For a guy who’s been living in the Ecuadorean Embassy to escape rape charges in another country, as well as one who has openly opposed HRC now and in the past, and especially one who has parted from his wikileaks-as-objective-truth to being okay with releasing information to harm his personal foes, his credibility in this, for me, has shrunk to near-zero. And while I’m okay with comparing trump to a venereal disease because I think he’s invited that level of discourse on himself, I’m not okay with doing the same for HRC.
And yes, I’m skipping over the numerous conspiracy theories about the charges against him being devised to discredit him
I happened to see at least one of the times he was mentioned, and then I audibly gasped at the way he was lifted, almost bodily, by the armpits, to stand him up for the brief applause line. The whole episode struck me as crass, and I can only imagine that it did nothing but harm to Dole’s reputation.
That strikes me as cherry-picking. Any powerful institution ostensibly run in transparent ways for the people but commited instead to secrecy (because it’s instead run for the sake of moneyed elites) is a target of WikiLeaks, not just HRC, Inc. And Assange is not living there to “escape rape charges”; he’s living there because he knows that if he leaves, he’ll likely be extradicted to the U.S., where he’d face charges drummed up for the express purpose of stopping him from doing the work he’s doing.
“conspiracy theories.”
Le sigh.
Then all I can surmise is that you’re okay with more of the same, and that maybe you don’t know enough about what that same has been. As for me, I’d say that an even more appropriate comparison that she’s invited for herself is cancer. As someone recently said, better than I could:
If we do not have serious social change it is likely the Trumps of the world will just keep coming right out of the social conditions the Clintons of the world have created.
I agree with that sentiment and I don’t have a problem with non-governmental institutions existing to hold governmental institutions in check by virtue of information because I expect that NGO to operate as objectively as possible. Do I want information on fraud, waste or abuse under a Democratic presidential administration JUST AS MUCH as I want it under a GOP administration? Yes, absolutely.
I don’t require a shining diamond of objectivity to believe the information such people produce, but it certainly does help me believe that they’re not manipulating the information themselves prior to release for extra punching power, or holding specific information up to a certain point only because the timing of release will do more damage. [And FWIW, a whole forum post could be dedicated to sussing out the complexities of Wikileaks information releases–the inflection points re: Democracy are fascinating].
And to take a page from “ableist” critiques, using venereal diseases as a factor in comparing people is shitty and I don’t personally care for it. Is it okay for us to say the decision is either trump as AIDs or HRC as Herpes? To my way of thinking, it is not. I shouldn’t be “okay” with trump’s comparison to such things, but because he’s spewed so much horrible shit about everyone else, I don’t mind it quite so much–but it’s still not right. At least, it’s intellectually lazy, and at worst, it’s insulting and degrading.
As for knowing about “the same” [politically], I’ve been around long enough to witness the Iran-Contra hearings and I started voting back with Clinton the first. I’m not a woman and I’m only a tiny genetic bit Senegalese, so the social issues won’t impact me nearly as much as others.
I’m a veteran and a Flori-duh-ian, and I had to watch the Debacle of the Hanging Chad devolve into GWB’s leading American into wars that destabilized the world and cost untold lives, American and otherwise. MY friends and brothers in arms are now the ones having to live in the hinterlands because their PTSD or PTSD-related issues are so bad they can’t cope with city-living, or they’re too fucked up to work and they’re constantly afraid that their benefits will be denied and they’ll be out of house and home. All of which is to say I’m not unaware of the political implications in this election.
That the lesser of two evils argument or the spoiler are forms of social control that have led us to exactly the choices we now have.
Then we should have advocated for a different voting system prior to the last election, or the one before that, or the one before that. Just because the progressive wing of the Dems didn’t win this particular contest doesn’t mean that all is for naught.
You can take a dim view of using diseases as metaphors if you like, but it has nothing to do with ableism. Neither gonorrhea nor syphilis is a disability, but even if they were I think people who have those diseases would agree that they are pretty awful. If I said that I want Donald Trump to win as much as I want a broken leg, I wouldn’t be saying something bad about people whose legs are broken, nor would I be diminishing them as people. None of us wants to have gonorrhea or a broken leg.
