Pretty much, although the “freedom of choice” stuff is now deployed only when opposing anti-discrimination laws or the like. They’re your typical screw-the-poor/bash-the-queers conservative party these days.
Probably not coincidentally, the brother of Bob Menzies (founder of the Oz Libs) was named Frank Gladstone Menzies.
In the 1990’s the Canadian Liberal party took advantage of a political crisis to funnel about $100M into friendly advertising companies with little accountability. The scandal eventually came to light and go them in big trouble. At the time I was spending time with an Austrian man who had lived in Norway most of his life and he was just appalled by Canadian politics. He said that if a political party had done something like that in Norway they’d just have to pack up shop - no one would ever vote for them again.
Clinton was a downright awful candidate. In the primaries people were casting votes for someone who was actively under investigation by the federal police in connection with her previous tenure as a government secretary. That ought to have been absolutely disqualifying, and in an country that isn’t dredging the barrel to find people who will run for government, it would have been. Both US political parties are thoroughly terrible and most of their candidates are abysmal. Same with Canada.
And there’s the issue. It’s not racist Uncle Bill, it’s that people who don’t like the racism are the ones who end up pushed out and silenced.
This whole conversation has gotten me thinking about a racist relative in my life, and whether I ought to be saying “can the racist stuff or you aren’t going to see my kids anymore.” I think everyone has been taking a wait for them to die approach.
I’d agree. And political classifications like liberal, conservative, libertarian, authoritarian cover a rather wide range of views, and it is pretty rare to find someone who adheres to all the supposed values.
Tangent: Probably ten years ago, while visiting relatives in Jacksonville, FL, I went out for a beer, alone. Sports bar place with pool tables and pub fare food, primarily white folks w/a smattering of PoC, and I set up on the perimeter w/beer to watch people play pool.
Commotion starts. White dude wearing black shirt with white text on front, “I’m not a racist - I hate everyone!!” is getting flack from a group accusing him of…(sigh)…being a racist. It was a slow enough burn that I was able to finish my beer and tequila back just as the best of the drunken fighting/scuffling began. And let me say proudly (Flo-ri-duh! Flo-ri-duh!) that despite the proliferation of pool cues in the bar, everyone just punched on each other for a short bit until the whole thing diffused into a general apathy. I think the spectators were just as confused as the combatants.
this is something the right masters much better, they see political power as an important objective in itself and not only a mean to accomplish other goals.
Not when the person being investigated is cleared of any wrongdoing multiple times, and the “investigation” is widely seen as a ridiculous attempt by a partisan group to smear her with things she didn’t actually do.
I wouldn’t say that they are dredging the barrel for people willing to run for government, they’re dredging the barrel for people willing and able to tow the lines. People without money and resources are effectively locked out. There is no clear path for a person without means to enter the political system, hence: they are without means.
You mean drown in a bathtub, and yes, I like that idea. What I can’t get on board with is hand waving away social injustice.
I wasn’t aware of a previous investigation before the one that concluded in July. “Things she didn’t do” is a little bit of a weird phrase. She did violate the rules set out by government IT that are there to keep information safe (even though, in the end, we know the State Department was hacked and we don’t know her server was), she did, according to the interview notes, have some incorrect ideas about classification of documents when she ought to have known better. None of this was worth of prosecution, but she did those things (and maybe blamed this on a serious concussion?). (To be clear on two points: 1) Trump’s list of horrible things is transparently, objectively much worse; and 2) the “October Surprise” re-open of the investigation was either intentional political interference or firing-worthy incompetence and either way Comey should have been out on Nov 9).
But I think that’s all beside the point. If you select a candidate who is currently under investigation by the federal police then you are stating plainly that either: 1) the federal government is hopelessly corrupt and that the people need to choose you to do things like clean house in the federal police; or 2) you are at a complete loss for viable candidates.
