There were a lot of comments about her Fresh Air interview in yesterday’s Hillary mega-thread, so I listened to it, and I thought she did a good job. Terry Gross is not DC media, so when Hillary kept deflecting on gay marriage, Terry didn’t stop asking for a clarification. You can’t bitch about the weakness of the DC media and then bitch about non-DC media not accepting a fairly weak, non-specific deflection. And, yes, Terry Gross does occasionally ask tough questions on her show — she wasn’t just picking on poor Hillary, who needs to sharpen up her DOMA excuse-making.
That said, Hillary showed once again in that interview that, overall, she’s a good politician. My problem with the Clintons has always been Clintonworld. A key example of that is the absolute lameness of the “I’m ready for Hillary” slogan. It signals nothing but bland acceptance of the inevitable, like the need to have a medical procedure or to pay a bill you’ve been putting off. Inevitability campaigns are full of defensive, weak messaging. A weak, defensive top of the ticket isn’t going to excite the ever fickle Democratic voter to get the photo id, blood test, rectal probe and identity tattoo that they’ll need prevent the scourge of voter fraud in 2016.
I’m less concerned about all the bullshit that Republicans will throw at Hills because that would happen to any Democrat. Speaking of that, shouldn’t this guy be getting fitted for an orange jumpsuit rather than making Newsmax headlines?
I’m almost tempted to click because I’m curious if it’s a remake of either “Teen Wolf” or “I Know What You Did Last Summer”.
Morzer
It’s worth remembering that in the 2008 primary HRC actually won the “popular vote” by 300,000. People rubbishing her as a bad politician might like to reflect on that fact.
OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER:
No, I was not a Clinton fan. I’ve been an Obamabot from the get-go. Since I was a fetus, in fact.
JPL
My keyboard is blocked from clicking to newsmax feeds. It’s kinda like a parental block but depends on more self control. Hillary’s comments to Terry Gross did not bother me. It was not news.
debbie
@JPL:
Yeah, it’s kinda what journalism used to be.
Poopyman
Hillary is the Dems’ version of Mitt: thrills absolutely no one on their side while riling up the opposition.
I saw that D’Souza headline yesterday, and assumed it’d be some sophomoric version of what a wingnut imagines her life to be. Maybe more like a bucktoothed version of “16 Candles”.
Poopyman
I’d be curious to know what the results of the
poll were, but I’ll leave that to those with stronger constitutions.
Baud
A reasonable person can conclude that Hillary shouldn’t be the Democratic nominee. My problem is that the criticisms people have been making lately seem like the kind of thing one hears on right wing or Village media.
Morzer
@Poopyman:
I think HRC is going to thrill plenty of women at the prospect of finally electing a female president. That ain’t nothing.
Alex S.
Teen Hillary? Her Goldwater years?
Morzer
@Baud:
Sometimes it’s like getting a free rerun of the worst bits of the 1990s, without the GOP even lifting a finger.
Baud
@JPL:
My view as well. I was disappointed that Chris Hayes spent time on it on his show. His shtick is to be above all that.
Suffern ACE
@Alex S.: nah. They’ll probably just go with man-hating, bra-burning, hippy feminist radical who hates real women.
Alex S.
@Suffern ACE:
Now you made me click the Newsmax link and it’s even worse. It’s about her (fictional) meeting with Saul Alinsky and how it radicalized her…. (radical enough for Barry Goldwater)
Marc
@Morzer:
While they’re at it, they could reflect on the fact that nominations are won by delegates, and Hillary’s “popular vote” count included two states that didn’t have any, where her rivals weren’t on the ballot.
I have no desire to refight those 2008 primary battles, but you can’t pretend that Hillary’s “inevitable” campaign for the nomination–run by an incompetent grifter who didn’t know how the delegate system worked–was anything other than a shitshow.
Suffern ACE
@Poopyman: agree that she riles up the opposition. But riled up is their lifestyle choice.
Romney wasn’t thrilling enough to rile me up, though. Gingrich would have riled me up.
Gator90
@Morzer:
Might even thrill some men as well. I’m white but I thought electing an African-American president was really cool.
Iowa Old Lady
Monica Lewinsky once walked out of an interview Terry Gross was conducting. Terry Gross is excellent at what she does.
Baud
@Alex S.:
Hahaha. Losers.
Iowa Old Lady
@Morzer: HRC counted that “popular” vote victory by completing disenfranchising me and anyone else who lives in a caucus state. I want to see a woman president, but that pissed me off.
Rarely Posts
It’s a fair line of questioning, and there are better, more convincing ways of answering it.
I couldn’t agree more with Cole’s concerns about her messaging. If Clinton wants people to be excited about her candidacy, she needs to put forward a positive campaign beyond: “I’m inevitable.” Right not, I’m leaning O’Malley because, as governor of Maryland, he: (1) pushed hard to get gay marriage passed in the legislature and then at the ballot box, appearing in state-wide ads, resulting in gay marriage in Maryland; (2) pushed hard to abolish the death penalty and ended it in Maryland; (3) signed a bill allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses; (4) expanded early voting; (5) legalized medical marijuana use; and (6) generally balanced the budget without putting all the cuts on the poor.
Meanwhile, Clinton has spent a lot of her life fighting the right-wing, but most of that fighting has been for her own political power. She doesn’t have many legislative and policy achievements to her name. As Secretary of State, she showed passion for women’s rights and children’s rights (which are massively important), but it’s not clear that she accomplished much to further those goals beyond speaking about them.
So, if she wants people to be passionate about her candidacy, she needs to give us reasons to be passionate. Talking about gay marriage, she could have used her own conversion experience to try to sell others on making the same change. She could have talked about how important it was that we keep making forward steps. Instead, she managed to talk about an issue where liberals and Democrats are winning, where she’s now on the popular and morally correct side, and instead of conveying true passion about the issue, she sounded like she didn’t think it was fair to be asked about it.
I also have always been annoyed with the extent to which many of my friends in the LGBT community have always loved Clinton. Maybe I’m too young (I suspect I’d like the Clintons more if I had been an adult during the ’80s and thus really seen Reagan during the AIDS crisis). Still, although Clinton is OK on LGBT rights, I demand more of my politicians than OK. So much of the last 5-years of LGBT progress has been repealing anti-gay measures signed by Bill Clinton. I voted for Obama because I was confident that he would be savvy enough to make real progress, and he delivered on DADT, switching to supporting gay marriage, and not defending DOMA in court. I’m pretty happy with the results.
beltane
@Poopyman: That’s not completely true. Totebaggers and low-info Dems adore Hillary because they can trust her to never deviate from conventional wisdom of the Snooze Hour/NPR/NYT variety.
Suffern ACE
@Alex S.: ah. Did Bill Ayers happen to be her lover? Has Dinesh taken to writing erotica by any chance? If not, I’m not interested enough to click.
Morzer
@Marc:
Well, if we are going to give Obama credit for his people getting the delegate system right, I think we need to give Clinton credit for winning the popular vote. Some people on here are making Clinton out to be a bad politician, which seems unfair to me. Yes, she had some bad moments during the primary, but the Obama campaign screwed some stuff up as well. After Obama won, HRC worked hard for him, both during the presidential campaign and as part of his administration. I think she deserves more respect and goodwill for that than some people on here are giving her.
Davis X. Machina
There was, from 1980 to 2008, exactly one Democratic administration, in which anyone hired for a Democratic White House with any experience either worked in, or worked with.
We’ve already seen HRC’s first two terms.
MattF
The Newsmax ad is useful because it displays a graded list of current right-wing memes. I’m not saying that it shows what’s on their mind, for obvious reasons.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Baud: A few things to remember about US political “news” these days:
1) Reporting seems to mostly be about personal connections. Reporters are important if they can call upon Famous Politician X for a quick comment or to show up on a show on short notice. McCain is still “important” because reporters know him and don’t want to lose him as a source of content – not because he’s had any actual impact on national policy since McCain-Feingold. Covering actual changes in politics, like the rise of David Brat wasn’t that hard – BlueVirginia had a post about Cantor’s
vulernabilityvulnerability to him in January – but it takes actual work.2) If it’s inexpensive to cover and has video then it gets quick coverage. “Who cares what actual experts have to say – let’s go with the Republican hacks in my iPhone contact list instead. We can have him here in 10 minutes.”
3) If it can fit in a conventional narrative, it is worth covering. “Maybe she’ll say she’s running for President on our show and we’ll get more hits! Go with it!!”
