that led to the last-second shot will be sliced/diced for days; every losing player is assessed in terms of “what could they have done differently on that play?” and “who messed up on that play?”. Many will seek other culprits: they’ll analyze to date the late-game penalties called against the leading team: “Did the refs steal the game and hand it to the inferior team?”
Overlooked is the fact that, when a truly superior team does play against a truly inferior team, this does not happen. In the NCAA playoffs, the first round pits the top 4 teams in the country against the 61st-64th best teams. In 2017, these games were won (by the best teams) by 22, 22, 38, and 39 points. In 2016, it was 36, 39, 16, and 32 points. 33,14, 41, and 29 the year before that, and so on. So too in politics: blowouts do happen. At no point during the 2016 race was there any evidence of a blowout underway:
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/2016/election/poll-tracker/
Clinton vs. Stein: that’s what a blowout looks like.
What annoys me most about these “how Clinton lost” commentaries is how little emphasis is put on the main reason Clinton lost: she lost because she was in a close race. She was in a close race because a huge percentage of our country’s citizens,10s and 10s of millions of people, wanted Donald Trump to be our president. Russian meddling, email scandals, fake news, etc; all get traction because they’re easy “if only” targets. They’re things that could have gone differently; that, with the right political savviness, perhaps could have been avoided or surmounted.
“If only #45 had guarded #24 a little more closely, he wouldn’t have been open to make that game winning shot” is much more tangible than “if only they’d had a better basketball team, they’d have had a +10% scoring differential and won the game by 20-30 points”.
It shifts away from the point that truly matters here: “If only a wide swath of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia didn’t run through our population, Clinton would’ve won by a landslide”.
Bingo.
She’s going to be speaking near-ish to me next month and I hope I can arrange to go.
She won by 3,000,000 votes. If the Crosscheck fraud had been prevented or reversed, and the voters fraudulently dumped off the rolls in those states could have voted, the sampling possible so far says she would have won by 7,000,000 to 10,000,000 more votes.
If we had a democracy, the bigotry would be much less powerful than it is.
I’m Australian, so I’ve only known about Bernie since the last set of Democratic primaries, and there may be much about him that is good that I may have failed to appreciate. To me he seems a terrible presidential candidate or leader of anything – egocentric, entitled, mean-spirited and more than a little racist and sexist.
The vibe (if I may) that I get from him is that he would be a terrible person to work with or for, who would be utterly unsuited to any role requiring careful research, consideration of advice, wisdom, good judgement, calm temperament, and the ability to compromise and negotiate.
Bernie and Trump were both well-known white men competing with a woman to replace a black man as the most powerful person in the US, and the world. I feel that both men have more in common than either would like to acknowledge, and the same could be said for many of their respective supporters.