If we lived in sensible countries were corruption was not tolerated then running a candidate who was under investigation would be idiotic and candidates who had done nothing wrong would step aside and say, “Well, obviously I can’t run for anything until this is cleared up.” While they vary substantially in truth-value, there is a real similarity between “The FBI investigation is partisan” and Trump’s “The election is rigged.” Both are people running for office by attacking the institutions that they will be in charge of upholding. If the FBI is doing what you think they were doing in the spring (and I what I think they may well have been doing in October) then the FBI needs to be dismantled and a new organization created from scratch in its place (I think the FBI does need to be dismantled and replaced with an accountable organization, but Clinton wasn’t running on that).
And you’ll notice he’s so very excited about “draining the swamp” of lobbyists and such that he’s rushed to release his taxes to the public to show that his financial history is “above board”, he’s removed all of his family members from his cabinet and made clear that they do not ask or receive business information/advice from him, and he’s placed all of the trump corporate holdings into one big IPO and sold public shares in it to prevent the absolutely stunning number of conflicts of interest between his holdings and government policy/operations/business.
Oh, wait, my fault, he’s never going to do those things (among many many others).
Or himself, natch:
“…candidate of any value…”
Or you select them because you know that they didn’t do anything worth prosecuting, that the things they did violated none of the laws that they’re being accused of violating, and that the person in question has boatloads more experience for the job of President than anyone else vying for the position. That’s the third possibility.
In the end, it turns out that a vague “they could be traitorous! we just don’t know!” suspicion is more powerful to voters than being cleared of any misconduct by a federal court, and that vague uncertainty “fed the narrative” of her untrustworthiness extremely well. And, just as importantly, being cleared of any charges fed that narrative even more: “See? Not only is she crooked, but she’s so well connected that she can get federal charges dropped! What else is she capable of??”
Honestly this possibility tells me the system is broken. A politician running for office shouldn’t be running with even an appearance of wrongdoing.
I get the bind that the Democrats are in in this respect. The Republicans will say anything about anybody (though they especially had it in for Hillary Clinton). Basically there is no respect for anything in US politics and the Republicans will lie, cheat and steal their way to victory. If the Democrats didn’t run anyone who had an appearance of wrongdoing, Republicans would just make something up about the next person and the next and the next.
Sometimes I just don’t think English-speaking people are fit to govern themselves.
But none of it changes my opinion that Clinton was a bad candidate. She was under investigation for things she actually did. “Won’t result in arrest” is a nauseatingly low bar. Going rogue is not something you do in government IT, and to do it because just because you want to use your Blackberry drips entitlement. Her favourability ratings with the general public were terrible, rivaled only by the top contenders for the Republican nomination. In the news for a scandal (whether much will come of it or not) and broadly disliked are two awfully strange things to seek in a presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton may well have been, as many people say, the most qualified person to ever run for president (and to be the first woman on a major party ticket she basically had to be the most qualified person ever) but in a party with tens of millions of registered members it is beyond absurd that they didn’t have a bench of 20 A+ candidates available in the event that their best A+ candidate had problems.
I think this is where her team (and the DNC) hugely underestimated her opponent. They saw her use of a private email server – something that even previous Republican presidents had done – as an incredibly minor blip on her record compared to an actual white supremacist with upcoming rape and fraud trials with a 20-year record of denying housing to black people, working with the mob, screwing over his workers, and running his companies into the ground repeatedly, and thought “well, this will be easy”, and didn’t really try all that hard. And definitely never moved past that minor blip. And as you say, that made her look entitled.
I’ll just say that while I think “currently being investigated by federal police in relation to a felony” ought to make people think twice about choosing someone as a nominee, “currently being sued for violently raping a 13-year-old girl while in the company of a verifiable associate known to be a sex slaver and with an eye witness” ought to make people think twice about voting for someone as president. Except in the second instance “think twice” means “feel sick with themselves.”
That sounds like a perfect description of the “triangulation” approach of the Clintonian Dems to me.
Yeah, but let’s face it, they’d like to strangle it, because fuck the common good is their motto. They care nothing about social injustice, unless it happens to them or they perceive it happening to them, through unfair things like having to pay taxes that might help someone else.
Some time back a friend included a quote apparently from Grover Norquist about the whole "shrinking government until it fit into a bathtub and then drowning it. I merely pointed out that this Norquist person was already small enough to fit into a bathtub. It seems an appropriate proposal.