4) It’s nearly summer – the traditional lull in Washington politics. Gotta have something to fill up the blogs and the airwaves to sell the ads.
I for one am happy that Hillary is getting some coverage even if it is more about tone than anything serious just yet. It beats yet more inside-baseball bloviation about how the Republican party really is going to get its act together and listen to the “adults” and how it’s inevitable that they’ll take the Senate and … :-/
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tim F.
Terry Gross is a badass interviewer. She takes a very deep look at the people with whom she speaks and often brings them exactly what they deserve, in the friendliest possible tone. Bill O’Reilly loves to ambush his guests with abuse and uncomfortable questions, so she read from some bad reviews of his book. The guy just completely melted down. He kept complaining about big mean terrible Terry Gross for what felt like months.
LAC
@Rarely Posts: well said! I agree with your assessment especially the need for Hillary Clinton to excite folks again and to better be able to respond to a fair question. I have no desire to go through the PUMA wars of 2008 again.
Marc
@Morzer:
That and 2208 delegates would have given her the nomination.
Tokyokie
@Alex S.: Conservatives are a lot more obsessed with Saul Alinsky than I’ve ever known a single liberal to be.
WereBear
You are probably right.
Don’t forget HRC is a product of her times. A younger woman politician would be less likely to need to show metaphorical balls, but wouldn’t have the gravitas to run for President, either.
In my ideal world President Obama runs for as many terms as he likes and gets a cattle prod to use on Republicans and help his Inner Liberal run free, but we never do get exactly what we want.
Jose Arcadio Buendía
I’m not sure some of the commenters here quite get it. Yes, Obama created a shitstorm of rage because he was black. But if you think that O’Malley or Schweitzer or Warren won’t also, you’re wrong and not living on the same planet as me. The cossacks work for the czar(s), i.e. the wealthy. They will slime anyone who tries them. You all will just not be “fatigued” by the new smears. Quit being such pussies.
If you don’t like Hillary because you’re concerned she won’t enact Sweden, fine. But until you can show me where the world is a better place with Schweitzer/whoever as the nominee, I won’t care.
As for Elizabeth Warren, I think a lot of folks will be disappointed by her positions on non-economic issues. I’m all for her if she goes, but she seems uninterested.
If age were no factor, the candidate we should all want it Jerry Brown.
Patrick
@Morzer:
Yes, do you know why?
My state, in which Clinton got beaten badly, had a caucus which was only open for 2 hours. Compare that to the neighboring state, which Clinton won. It had a primary which was open all fricking day. Who do you think benefited from this?
Do you think that might have made a difference? I got so sick of the Clinton won the popular vote crap, when nobody even bothered to ask why.
Patrick
She did ONLY if you then acknowledge that it was not a fair process since some states were open all day while others (caucuses) were not. In other words, you are counting apples and oranges.
beltane
@Jose Arcadio Buendía: I think the issue many have with HRC is not the shit that will be thrown her way, which will be a given no matter who the Democratic nominee is, but whether she, on her own merits, is worth defending from all the shit. I guess there is some kind of shit to benefit ratio that must be considered. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone promising on the horizon.
Betty
I don’t want another Clinton, regardless of gender. That whole gang of DLCers makes me sick. This is a country with millions of people. Why must a few elites control the nomination process? It sure ain’t democracy.
Patrick
@Iowa Old Lady:
Amen! Her campaign was about as awful as it got. Did they really understand how that crap made people in caucuses states angry as hell? My wife who works an evening shift could not vote in the caucus. Had she been in a primary state (ie more likely Clinton state) her vote would have counted. Yet, Hillary Clinton thought that was fair in her stupid “I won the popular vote” garbage.
ruemara
@Rarely Posts: Yes, that’s exactly so. I fear this”inevitability” concept because it makes an already disaffected, complacent, LAZY group, even more so.
I’m also going to say that I don’t see being critical of Hillary’s response as “Hillary hate”, as some have called it. Recalling her lack of good people is also not hating. Head over to any wingnut agitprop feed to see what hating on the Clintons looks like. That the main people who are truly outraged at criticism are also the truest warriors against Obotism is also not lost on me. This wasn’t hardball as a question, it was just keeping on the question until you have a real answer, not political doublespeak. Seems like how that looks has been forgotten. Being fair to Mrs Clinton, it also struck me that this being controversial is more than a little stupid. It’s just not.
Hal
Per ken cuccinelli on meet the press, Hillary is not a juggernaut, and that’s what you need to win. No one bothered to ask coach why he got his ads handed to him while he bragged about tea bagger resurgence via castor, but that’s mtp for you.
gene108
@Rarely Posts:
Posted this yesterday, but O’Malley’s balancing the budget by raiding the state pension fund.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/maryland-pension-proposal-breaks-trust-with-states-retirees/2014/03/01/4faced40-a0a0-11e3-9ba6-800d1192d08b_story.html
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-03-04/news/bs-ed-pension-letter-20140304_1_pension-system-o-malley-legislature
MattF
@Hal: How is Cooch an expert in anything, except maybe creeping out voters?
tobie
@Rarely Posts: Couldn’t agree with Rarely Posts more. I will likely vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary, but she doesn’t excite me, nor any of my 40-something friends, none of whom see her as a trailblazing feminist. She rose to fame on the coattails of her husband, and while she has more than earned her position in the political limelight, she hasn’t exactly done it on her own in the same way that Elizabeth Warren has.
Every cause that Hillary has championed has been chosen for one reason: to aggrandize Hillary herself. I so want her to take up a cause like climate change or poverty, which wouldn’t be about her, her biography, her public persona as the aggrieved woman lambasted unfairly by the press, etc.
Both opponents and fans of Hillary alike focus on her. How about her positions??? Listening to Ann Lewis last week on The News Hour, I was reminded of how teeny-boppers talk about their favorite rock stars. Hillary has idol worshippers. But for those of us who don’t idolize her, we’d really like a reason to be excited about her candidacy besides her biography.
One more thing: Hillary and company’s relentless complaints about sexism might be more compelling if she were to acknowledge some of the racism in her own campaign in 2008. Her comment about “hardworking white Americans” has not been forgotten.
Morzer
@Patrick:
First of all, I get pretty sick of the narrative that Obama was perfect and Clinton was pure evil. People insist on making out that Obama got everything right, when he didn’t, while Clinton supposedly was incapable of doing anything other than pick bad people and lose by a landslide. The facts are otherwise: it was a very hard-fought, close primary, tilted mainly by Obama’s people knowing the system better than Clinton’s. Whining about “apples and oranges” is stupid. Politics ain’t beanbag – and I daresay there are a few Clinton voters out there who feel that Obama and his team gamed the system. Of course they did – and all politicians do. You can’t have it both ways: if Clinton was so bad as a politician, then Obama’s victory in the primaries wasn’t quite the marvel his supporters want to pretend that it was. Likewise, if you are going to complain about limited voting hours, well, maybe the people in states whose vote didn’t count might want to have a word with you. Politics is messy, imperfect and not for the faint of heart. Don’t like that fact? Feel free to take your purity t-shirt and walk out the door.
Morzer
@gene108:
Hmmm.. there’s a big, bad politician who has been screwing with the pension fund in a little state called New Jersey. Seems to me that a lot of Democrats thought that was a pretty corrupt and unacceptable way to behave. But maybe the rules are different in Maryland.
Suffern ACE
@MattF: I think he would be better off declaring her a juggernaught. Juggernaughts, while scary and merciless, are also intelligible for the office.
Cephalus Max
@Tim F.: She is amazing. That O’Reilly interview is a classic, but my favorite has to be her interview with Newt Gingrich (back in the day when he was still an actual factor). Totally dismembered the guy. It was brutal. Never altered her perfect-for-public-radio tone of voice in the slightest. Just kept asking questions.
Botsplainer
@Alex S.:
No mention of Goldwater will be made. She’ll be portrayed as being excited at the potential prospect of loading bullets into clips for Guevara’s civilian model automatic assault rifle that he planned to use to fire off one round at a time in order to execute white Christian freedom lovers all over the American south. There will actually be a fantasy sequence of her loading bullets while Guevara shoots Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Bull Conner and Orville Faubus.
The goobers will lap it up like a dog to its vomit.
gene108
@Morzer:
The problem with Democrats is that when they achieve a stranglehold on a state’s government, they revert to the default setting of “politician”, where patronage and collecting favors are as important as actually doing stuff to help people.