At worst it’s making light of serious issues. Like if I said that I’d rather have gonorrhea than watch Sex in the City and someone in the room who was suffering with gonorrhea then they might get pretty pissed at me. But I don’t think it’s going overboard at all to compare a Trump Presidency to an serious injury or disease. People are going to die if he gets elected.
Notwithstanding my original mistake, I think that’s the result I eventually stood on. And while I completely, utterly agree with your final thought (that trump as POTUS would mean innocent people dying), for my own purposes I’ll stick with calling him a bigoted, bloviating douchebag demagogue or some variation thereof. (Yes, yes, #notalldouchebagdemagogues and all that).
So which neoliberal policies did she support as a senator despite promises made to the contrary while on the campaign trail?
You don’t like HRC, I’m not crazy about her, but there is a large number of people who think she is the bees’ knees, and part of the reason for that is she has a really good record of sticking to commitments. Perhaps this is one reason she doesn’t like to make the kind of black-and-white promises that Sanders does.
I’d say the Iraq war was the prime one. And she supported the bank bail out, yeah? Her general leaning is towards more privatization rather than less.
Honestly, Clinton is center-right. She’s a adopted a more progressive platform, but we’ll see how much of that actually sticks come 2017. I suspect that if she wins, she’ll need continuous progressive pressure not to do the “pragmatic” thing of compromising with the money changers.
Yes, but in neither case was she going back on a promise. I’m not sure what you can read into the Iraq vote, both my senators voted against it and I would say she is to the right of one of them and to the left of the other.
I agree that she’ll need continuous pressure from the left on nearly everything. One of the real mistakes we made with Obama was not doing that during the first couple of years.
I’m not sure being a neo-liberal has anything to do with going back on promises though, but is a belief in the market’s ability to deal with our problems as a society. I don’t believe that concept as it’s not help people who are most vulnerable. People don’t like her political record was my point, it’s not about some concept of feelings.
No, but everyone is very quick to say that she won’t try to do things she is explicitly saying she will do, and vice versa. This is evidently based on some image of her as being untrustworthy, and we really don’t have strong evidence of that. We do have some sense that she is committing to some positions that aren’t entirely compatible with decisions she’s made at other times in her career, but some of these have been at times where she was engaged in political give-and-take, or working for other people, so even then the dissonance might be illusory.
The young Clinton was a fundamentally decent person dedicated to helping people with fewer advantages than she had, and I don’t think that has changed, it has just been buried under all the messy crap that comes with being a legislator or being in someone else’s cabinet. She has a chance to be herself as president, and with her acceptance speech and the rhetoric therein she is off to an excellent start.
I found a great editorial this morning that really nails why Clinton rubs me the wrong way (that is, why I kind of dislike her, rather than why I think she should be imprisoned for war crimes - we’ve already discussed that my standards aren’t going to fly):
So Rick Salutin is a long time columnist for the Toronto Star and is very much a cranky old man. Some of the column is very much just crankiness:
But what really struck a chord with me was this:
Hubby Bill opened a possible alternate route Tuesday, calling her a “change-maker.” Van Jones on CNN was agog. She’s “one of these workaholic dogooder women,” he gasped. “I know these people!” Will she stress that instead? Doubtful. Why?
…
Those she identifies with aren’t the needy, who get her pity and sympathy. It’s other dogooders with answers, like rich technocrats in Silicon Valley — such as Bill Gates — who she allies with, even when they do immense harm, as Gates has by messing with education.
And there it is. She’s part of an older generation who thinks that the way you help poor people is by having a fundraiser with rich people.
She comes across as very paternalistic. I don’t like it.
But as much as I don’t like it, it also really humanizes her for me and makes me like her more. I think, when she has those fundraisers and talks to those rich people about what we need to do to help the poor people, that she does that because she genuinely cares.
She paraphrased an apocryphal quotation, “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” A lot of harm has been done by that idea, by dogooders. But a lot more harm has been done by “Fuck you, I got mine”. So Clinton vs. Trump is a pretty clear choice.
