I don’t mean this as a dis on HRC, but… can I have Annie L shoot my portrait?
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I’m confused. Have you not been paying attention to her career in public service over nearly 50 years?
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Here’s what The Stranger just said:
Jesus H. Christ. FINALLY. Vote for Hillary because she’s not a crazy fascist racist rapist* sexist pile of orangutan shit threatening to destroy our democracy.
We suspect that’s not good enough for some of our readers. So we’re going to lay it out for you, Ken Bone.
First, here is a noncomprehensive list of things that Hillary Clinton supports that both Donald Trump and Gary Johnson oppose. (Don’t even talk to us about Jill Stein.) Here we go: Expanding Obamacare so you don’t fucking die for lack of health insurance; raising the federal minimum wage so you can afford to pay your rent after you move to Cle Elum; cutting taxes for the middle class so you can maybe afford to have a family someday; regulating Wall Street so those assholes don’t wreck the US economy again; passing gun control laws so maybe you don’t die in a hail of stupid bullets; using government regulation to combat climate change so that maybe you don’t die in a flood or mega-hurricane; using government funding to support women’s reproductive rights so that women don’t have to go through crazy and dangerous hassles in order to make decisions about what goes on in their own uteruses; spending tax dollars to support green energy so that maybe we all actually have a breathable future; enforcing net neutrality so that you can stream your porn quickly and efficiently; and repealing Citizens United so that maybe we can start getting big money out of our messed-up democratic process. (Don’t believe our list because we’re “the media”? Well, it’s not our list, asshole. We found it on Facebook, in one amazing and shareable chart, and—checkmate, motherfuckers—it’s all fucking true. We checked.**) TO REPEAT: Hillary Clinton supports all of the above. Donald Trump and Gary Johnson oppose all of the above. (**With one minor, non-excusing wrinkle related to Donald Trump’s position on Citizens United. Trump has never actually taken a firm position on repealing Citizens United—you’re a real brave guy, Donald!—but he has hired the president of Citizens United as his deputy campaign manager. So you do the math on that one.)
Second, let’s talk about character: Hillary Clinton is a liberal workaholic who lives in the fact-based universe and has a decades-long track record of getting shit done—shit that has had real, tangible benefits for working families, children, and disadvantaged communities. Gary Johnson is a gun-humping moron who believes we can solve the climate crisis by leaving planet Earth (after you, Gary), and Donald Trump is a lying, racist, women-hating sexual predator. He’s also an unstable narcissist; a proto-fascist who wants to ban Muslims; a xenophobe who called Mexicans rapists; a sleazy-ass creep who brags that being a “star” allows him to “do anything” to women without their consent, including “grab them by the pussy” (which, to be clear, is sexual assault); an insecure dictator-in-waiting who recently threatened to “jail” Clinton if he wins (which, to be clear, is how people like Stalin and Mussolini and Putin have rolled); and a man so obsessed with petty grudges that he attacked Rosie O’Donnell in A FUCKING PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE. Oh, and he has a fake tan and fake hair and short, stubby fingers.
Third, in case you forgot amid all the disgusting nonsense that’s become our American political discourse: Hillary Clinton would be the first woman to EVER become president of the United States. This country has been around for 240 goddamn years. It’s about time, people.
Honestly, we can’t really believe we’re having this nightmarish conversation. A totally unqualified reality television star/unhinged bigot/admitted sexual predator has somehow managed to take over one of America’s two major political parties and we don’t know how this happened. Wait a second. Ha! Ha! HA! We know exactly how Donald Trump took over the Republican Party. President Obama said it best in a speech last week: “[The GOP has] been feeding their base all kinds of crazy for years… If your only agenda is either negative—negative is a euphemism, crazy—based on lies, based on hoaxes, this is the nominee you get… Don’t act like this started with Donald Trump. He did take it to a whole new level. I got to give him credit. But he didn’t come out of nowhere.”
If you need a moment to breathe, take it now. If you need an even longer moment to climb atop your signaling soapbox and let everyone know you’re extra righteous by ranting about all the mistakes Clinton’s made over her decades of public service, take it now. Have at it. Get it out of your system. We’ll wait right here.
Are you done?
Do you feel better?
Do you feel superior?
Good. Great. You’re awesome. You’re perfect. You’ve never made a mistake, you’re always at least a decade ahead of the historical moment in which you’re living, politics is easy, and if you were running the world and/or the Democratic party everything would be super, and if you were the Democratic nominee you would be up by 50 points in the polls and victory would be assured. But you know what? Once you crawl back out of your own ass, you’ll find that politics is super hard, you aren’t running the world, and you’re not the Democratic nominee. Now do the right, rational, and politically mature thing and vote Hillary Fucking Clinton.
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Amazing how often this needs to be repeated. One of the greatest lies of this election is that “Hillary only seems qualified next to Trump.” Nuts to that.
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I just don’t get the whole “what have you done for us lately” thing, where the only nod to the woman’s decades of hard work in the public interest and advocacy for progressive causes is pulling out the one or two clinkers from her hundreds of votes as a senator. I would hate for any young activist today who worked their hearts out for Sanders (as HRC did for McGovern) to think that if they devote their lives to similar service, all they can expect when they finally get into a position to run for an important office is for people to sum up their lives by one or two mistakes they might have made.
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That Leibowitz portrait is gorgeous. Leibowitz is just unbelievably talented.
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(Removed because of of edit.)
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Some of those specialty magazines can deliver hard hitting journalism.