I do not know the cure, but it is a condition all too common in this country, which is why Democrats – as a whole – do not elicit the kind of enthusiasm other than “lesser of two evils” by so much of the electorate.
gene108
@Morzer:
The problem with Democrats is that when they achieve a stranglehold on a state’s government, they revert to the default setting of “politician”, where patronage and collecting favors are as important as actually doing stuff to help people.
I do not know the cure, but it is a condition all too common in this country, which is why Democrats – as a whole – do not elicit the kind of enthusiasm other than “lesser of two evils” by so much of the electorate.
EDIT: State Dems in NJ should be drawn and quartered for cow-towing to Christie’s agenda and allowing cuts to pensions, rolling back the millionaires tax and fucking endorsing him over Buono in the 2013 governor’s race.
Emma
I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. Will Rogers
Marc
@Morzer:
It is very thoughtful of you to count them when citing her meaningless popular vote victory, though – since otherwise she would have lost that to Obama as well. You know whose vote really didn’t count? People in Michigan who wanted to vote for Obama.
Here is some free advice for Hillary supporters: if you want to win my support and my volunteer hours in 2016, you need to mention the 2008 primaries as little as possible. You don’t want me thinking of the “3 am phone call” ad or “hard-working white Americans” or Harriet Christian or the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq when I’m deciding whether to go out for a canvass – or who to canvass for.
gene108
@Betty:
I do not get the reflexive hatred of the DLC. I view it as a response to the crushing defeats, in the Presidential elections, of 1980, 1984 and 1988. In its own way the DLC was a pragmatic response to the politics of its times.
If politicians, who came up through the DLC, still think the DLC way is the correct path in 2014 or 2016, they are just as bad as Republicans, who cling to supply-side economics, when times have changed and should be purged from holding important jobs.
********************************************************************
People, who are pissed off about Bill and Hillary not campaigning for fellow Democrats, I’d like to point out President Obama did not campaign for NJ Democratic gubernatorial nominee Barbara Buono in 2013, because she was going to be killed by Christie. The same year, Obama did campaign for McCauliffe in VA.
Robert Sneddon
@Morzer: “People insist on making out that Obama got everything right, when he didn’t, while Clinton supposedly was incapable of doing anything other than pick bad people and lose by a landslide.”
It was the other way around, the “bad people” chose Mrs. Clinton as their electable puppet, she didn’t get to choose them. She had little or no control over them, it was very clear. She certainly couldn’t fire people otherwise Mark Penn wouldn’t have had a job after the first week.
“The facts are otherwise: it was a very hard-fought, close primary, tilted mainly by Obama’s people knowing the system better than Clinton’s. ”
The facts are that in any serious challenge for the Presidency the competency of the senior political staff is taken for granted. They know the rules for the caucuses, the states, the percentages off by heart. That’s why it was obvious that the DLC’s Presidential campaign in 2008 wasn’t serious about winning the primary until it was too late since they didn’t think the technicalities mattered.
hitchhiker
@tobie:
I was born in 1952, 5 years after HRC and 3 years after EW. All three of us left high school at a time when they were still sorting the help wanted ads by gender. They were still routinely sending us into teaching and nursing; my high school counselor looked at my perfect SATs and asked which of those 2 things I wanted to be. It’s impossible to overstate the strength of the barriers both of them have crossed, which is where the focus ought to be.
My own 20-something daughter tells me that the whole dynasty thing gets her down and makes her want another name to vote for — which makes me think that as much as being married to Bill has helped HRC politically, it has harmed her equally. She gets blamed for his flaws, and her achievements are suspect because she rode his coattails.
I’ll vote for her enthusiastically if she’s the nominee. I don’t think we’re anywhere near seeing what she could do. That said, EW is better than anybody but Bill himself when it comes to naming & explaining the core economic values of the Democratic party. She’s more than earned a chance to make her case, and I really hope she does.
gene108
@Robert Sneddon:
People, who lose, generally do not do things as well as he people who won.
The issue is can the loser of the past contest learn from his/her mistakes and win, when the opportunity presents itself again.
To assume the runner-up can never be the champ goes against the very nature of competition.
gene108
@Robert Sneddon:
People, who lose, generally do not do things as well as he people who won.
The issue is can the loser of the past contest learn from his/her mistakes and win, when the opportunity presents itself again.
To assume the runner-up can never be the champ goes against the very nature of competition.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Marc:
What? No mention of the Commander-in-Chief threshold?
The words “Sen. McCain has done that…” should disqualify Clinton for any high office.
Patrick
@Morzer:
Please point out where the hell I said that.
Furthermore, I really want to find a reason to vote for Hillary. But people like you who bring out this utterly meaningless “she won the popular vote” crap, makes it very difficult for me. It just brings up old memories of how dishonest her campaign was.
Say what??? I just told you that my wife’s vote didn’t count and Hillary’s campaign bragged about it.
amk
Going by the bj straw poll, Hillary doesn’t seem to be that inevitable candidate. Wonder how inevitable she is perceived to be in the real world.
Emma
@hitchhiker: tell your daughter politics is not a spectator sport. Tell her to get down in the trenches, find people just like her, and build the party she wants.
I will own up to not being active enough. I give a little money when I can to the right candidates, vote, and that’s it. Why? Because I find that I have less and less patience for the compromises necessary to live, much less the ones needed for politics. Not to mention a near-reclusive personality.
The reality of it is that massive political movements are fueled either by rage or idealism, and neither bodes well for long-term success. Successful politics is hard slogging, compromising, taking what you can and moving on. And that’s freaking hard work.
And as far as Hillary is concerned, for God’s sake. It’s still two years away. We still have time to change the narrative.
gogol's wife
@Marc:
“hard-working Americans, white Americans” is the one that gets me. I keep hearing her voice saying that.
HRA
I am a woman. I do not base my vote on gender, ethnicity, etc. I base it on who I believe will be the best candidate for the office. HRC falls short of my belief.
Looking back on who was voted in for president before President Obama, I can only see a vast field of white men with a majority of one primary ancestral ethnicity. What is the reason and/or problem for eliminated anyone other than what we have already had as president?
tobie
@hitchhiker: Your post kind of proves my point. There are many people born in the 1950s and earlier who strongly identify with Hillary Clinton’s biography. For those of us who don’t, though, we need another reason to passionately support her candidacy.
Emma
@tobie: Three Supreme Court judges might be up for replacement soon. Scalia or Ginsburg? You vote, the president decides.
ralphb
Why are you letting yourselves be baited into discussing, let alone arguing about, a non-existent campaign? If you want something to tug your little forelocks over, 2014 is coming up fairly soon. Perhaps you can find an excuse to sit that election out before bitching about 2016?
sherparick
Yep, it will be really interesting how ol’ Dinesh will make my boring ol’ suburban home town of Park Ridge, which had been rock ribbed Republican since the Civil War and where my family were the only Democrats on the block (and we were immigrants from D.C.), a cesspool combination of the New Left and the Chicago Thuggery. I remember bicycle theft being a bit of a problem but that was about it. Hilary attended what was to become Maine East, from which I graduated in 1973, until 1964 and was in the first graduating class for Maine South. According to late Paul Carlson, who we shared as a teacher, she was a young volunteer in the Goldwater campaign in 1964 (I thought Goldwater was going to win because all my friends parents were voting for him!) so this will be very strange, although I expect it will focus on her years at Wellesley College and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement and how that means she really “hates America.”
Robert Sneddon
@gene108: For what it’s worth if Senator[1] Clinton runs again it looks like she will do so as her own candidate and be in charge this time. Whether this turns out to be a good or a bad thing, we’ll see. Last time it was embarrassing to see just how far out of the command loop she was.
[1] I don’t know how the US hereditary aristocracy exactly deals with nomenclature protocols regarding previously held senior governmental positions — does having been Secretary of State override her having been appointed as a Senator? I erroneously surtitled her “Mrs.” in previous comments for which I apologize.
tobie
@Emma: Oh please! I said, “I will likely vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary.” If she’s the party’s nominee, I will definitely vote for her in the general election.
Ruckus
@Robert Sneddon:
I believe it is the highest office/post held. General whatever, President Clinton, etc.
So the next question becomes, is Senator a higher office than SoS? Well it’s an elective office rather than an approved appointee, so I’d guess Senator is higher.
hitchhiker
@tobie:
I wasn’t trying to give you a reason to support her candidacy; that’s her job and I hope she does it.
