Tag: HRC

Let’s cut the crap about why Hillary Clinton lost

Please read the whole thing, but here’s part of the nut:

So why didn’t she [win]? The answer is pretty simple: despite running a pretty good campaign, she got walloped by things that decidedly don’t come with the territory: Russian interference via the WikiLeaks drip; an indefensible letter released by the FBI director; and a press corps that treated the Comey letter like the OJ trial. She got slammed late in the game, and had no time to recover.

Yep.

Let’s cut the crap about why Hillary Clinton lost

The most depressing message from this election is not that Trump might win. He won’t. What’s truly frightening is that very few Republicans are peeling away from their 2012 voting patterns. The most abhorrent political figure to rise in from our political system, perhaps ever, will inspire a decline in internal Republican support of only about 3-4 percentage points. That tells a terrible story about the weakness of conscience in the face of group pressure. It is a reminder that “it can’t happen here” is a myth.

Chris Ladd, until recently “GOP Lifer” and now writing for Political Orphans

Clinton: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.
TRUMP: That makes me smart.
Lemkin: For some reason, I expect to see this exchange in continuous ad rotation right up until blood starts coming from my eyes and or my whatever.

Ms. Clinton is hardly blameless. She treated the public’s interest in sound record-keeping cavalierly. A small amount of classified material also moved across her private server. But it was not obviously marked as such, and there is still no evidence that national security was harmed. Ms. Clinton has also admitted that using the personal server was a mistake. The story has vastly exceeded the boundaries of the facts.

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post. There now, was that so very fucking hard to do? Can we now keep these nearly 70 words on a card that is at the ready in the little filofax that is our journalistic brain? I’m guessing no, but I’m an optimist.

Sarcasm

Trump today: Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) “the founder” of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?
Trump yesterday: No, I meant [Obama is] the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.

I just want one prominent Democrat to say that our problem isn’t “partisanship,” it’s Republicans. Or it’s conservatism. Blaming “partisanship” reinforces the apparently unkillable conventional-wisdom notion that the two parties are equally responsible for our political system’s failure because neither one will compromise.

Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog. Be for things. Be clear about what those things are. Explain why and how the GOP and only the GOP is standing in the way of that goal. Don’t be afraid to say so if a Democrat is in the way too. Repeat for 20 years. Then you can get somewhere.

You can support democracy in which the risk of Islamists gaining power and influence is present or you can support secular autocratic regimes that reduce the influence of Islamist groups through repressive means, but you can’t do both.

Adam Serwer, hitting the nail squarely on its head. This is why Obama’s administration is using words like “reviewing our assistance posture.” That’s meant very clearly as a warning to Mubarak in advance of any heavy-handed crackdowns.
By the same token, revolution is vastly more likely to end with a more Islamic regime in charge, destabilization of the Egypt/Israel axis, and a lot more complicated Middle East than it is to end with some magical democratic flowering and instant equality amongst all peoples of Egypt.
Status quo, on the other hand, means either living with a weakened Mubarak (and trying to fix that with some kind of real elections in 2011), accepting some type of military takeover (Pakistan light), or ending up with some other “strongman” style government that emerges in the aftermath.
I’d say neither option makes Obama or HRC sleep more easily. This is the essence of these big jobs and why they inevitably eat you up. Well, they eat you up unless you’re an idiot man-child like George W. Bush.