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Thanks for the heads up, will edit so as not to unintentionally give consent to the political inclinatipns of the subject. Praise was intended for the artist. I thought my intent was obvious, but just in case… (though I suspect you are just taking advantage of an easy opportunity to shill for your candidate 
).
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She may have cast hundreds of votes in the senate, but she failed on the issues that mattered most. When we needed Congress to take a stand against Bush’s devastating “war on terror,” she supported military intervention and the expansion of police powers.
To characterize these as “mistakes” is generous; they’re who she is now. She may have once been a progressive activist, but today she’s a centrist who supports military intervention and surveillance. She’s beholden to her party and to the donor class, and though she may tweak the tax code and protect Obamacare, she’s not going to reform the banking system or reign in the excesses of global capitalism. She won’t prevent the next disastrous war or financial crisis; she won’t uphold our civil liberties in the face of terrorism; and she definitely won’t diffuse the social tensions that are paving the way for another demagogue in 2020.
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I don’t know, there are so many to chose from. I’m leaning towards the ‘Trump-Assange-Putin conspiracy deflection’. Perhaps that’s just my progressive bias though.
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I haven’t seen anyone questioning her experience, except in the Bernie-style “does experience count as a positive when you have a proven record of bad decisions?” sense. Clinton is, without a doubt, one of the most experienced and embedded Washington insiders to ever run for the office.
I have seen plenty of folks questioning her judgement and honesty, on what seem to me to be valid grounds.
She is still a better option than the idiotic fascist, by a very large margin. But that is an extremely low bar.
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My candidate was Sanders, but I agree with your original post, Clinton is unbelievably talented. Also, making HRC look beautiful was not difficult for Leibowitz, Clinton was and is a beautiful woman, a fact agreed by people on both sides of the political spectrum back when her husband was in the news for his social predilections.
[quote=“Haystack, post:31, topic:87697”]
She may have cast hundreds of votes in the senate, but she failed on the issues that mattered most.[/quote]
No. A different vote from her wouldn’t have made a difference, so of all the things she’s been involved in it is one of the least important. It became a meaningful symbol of the difference between her and Sanders during the primary (and Sanders vote was important for him), but that primary is long over.
[quote=“Haystack, post:31, topic:87697”]
She’s beholden to her party [/quote]
Wait, I thought she was manipulating the party, the evil Clinton telling the DNC what to do. Which is it, is she beholden to them or are they beholden to her? If you’re right and she’s beholden to them, that’s OK with me, I’m a lifelong Democrat and I strongly support their platform this year.
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I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s because you’re not a woman about to vote for the first female president of the country.
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This is one bit I feel the need to quibble with you on. Clinton’s Senate votes don’t go away and become a nonissue just because Sanders is no longer in the race. The damage done to our democracy by those who jumped on the 911 bandwagon is going to take decades to undo. She is one of the many (yes it is a majority) that did the wrong damn thing. I’m still voting for her, but her mistake doesn’t get erased unless she does something actively to fix it.
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Dtop misrepresenting my words, it’s creepy.
Give it a rest already. It’s getting old seeing every topic tortuously turned into a partisan polemic. Do me a favor and don’t reply to my posts just to give yoyrself a platform. (And don’t even go there with objectifying Clinton, I do not, did not, have not, will not judge or speak to her physical appearance. I think it is completely irrelevant. My comment was praise for Leibovitz’s brilliant composition and skill. It’s YOU that made it weird). That being said, I forgive you, as I have been and will yet again be, in need of forgiveness from you and others here 
).
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I don’t disagree with this, but her one vote (in a strong supermajority) didn’t have the effect, the huge majority did, and many people who were not hawks voted Aye because they thought they were looking at compelling evidence of Iraqi aggression. The fact that the evidence was cooked up by Bush and Blair was pretty cleverly masked (especially by using Colin Powell the disgraceful way they did), and while it is easy to look back and say it was a bad vote, it was also a vote that people of integrity and good intention can have made. (That shouldn’t detract from Sanders’ principled vote on the question, of course.)
??I quoted your original post verbatim, you’re the one who went back and did a stealth-edit to make mine seem like a misquote.
It’s getting old seeing every topic tortuously turned into a partisan polemic.
What were you expecting in a thread on a political endorsement? Partisan politics is what this thread is about.
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I have more of a problem with the vote because congress wasn’t questioning the evidence enough. The sinking feeling started for me with them singing “God Bless America” on live TV. The majority then all fell in line to show they were “doing something” in response. I don’t doubt there was a disconnect between CIA and congress as well, but that’s not an excuse.
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Here was what I orginially said:
That Leibowitz portrait is gorgeous. She is just unbelievably talented.
Here is what your politicized response prompted me to change it to:
That Leibowitz portrait is gorgeous. Leibowitz is just unbelievably talented.
Certainly wasn’t expecting my statement of praise and admiration for an artist to be turned into meaningless political bullshit. It’s sort of like shoving a turd in someone’s mouth and then exclaiming ‘well you had your mouth open!’ Apparently I need to closely scrutinize my words and posts lest I leave a grammatical loophole for you to inject political statement.
Edit: If English is not your first language, then maybe. But if not, not buying it.
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Despite the notion of checks and balances, our system is based on the idea that one branch of government is not trying to outright scam the other branches. Even under Nixon and Reagan we’d never before had such an egregious abuse of this idea. I don’t know if we’re really set up for Congress to fact-check all executive statements in real-time.
(Comment to the other guy: this is a thread about a political endorsement. Getting all huffy when you apparently stray off topic and someone ties your post back to the topic is maybe a bit of an overreaction?)