I just get somewhat tired of reading that she rode on Bill’s coattails, when it seems to me he’s been as much liability as benefit. The other meme is about a Clinton dynasty, as if there’s a comparison to the Bush family’s hold on power.
gian
@gene108:
the problem with the democratic coalition is that it’s a coalition.
work on equal pay for women and you piss off the immigration or gay rights activists because their issue isn’t the first on the list. and then they stay home the next cycle, or bitch enough that the friends who listen to them stay home
and for some reason the leadership still thinks GOP policies for “reform” of education are anything other than profitization of education
gian
@gian:
forgot the education profitization plans are also about union busting
Fair Economist
I’m pretty enthusiastic about Hillary. She’s the one who devised and pushed hard for a significantly more liberal healthcare reform than Obamacare. She’s the one who identified the “vast right-wing consipiracy” (remember how much she was mocked for that, when it was the exact literal truth?) She works her ass off on anything she does, and she probably has the most broad and extensive experience in Washington of anybody alive.
Plus, I admit I’d love to shove a Hillary landslide in the eye of every right-wing slime who’s been spouting nonsense since the day Bill Clinton won the presidency. If you want to hear the end of Vince Foster conspiracies and birther nonsense, you have to respond by getting more active. If the Vince Foster kind of nonsense makes Democrats less enthusiastic about the targeted candidate, we’ll get more of it. LOTS more.
Corner Stone
@tobie:
Wow.
Every cause? That seems a little uncharitable.
Kropadope
@Morzer:
Ruin any potential thrill that might have?
Bart
@Robert Sneddon: This “you get addressed by the highest job you’ve ever held” is such BS. So what if you once were a senator or a president? You aren’t one now.
hitchhiker
@Emma:
“tell your daughter politics is not a spectator sport. Tell her to get down in the trenches, find people just like her, and build the party she wants.”
I would, but I don’t really order her around these days; unlike me at her age, she has agency & knows how to use it.
Corner Stone
@Fair Economist:
At first I read this as “unenthusiastic”, then I continued reading and had to do a double take to see it correctly.
So, I guess the narrative the very liberal blog Balloon-Juice is determined to push seems to be working.
Suzanne
I am no huge Hillary fan, but I am always surprised when reading Balloon juice to see how so many people seem to think that who she has advising her campaign actually matters to most voters. I would be willing to bet that 98% of voters could not tell you who the Vice President is, never mind who advised the Clinton and Obama campaigns six years ago. I really think that this is a non-factor.
I also think that getting unhinged about some of the specific douchey things she said in her campaign (3 AM phone call, white Americans, etc.) when compared to her years as a Senator and Secretary of State, when she almost always voted the right way and did the right thing, is sort of looking for a reason to dislike her.
But I am looking to have a Democrat win the next Presidential election, even if it’s my third- or fourth-choice Democrat.
Chyron HR
@ralphb:
Wow, this isn’t going to get tiresome over the next three years.
Talentless Hack
‘Ready for Hillary’ weak? A similar slogan was good enough for Poppy Bush in ’88. Ask former President Dukakis how weak it was then.
Corner Stone
I was not a woman coming out of high school in the ’60s, so I’ll never know what that whole culture was like. But I have a good friend who was born in 1947 and she tells me stories about getting chased around the desks by men at the office she worked. And how any woman just accepted getting goosed in the elevator. I’m sure lots of people here have similar or worse stories.
So I think we do a disservice to so easily forget some of the not so immediate past.
Villago Delenda Est
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
This is something the privileged scum that makes up the Village simply will not do. Actual work. Too many cocktail weenies to eat.
Wipe them out. All of them.
rk
@Tokyokie:
To this day I don’t know who Saul Alinsky is.
Fair Economist
I’m curious what the Hillary haters want to say to all the people who are big fans of Hillary. There are quite a few – I argued with them quite a bit back in 2008. How do you think their enthusiasm will be affected if she loses a primary again?
Villago Delenda Est
The most significant thing about a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign is that it will keep the batshit insanity of the wingtards in a high lather.
For that alone, and the sake of popcorn futures, this will be fun.
Villago Delenda Est
@rk: The devil.
Fair Economist
@rk:
He was a leftish/libertarian organizer, writer, and agitator. I remember him most for clever non-violent protest methods – like having a whole bunch of people eat beans before a civic concert. He had some odd ideas, but overall seems to have been very reasonable. It’s really weird that the right has demonized him so – he’s about as non-demonic as you get in politics.
Kropadope
@Suzanne: @Suzanne:
You could program a computer to always vote the way you want it to. That doesn’t mean it would do a good job in elected office. Hillary is actually closer to me on most domestic policy issues than most Democrats, including Obama. I have other reasons not to support her.
Here we have a woman who will gladly spread MSM/Republican lies when it suits her, will most likely misinform and obfuscate about the Rs also (we should be able to beat them with the truth), and has never seen a war she doesn’t like. I, for one, don’t really want to see the Ds become the war party or otherwise become a mirror-image of the mendacious Rs whoe just happen to be on the right side of domestic issues.
Hillary Clinton will destroy the Democratic party. People say she will be better than any R, I reject that. I’m having a hard time thinking of an R I like less than her.
Fair Economist
@Kropadope:
I can see why somebody who likes Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Santorum more than Hillary would not want the most popular living Democrat eligible for the Presidency to get the Democratic nomination.
Ruckus
@Fair Economist:
And that’s exactly the point. If they can demonize this guy then anyone with a “stronger” viewpoint against them is automatically included. Plus, like they really give a shit who he is, what he says/does, he’s not one of them, he’s a demon. They are grasping a straws, and if they can’t find them to grasp at then the have to create them. We then spend huge amounts of time defending him instead of discussing issues. The right likes this because they lose on issues. All they have is straw and bullshit. They’ve tried to put a pretty coat of paint on their bullshit but paint doesn’t stick very well to bullshit. They have little other choice but to demonize liberals. And we fall for it almost every time. That’s why Ms Warren is so good, she sticks to issues. She always pivots back to the issue. She may or may not be more progressive than anyone else but she sure sounds that way, and it’s because she stays on message about the issues.
And that’s really what everyone is asking Hillary to do, discuss the issues, let us know your real positions on the issues, because we really don’t know them.
Long Tooth
Gross’s question was a marshmallow. It will get much worse for Clinton (or should). She either swallowed the lies hook, line, and sinker, OR she took counsel of her presidential ambition. It’s one or the other.
Q: “Why did you wholeheartedly support the Bush/Cheney big lie war?
Hillary: “Because, that’s why”.
Tom Q
Posts the past few days have me really fearful this place will turn into Firedoglake-in-reverse come 2016, which would be really sad to see.
Disclaimer: I was very much NOT behind Hillary in ’08. I started with Edwards (god forgive me), and switched very early to Barack. That said, I think the notion that Hillary’s campaign was 100% disaster is a shallow reading, based on her fall from inevitability. I was convinced, early on, that Hillary had a political glass jaw, and thus figured when Obama ran off that string of victories post-NH, the contest was all but over (as it had been in the Dem primaries of 1992, 2000 & 2004). But Hillary didn’t evaporate like Bill Bradley or Howard Dean — she came back and won a ton of primaries and delegates. Obama’s lead was too much for her to overcome in the end. but her candidacy stayed very much alive. (The “won the popular vote” thing is a red herring — the point is, she got a whole LOT of votes, way more than runners-up had managed in recent primary contests) I had tp grudgingly concede she had way more/deeper support than I’d imagined, and I don’t see why it’s so important for many to deny that. And, yes, I think that’s a very strong base on which to start in ’16, which is what makes her a potent candidate.
It’s also amazing to me how Dems (here and elsewhere) have such varying reactions to the Terry Gross interview, with the reactions seeming largely to coincide with how much contempt the listener has for Hillary to begin with. Yes, Gross was persistent — but, for those of us who don’t hate Hillary, she was persistent on a topic so picayune it wasn’t the ghost of Edward R. Murrow we were hearing…it was the ghost of Tim Russert with his gotcha. And for the record, I don’t agree that Gross was persisting until she got “an answer”…she was persisting till she got the answer SHE wanted (essentially, “Yeah, I totally lied about supporting gay marriage till it became popular”). Anything less than that, to Gross and many here, was an evasion; to the rest of us, her answer was fine, and please move on.
Kropadope
@Fair Economist: Ted Cruz and Michele Bachman would have the same detrimental effect on the Rs I anticipate Hillary having on the Ds. Santorum’s a mess, but he at least acknowledges his party’s lack of interest in helping working people. Admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Robert Sneddon
@Ruckus: Senator Clinton was appointed to be the Democratic candidate for the vacant Senate seat in New York which is about as close a lock going. It takes an astounding indifference to the job of campaigning to the electorate plus a competent challenger to lose such a seat although it can happen, see Coakley in Massachusetts when she failed to make any effort when appointed to the vacant Kennedy family Senate seat there and lost out to Scott Brown. Elizabeth Warren didn’t make that mistake in the rematch.
amk
@Robert Sneddon: For a political noobie, Warren was awesome.
burnspbesq
@Suffern ACE:
I’m betting Dinesh will let his imagination really run wild. We’ll get lurid tales of college roommates swapping husbands. Did you know Bill Clinton is Grant Hill’s biological father, and Calvin Hill is Chelsea’s?
ruemara
Sorry, don’t tell POC that it’s “unhinged” to be upset about the hardworking white Americans quote. It was a smart, legally trained mind uttering that throwback to the Southern Strategy I’ll be damned if I forget that. Not to mention the secret Kenyan smears, the circulation pictures of him in a tribal dress, the PUMAs who were just encouraged to go apeshit and really give in to a nasty blend of entitlement & bigotry. Hillary Clinton was not to blame for all of it, no. But don’t sit there and say we’re unhinged at seeing the wife of a presidency black people embraced, key leaders of the only party most of us feel in any way comfortable voting for, slur us to get democratic bigot vote. This little party loses everything if you keep taking black turnout for granted by assuming that shit didn’t hurt.
rikyrah
If you want to re-do the 2008 campaign, ok.
It was OVER the night of the Wisconsin Primary. It was mathematically IMPOSSIBLE for Hillary Clinton to win the Nomination, unless they were going to change the rules in the middle of the process.
Wisconsin.
Yet, she remained in it.
And we got the ‘ Hard working, WHITE people’
the Is Barack Obama a Christian …… I dunno response on 60 Minutes…
and the RFK got shot, so I should hang around..
I was part of the group that set up the Wiki with the racial insults by Camp Clinton.
do you really want to remind folks like me why they despised her by the end of that campaign?
rikyrah
Not that I want Elizabeth Warren to run, the comment that I and others would be ‘disappointed’ in her non-economic positions..
so what?
At least, I believe I’d be happy with her on Domestic Issues.
I don’t trust Hillary Clinton on Domestic OR Foreign Policy.
Tell me one thing that a President Hillary would have done differently or better than President Obama – domestically or foreign policy wise.
At least, if Warren ran, she would have a purpose for us voting for her.
Outside of Hillary’s ‘it’s my turn’…
what exactly am I, as a Democrat, supposed to believe I should be getting from a President Hillary?
Suzanne
@Kropadope: If you’d rather have Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or someone who thinks that rape isn’t rape as your president than someone who will actually enact your agenda more often than not, then I might suggest changing your party registration.
dogwood
@Tom Q:
I tend to agree with you here. Hillary’s ’08 campaign was not the disaster that everyone wants to make it out to be. It was a fairly well-run traditional campaign. She just got out-foxed and out hustled by the Obama folks, who knew they had to broaden the electorate in order to have a chance. Her campaign was much better than that of Edwards who couldn’t win Iowa after spending 4 years there. My biggest fear about a Clinton run is that she will revert to form and run the same way again because deep down they think ’08 was a fluke. No matter what you think about President Obama, the way his team organized and implemented GOTV in both presidential runs should be a model for Democrats to continue developing. Sparring with journalists and attempting to win every news cycle is what the MSM likes in a candidate, but it is not the best way to get actual voters to the polls.
Kropadope
@Suzanne: From what, Independent? Dude, if Hillary wins, whatever short-term benefit we may derive will be undone by the time her presidency’s over. For starters, we’d be destroying any chance to undo in 2020 the damage that was done in 2010.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I was mad at Clinton for staying in too, although I was wrong, honestly. It didn’t hurt turnout a bit.
However. Think about John Edwards. He was better known than Obama, in fact had been the VP nominee. Now, Edwards never had a chance, his problem was he never won anything and had no delegates and I couldn’t discern any enthusiasm for him among the people who Chris Matthew’s said would love him. Those people were mostly Clinton supporters here. Edwards came in close to dead-last in our county straw poll early on, but it’s not at all scientific. They were told not to write in Al Gore and some did :)
But what if Obama had crashed and burned based on something no one knew? Not an affair, but something else. People are complicated, and Edwards was not only a Senator but a VP nominee. Presumably they knew a lot about him. “He had been vetted!”
Clinton would have stepped in and (conceivably) salvaged the general. You know they’d screw with the rules to replace him, had that happened. They can do that. Party nomination rules are pretty much up to the Party.
It’s just a thought I had later, after Edwards, re: “Clinton staying in so long”
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Suzanne:
You know, I’m sick to death of the “Better than a Republican” line. Just how little better than a Republican does a Democrat have to be before we demand better of our party?
Corner Stone
“We must stop the lesbian Hildabeast before she can murder another lover and kill the party!”
/dope
burnspbesq
@rikyrah:
The fact that she’s not a Republican isn’t enough for you?
rikyrah
@dogwood:
She had no Plan B.
They had no plans after Super Tuesday.
They had no money after Super Tuesday.
She was just ‘ inevitable’ and the rest of us just needed to fall in line.
Barack Obama showed that you don’t need one fucking Southern State to win the Presidency of the United States.
it’s nice that he won the Southern States that he did, but without them, he STILL would have made it to 270.
Barack Obama proved that you don’t need remotely near a White majority to win both the Popular Vote and the Electoral College vote in this country.
Barack Obama showed the Democrats the way to expand the electoral college map without having to so any sorts of bullshyt to try and get those mythical ‘ hard working White people’ that would rather vote for two sociopaths that told you they would destroy the American Social Safety Net, than vote for the Black man who actually gives a shyt about you.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: What’s this lesbian BS now?
Corner Stone
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Lesser of two evils, my man.
Do you want Godzilla in the WH? No, the actual Godzilla. Because if you deny Her righteousness and Hillary loses, then the actual Godzilla will appoint future SCOTUS picks.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I don’t forget Edwards. I remember when they were trying to push the ‘ but he’s a Southern White Man’, and by intimation, he’s so ‘ safe’.
I remember it all, Kay.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: sometimes the lesser of two evils is allowing the greater of two evils to remind everyone that it is, in fact, evil. Hillary will make “both sides do it” actually true.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: So then I can mark you down as objectively pro-Godzilla for WH 2016?
amk
@Kay: By the time convention was due, Obama had been vetted enough. Jeez they even ‘vetted’ 3rd grade essays. So, I call BS on your “what if Obama had crashed and burned based on something no one knew? Not an affair, but something else. “
Tom Q
@rikyrah: If you insist on throwing back every insulting quote, how about “You’re likable enough, Hillary”? I knew many women — including an African-American woman I work with — who were angrier about that than anything else in the campaign. Team Obama (to which, I remind you, I belonged) was not pure at heart throughout the campaign.
And I have to say that the paraphrase of the “RFK was assassinated in June” was the biggest crock I heard from my side in ’08. Hillary was asked why she was staying in, and she cited other long primary races. For those of us who were around in ’68, we knew the competitive California primary was held in June because Bobby was shot the night of it; I’m sure that’s how Hillary’s mind worked in that moment. To translate that into “She hopes Obama’s assassinated” was insulting bullshit, but consistent with the She-Demon characterization people seem to insist upon when speaking of Hillary.
I dispute that it was mathematically impossible for her to win after WI. It was difficult (especially given the demographics, as Nate Silver in his early incarnation pointed out), and didn’t happen in the end, but given how close the delegate count was, an upset in, say, NC further down the road could still have tilted the race barely Hillary’s way.
JoyfulA
@rikyrah: I’d feel better supporting Hillary as a divorcee or widow, which is tacky, but I really can’t stand Bill and never could, from his dump on Sister Soulja on.
I thought he might have improved until he started with the racial innuendo in South Carolina. How could he be so dumb, as well as so gross, as to think white Southern Democrats respond to those dog whistles? I know some, and they all went for Obama.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: As opposed to Hillary, sure.
Suzanne
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I would say “only a little bit better”, but that’s because Republicans still win the vast majority of elections where I live. John McCain is still my Senator and Joe Arpaio is still my Sheriff. It has been this way since I was a kid. I will fight my ass off for even a tiny improvement over those two clowns if I think that they have a reasonable chance of winning.
Having said that, I think Hillary is better than a-little-bit-better. She was on the right side of health care, she is on the right side of women’s issues, she has come around for LGBT equality, and she would appoint good Supreme Court justices. I don’t like that she voted for the AUMF, but lots of people who I otherwise agree with did that.
You can, and I think you should, do what you can do to push the party to the left. I am more pragmatic and I am not personally willing to sacrifice elections in the interim. YMMV.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Corner Stone:
Just not lesser enough for me.
Corner Stone
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Purity Troll!
Tom Q
@dogwood: I agree with you the most annoying possibility is the Clintons will revive the Rapid Response team, and shout back to every piddling media-storm. Obama’s demonstrated that many go away just as surely is you simply ignore them.
What makes me hopeful the campaign will be different this time is, the Clintons aren’t stupid: they’ve seen the effect Obama’s field operation had in both ’08 and ’12, and aren’t likely to disregard that. And, on issues, I look at the way Terry McAuliffe ran in VA last year. He didn’t run on the “I’m really half a Republican, plus a few Dem positions” model; he came out foursquare for ACA and women’s rights. There’s no way he ran that way without the Clintons more or less advising him to do that.
rikyrah
@Tom Q:
Funny when I bring up an entire Wiki of racial insults by Camp Clinton and their cronies, THIS is all I get back in response.
We had an entire Wiki full of racial insults towards Barack Obama.
And now, she writes a fucking book pretending that it didn’t happen..
that it was all in our ‘ imagination’.
Ok…..
Uh Huh.
Like I said, it you want to bring up 2008, let’s go down that road….
uh huh
dogwood
@rikyrah:
I don’t disagree with anything you say here. Democrats have a choice about how they, run from here on out. They can follow the Obama model or they can revert to form and listen to the MSM go on and on about the importance of the angry white male vote or whatever they choose to call it at any given time. I think the Obama model is the way to go if the party wants to gain and sustain political power over the long haul. I don’t think the Clinton’s or their devoted fans see it that way. We’ll just have to see how it all shakes out in the next couple of years.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Ok, so you’d prefer the next 2 or possibly 3 SCOTUS judges to be picked by a Republican? So the next 20 to 30 years we can have 6-3 decisions?
Hillary is such an evil force, so divisive, corrupt and not cool that you want Jeb or any other generic R to be nominating federal judges and/or SCOTUS?
Gene108
@Robert Sneddon:
Small correction, Coakley was not appointed to Kennedy’s Senate. Forget who was appointed, the appointment was deliberately done to put someone in place, who did not want to run for the office.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Hillary is reminding a bit of Jerry Brown here; yes she’s representing herself as the bland and unexciting return to competent government of the good old days. That is going to a hard one for the radical right to argue against after what ever nightmare they put up in 2016.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Suzanne:
Obama was elected and re-elected because of people’s enthusiasm for him. He certainly didn’t win in 2012 because of the economy or winning wars. Clinton has demonstrated already that she’s a mediocre campaigner and the fact that she’s a Boomer is not going to galvanize the youth vote. She does not generate enthusiasm. At the moment all she generates is a shopworn inevitability. Our party hasn’t elected back-to-back presidents for decades. Clinton doesn’t strike me as the person to break that streak.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Hillary herself isn’t improvement over any Republicans, why should I expect her nominees to be? Presidents alter the form their party takes. President Hillary says to me there won’t be a Dem worth voting for for a decade after the fact, at least.
Gene108
@rikyrah:
No Democrat has won the majority of white votes since either Carter in 1976 or LBJ in 1964 (or maybe that is just white males), regardless Dems have not won by going after solely white voters in generations.
Obama revolutionized both campaigning, with OfA, and fundraising by effectively using the internet.
He changed how political campaigns are run. We will not see someone that far out ahead of the curve for quite some time.
Emma
@hitchhiker: I’m sorry if that came out wrong. I didn’t mean order her around. I meant explain her options.
Kay
@amk:
I was the single Obama delegate from my congressional district at the state caucus. The idea that I am a rabid Hillary fan so therefore making excuses for her is just wrong.
The crack Democratic national investigatory team “vetted” John Edwards too, as did media. The National Enquirer broke the story.
Suzanne
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Plenty of people are enthusiastic about Hillary. They’re dismissed here as PUMAs, but they exist. I realize that it may not appear as such to you, but it would be pretty mind-blowing for a lot of women to see a woman elected President.
Keep in mind that I literally wept with joy on election night 2008 to see a racial barrier fall in my lifetime. For many women, seeing Hillary elected would be like that.
Emma
@Kropadope: If one person can destroy the party then the party deserves it.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Delusional.
Emma
@rikyrah: I’ll bite. Who would you run, given the political realities?
Robert Sneddon
@Gene108: She was the anointed Democratic candidate for a Senate seat that was going to elect the Democratic candidate by hereditary fiat since Americans love their ruling families. The only way she could lose would be to not campaign or do the work and for the “Washington Generals” Republican candidate to be halfway competent. The result was Scott Brown as a Republican Senator for Massachusetts, not words you really think should go together in this modern world.
Kropadope
@Emma: If the party can’t do better than Hillary, it will deserve it.
Long Tooth
@Corner Stone: The first sighting of the season! It’s the perennial lesser of two evils, raising its inevitable bleat*.
*[The argument lost much of its luster in the aftermath of the democratic stampede to support the 2003 War. Issues of War or Peace ranking right up there with nominees to the Supreme Court, by my lights anyway anyway.
Emma
@Kropadope: You don’t have daughters, do you? Because leaving them to the kind mercies of Ted Cruz will be so much fun for them!
Kropadope
@Emma: Oh, would you rather have your children in the firing line for every stupid, intractable conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else? Do you want to stand and defend someone who lies as easily (and way more needlessly) than Rmoney? Would you like to make the most visible avatar for all the lovely things you thing the government should do an awful, AWFUL person?
Cervantes
@Iowa Old Lady:
Yes.
@Kropadope:
Make sure you get enough oxygen to breathe, up there on the heights of Mount Olympus.
Emma
@Kropadope: I don’t know. Lyndon Johnson was a creep who pushed through the biggest civil rights law ever. I don’t give a flying rip about avatars. As I’ve said before, I will vote for Vlad Tepes rather than a Republican. However, same question to you: who?
Kropadope
@Cervantes: Dude, she’s worse than the Republicans. She will instill every bad trait Republicans have into the Democratic party. She will involve us with every war that breaks out and maybe even start one of her own. She will legitimize every MSM lie that comes out about policies under consideration and about people in the public eye.
Our response to “both sides do it” shouldn’t be for our side to start doing it.
@Emma: She’s the one person who can make Rand Paul look appealing.
Oh, and what happened after LBJ? Nixon, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush 7/10 (really 9) Republican follow-ups
Cervantes
@Robert Sneddon:
No, she was not.
Coakley was not the appointee. It was Paul Kirk.
What mistake?
Jewish Steel
There is one nicely argued post for O Malley waaay upthread and then a whole lot of batshit Hillary hate. Up to and including what appears to be a Maximize The Contradictions argument.
I expected Republicans to forget Bush as soon as he was out of office. I didn’t expect it from Democrats. If the very notion of an R with executive power doesn’t motivate you, powerfully, what the fuck can someone say to you?
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
I’m telling you, be careful. Cerebral hypoxia is not good for you. It’s actually worse for you than many Republicans.
Kropadope
@Jewish Steel:
It does, and that’s why I desperately do not want the Dems to become a left-wing analogue to the Rs.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope:
She will order her Praetorian Guard to fire on the insurrectionists! She will sell drugs from an airstrip in backwoods Arkansas! She will throw babies out of incubators! She will extinguish the sun!
As I said, delusional.
Corner Stone
@Long Tooth:
The argument can not fail, it can only be failed.
Cervantes
@Kropadope:
To paraphrase Hillary Clinton herself (1992): if you don’t like her, then just don’t vote for her. That’s your prerogative. She’s no more perfect than the next person.
But when you say the kinds of things about her that you’re saying here, well, it’s your own judgment that you’re calling into question.
Come down from the mountain-top.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Who, besides John McCain, has literally been in a position of power trying to influence our government to get involved with every conflict that has happened in the past 11+ years? Hillary Clinton. Who gleefully repeated all the MSM lies about Obama (not experienced/ready; Socialist; Hard-working people, white people don’t support him)? Hillary Clinton was willing to leave Bowe Bergdahl to the Taliban because all she cares about is looking tough. Hillary Clinton who fights hard enough to get the emo-progs hearts all aflutter, yet was somehow the “moderate” alternative to Obama.
In all this time, no one has deigned to actually list one redeeming quality of hers. Isthere any affirmative reason I should consider her as someone I’d like to vote for?
Cervantes
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Gore after Clinton.
dogwood
@Kropadope:
I’m no varsity team Clinton hater , although I do admit they both give me a headache. Nonetheless, I thought she was pretty clear that she agreed with the President on the Bergdahl return. If you have different information, then I’d like you to link to it rather than simply assert it.
Kropadope
@dogwood: She stood by the decision after the fact, but back when she was still at the State Department and actually had a stay in the matter she was against it, the same deal.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope:
Interesting that Obama was the boss that whole time.
Marc
@Suzanne:
The AUMF is a pretty big exception to that “almost always.” And equating “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans” is giving us plenty of reason to dislike her, thanks. These are not moments her supporters should be looking to relive.
@Tom Q:
This is exactly why I found the NPR interview troubling – because it suggests she still has a thin skin, is still far too easy to bait into making mistakes and exposing her weak points. I can chalk a certain amount of that up to campaign rustiness, but the truth is she was never all that experienced or adept a campaigner. Carrying on her primary campaign far past the point where she could possibly win, to the point where she could only win by destroying her party’s nominee, to the point where she was openly endorsing the man who would have been her general election opponent had she won… these were not signs of grit and determination. They were signs of selfishness and an astonishing capacity for self-delusion.
Joe Buck
Hillary did not “win the popular vote”. To claim that she did, you have to assume that Obama had zero supporters in Michican. Michigan refused to follow party rules, so the party told candidates not to participate. Hillary defied the party, so she was on the Michigan ballot and Obama wasn’t. If Michigan is excluded, Hillary lost the popular vote.
For more detail see
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/06/04/529184/-Hillary-Clinton-Did-NOT-Win-the-Popular-Vote-Media-Needs-to-Point-This-Out
Corner Stone
I, personally, have to say that whatever one may think about HRC, at least she is not the complete fucking scumbag and political pariah Ted Kennedy.
Oh, wait…
AxelFoley
@Tom Q:
GTFO with that. That, even if some women you know–including the black chick–got offended over THAT, was weak compared to the insults Hillary’s side threw around.
rikyrah
@Marc:
To quote Jeffrey Toobin when he described Clinton the night that folks couldn’t stop denying the math, but she just continued on..
” Deranged narcissist. “
Corner Stone
And now people are quoting Jeffrey Toobin quips?
Really?
Really?
Wonder what he said about President Obama?
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: I’m not a lawyer, but Toobin may be correct on that. It depends on how the 30-day notice thing was written, because this deal was on the table for years and Congress knew. I love Obama, but I’m at least open to the possibility that what he did there was illegal, regardless of whether it was the right thing to do.
The law he was maybe violating may have been unconstitutional (never mind Executive authority, I’m talking about illegal detention). But that’s a fight I hope plays out honestly. I’m sure it won’t but I’ll wait for everything to fall in place first.
Mike G
@Corner Stone:
“Unless it was one of Bush’s signing statements, which are totally valid at negating whatever law he is signing based on whatever fantasies and whims he is pulling out of his ass that day,” Toobin might have added.
Corner Stone
Hey, wonder what user name Mitt comments here as?
“Mitt Romney blasts Hillary Clinton as ‘clueless’
Her tenure as secretary of state was ‘a monumental bust,’ former GOP nominee says”
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Well, I bet Karl Rove is Corner Stone. Hillary Clinton being his back-door way of ushering in his dream of generation-long dominance of our political system by Republicans.
Kay
@Mike G:
It’s not a perfect comparison, because Congress hadn’t yet passed an ass-covering law where they have to be consulted on releases from the prison, but I thought this was pretty amusing:
It shouldn’t at this point, but it still amazes me that we have these “debates” for weeks and then eventually someone says “ya know, now that I think about it, we do this same thing all the time”
Not one media person said “I think something like this has happened before. In fact, I reported on it when Bush released two terrorists because Tony Blair was polling poorly!”
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Got me. I’d prefer to have a lifelong D poltician elected to the WH, nominating federal judgeships, cabinet heads and SCOTUS picks.
My dastardly plan is to destroy the D party from within! Bwah ha ha ha!!
As opposed to “Independent” Dope who has repeatedly said a “get worse is better” solution. Someone who has said that any R is preferable, and any R setting policy and leadership roles for the country is what he’d choose over a D Senator and D SecState under the current D president.
Tell us Dope. You must not think very much of President Obama, his leadership, management or his decision making skills. How do you explain his confidence in having Hillary be his representative abroad for four years?
dogwood
The irony of Hillary Clinton is that as much as she disdains and distrusts the MSM, she is a creature of the beltway totally steeped in the archaic conventional wisdom they peddle. The people around her are the same. I expect to sit this next election out in terms of following it closely online or elsewhere. It’s going to be depressing. Her gratuitous attempt at wooing Sarah Palin and her crowd is pretty pathetic. Only among the Washington insiders are that woman and her minions considered noteworthy as far as electoral politics is concerned.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: I’m extremely supportive of Obama. On the rare occasions that I disagree with his decisions, I still appreciate his thought-process.
I’m arguing against Hillary for her blind partisanship and the only reason I’m being told someone would want to vote for Hillary is blind partisanship. Figure it out.
Jewish Steel
@Kropadope: Obama was under no onus to have HRC participate in his administration in any capacity. He chose to let her have a position that would burnish her foreign policy credentials and strengthen her as an eventual candidate. Why would he do that?
Kropadope
@Jewish Steel: Political savvy? The fact that you can’t just outright ignore your top-competitor with such a huge base of support for a position in your administration if she wants it. They both had reasons to want to bury the hatchet.
That said, I can’t see that she did anything to particularly distinguish herself at State (or the Senate for that matter). Safe may play well in a cabinet position, but it’s a terrible posture for an electoral campaign.
WaterGirl
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I know you’re discouraged. But I have two words for you:
SUPREME COURT
Kropadope
@WaterGirl: War/Peace > Supreme Court
Gian
Hillary.
Racial train whistle in 2008
Sniper fire in 2008
Part of the fundi nut group “the family”
War hawk.
The notion that the country needed to honor her deal with her husband that it was “her turn” in 2008
I wish we had better. The “it’s HER turn” bit I found entitled. You have to earn the votes to win the election. We don’t take turns
WaterGirl
@Emma: rikyrah wants someone she can be excited about, like she was excited about Obama. I want that, too.
I would okay with Biden, but I am concerned about his age because I think in this world we live in, the presidency is a younger person’s game. President Obama does more in some weeks than I do in a month. I would not be unhappy, and I trust Biden, but I think age is a factor. But he also has the experience of working closely with President Obama for 8 years, and I trust Biden.
The only person I see that I could get excited about is Sherrod Brown, but I suspect he won’t run.
I neither like nor trust Hillary, particularly, but I will vote for her in the general if she’s the democratic candidate.
Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised, but there may never be another presidential candidate in my lifetime that I can get excited about the way I was/am about President Obama.
I hope we get some excellent democrats running in the primary. But I’ll tell you what… after the past 8 years, I would vote for a sleazy democrat who fucked chickens in their basement over any republican for president.
Stand on principle if you want, but my principle to stand on is that the supreme court can do a whole hell of a lot of damage (as we are seeing) and can set precedents that can make our world a much uglier place.
Jewish Steel
@Kropadope: BHO retired her campaign debt. HRC and Bill campaigned for BHO. There were smiles, waves and hugs at the convention. Then BHO CRUSHED in the general. If there was ever an opportunity to thank the Clintons for their service and bid them goodnight, it was then.
I too trust Obama’s judgement. I think he saw value in Hilary as a political thinker and leader. And if he doesn’t think Hilary is the manchurian monster who will destroy the party, I’m inclined to trust him.
Kropadope
@WaterGirl: Our world? What about the world of millions of Iraqis, to start?
I’d rather have someone making me miserable than making a decision that makes millions of others with literally no say in the matter miserable. I’m also pretty sure if Hillary is running for re-election, we can forget about 2020. She’ll guarantee about another decade of the house making us miserable.
WaterGirl
@Kropadope: If you think we would have more war with Hillary than with a republican, I suggest you take a rest and do some reading.
I looked back at some of your comments from the past year. You’ve come a long way from hoping Hillary isn’t the best we can to do what you’re arguing here.
EDIT: I think Hillary would have a very republican-looking foreign policy, one that I wouldn’t like, but she would certainly NOT BE WORSE than a republican foreign policy.
Kropadope
@Jewish Steel: It’s not so much the idea that she’s some form of Manchurian candidate that I worry about, so much as an overreach scenario. She’s very top-down and that will lead her to overstep WRT Congress. Also, it will pain me EVERY SINGLE TIME, she repeats some false MSM trope that just happens to benefit her at the time. She’ll be an image problem for us the way W is for the Rs and we don’t really need that.
Kropadope
@WaterGirl: There are definitely Republicans out there less prone to want war than Hillary and even if one gets elected who isn’t at least it’ll be their terrible idea.
Mainly due to the failure of anyone coming up with an argument for Hillary other than “she’s not a Republican.” It’s not enough and if it is, we’re already as bad as the Rs.
dogwood
Despite the conventional wisdom that believes Bill Clinton is the greatest politician and campaigner of the last several decades, his name at the top of the ballot in ’92&’96 did not bring more Democrats to Washington. Obama’s name on the ballot had a much more positive effect for congressional and senate races. I expect Hillary to run and give her pretty good odds of winning, but if she decides to follow what will undoubtedly be the conventional wisdom to run away from the President she will hurt the party down ticket and begin her first term with solid republican majorities in each house. At least she’d have a veto pen and SCOTUS appointments, but I wouldn’t expect to see any progressive legislation during her tenure.
Emma
@WaterGirl: That is exactly how I feel. I really, really, really want an alternative but so far I haven’t seen it yet. I wish Biden were younger too.
askew
@WaterGirl:
President O’Malley gets us the Supreme Court as well. That isn’t an argument for Hillary. In fact, it’s the same deluded argument that was made by Hillary supporters in 2007-08. Only Hillary could win, therefore if we didn’t support her we were letting the Rebuplicans pick the nominees. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. There is a long list of Democratic candidates who can win the WH in 2016. We can and will do better than Hillary.
Corner Stone
@dogwood:
Non sequitur, much?
askew
@Jewish Steel:
Actually the campaign debt wasn’t retired in 2008. It was still outstanding in 2012 and Bill Clinton refused to campaign for Obama until it was paid off. In the end, the Clintons are always about themselves.
And how egotistical was it for the Clintons to demand that Obama pay their bills they accrued well after they had lost the nomination against Obama.
Patrick
@dogwood:
The way senate elections work, 2016 should be a good year for Dems irregardless of who runs. The GOP will have many more seats to defend than the Dems. And same thing with the house, the GOP will win irregardless of who runs due to gerrymandering.
2020, it is a gerrymandering year. Since it is a Presidential year, it is likely Dem voters will actually bother to show up, which they didn’t do last time in 2010. With that in mind,Hillary may actually have a Dem House to work with in 2022 and could actually get a lot of things accomplished.
Kropadope
@Patrick: Do we really need Hillary giving Democrats a reason not to show up in 2020?
Oh, and even if it somehow worked out that way, redistricting happens between 2021 and 22, so we’re looking at 2023 by the earliest.
dogwood
@Corner Stone:
I guess if your definition of a great politician and campaigner is that you get yourself elected, but don’t inspire voters to vote for other members of your party then that’s a non sequitur.
Patrick
@Kropadope:
Yup. And whoever is Dem Prez in 2023 should have a chance to actually get a lot of things accomplished.
Corner Stone
@dogwood: This isn’t even a reasonable line of argument. Turnout increases in presidential election years, but they can’t change local politics on the ground. Or change candidates or funding or districting or debates or voter ID laws or demographics or…
Jewish Steel
@askew: The way that actually played out is more complicated and much more prosaic than you describe it.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/obama-campaign-raises-money-for-hillary-clinton/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
dogwood
@Patrick:
I know how Senate elections work and how redistricting works. 2016 will be a very tough year for Senate Republicans, but it will be considerably easier if Hillary ignores the Obama coalition and how it was mobilized and runs a less strident version of the anti-Obama campaign that the Republicans will trot out. I never really thought Hillary and Bill were anything other than sincere in their belief that Obama couldn’t win in ’08. Given their age, backgrounds, and where they honed their political skills, it was perfectly understandable. I said earlier I don’t hate the Clintons; they just give me a headache. And I don’t think they are the political geniuses that conventional wisdom claims they are.
Long Tooth
@dogwood: My pet rock could have defeated John McCain in 2008. Whoever gained the democratic nomination that year was as good as the next POTUS.
dogwood
@Corner Stone:
Are you actually saying that the candidate heading a ticket during a higher turnout election year has no effect on down ticket races? In ’92 the dems stayed even in the Senate and lost House seats. Lost seats in both chambers in ’96. This is not the total responsibility of Clinton, but is more likely to happen if the presidential campaign is more traditional. Investing in a ground game that targets sporadic voters, registers new voters and actually gets them to the polls is a better recipe for influencing down ticket races than the traditional model that leaves a lot of that to chance and the efficacy of local party operatives.
dogwood
@Long Tooth:
We’ll of course that’s true, but I don’t think your pet rock could have beaten Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.
Corner Stone
@dogwood: I’m saying we’ve had an increase in raw voter potential for the “most likely to vote D”, starting about the mid-2000’s.
It helps to have an effective GOTV organization, but any generic D for president should start ahead of any generic R in presidential election years, for the immediate future. We still have to put candidates up in house districts, and do all the rest to see them through. That’s not on one man/person.
Mondale got pasted in 1984 but the D’s only lost 16 seats in the House and gained seats in the Senate.
Another Holocene Humann
@Morzer: Bullshit, she contested a state Obama didn’t waste his time on, confident that her insider status could bully the Dem insiders to seat delegates from a basically cheat run anyway. She failed and frankly I’m still pissed at the arrogance. Obama showed all of us how to fight and win a national election, something some Democrats 6 fecking years later have yet to get. Either that, or they’re still satisfied being a minority party. Well, I’m not.
David Koch
Fuck! I’m running out of popcorn.
Another Holocene Humann
@rikyrah:
This is late, but hear, hear.
I guess it was the wrong person to say it, I got slapped down here when it came from me, so I’m glad you said it. Truth.
dogwood
@Another Holocene Humann:
I’m hoping that this time around Hillary will open up her inner circle to people who haven’t been loyalists for 25 years. There must be plenty of young guns who worked on the two Obama campaigns who would love to move up to a place of higher responsibility in a presidential campaign. Having a few of those people in the inner circle would be good for developing campaign strategy. Nothing about her past political behavior suggest she would be comfortable with this, but there’s always the audacity of hope and all that jazz.
different-church-lady
Psst: “I’m ready for Hillary” is code for “I’m ready for a female president.”
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: One does not require the other to be true.
David Koch
@Morzer:
Soviet-style election results
My Math Beats Up Clinton Math.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
Thank you.
Also, too running across the tarmac under sniper fire.
MomSense
@Kay:
The real problem with Edwards was that he spent a year living in Iowa up close and personal with folks who figured out pretty quick that he was a narcissist and had problems. One of my friends there (who is a union rep, precinct captain and candidates need her support) was sure that he had a “wandering midsection” and it was only a matter of time before they found affairs and a love child.
Up close and personal he was a phony.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone:
Nice to see you back on your game!
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
Being enthusiastic about Hillary and being bitter to the point of insanity about her defeat in ’08 are two different things.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope:
OK, we can officially stop paying attention to you now.
different-church-lady
@Cervantes:
The mistake the hare made against the tortoise.
different-church-lady
@Corner Stone:
Hell, that’s a reason I’d vote for her — night people rock.
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: Hey, if you want to help the Democrats lose their moral high ground vs. the Republicans, be my guest. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to do everything in my power to convince you not to.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope:
Clearly any republican would make their world better that Hillary Clinton would, yes sir, you’re so right.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope: Trust me, any bullshit you choose to spew will have no influence on my vote one way or another.
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: Wow you just love war and lying politicians, don’t you? I bet you’d love if Hillary had been president so she could fail at healthcare reform again, having learned nothing from the 90s. Those heard-working white Americans don’t need healthcare anyway.
different-church-lady
@Kropadope: I am bored with you now.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: 200+ comments later, I have been forced to agree with your elemental logic.
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Jeb will definitely keep our nation out of any int’l conflicts. They will expand tenants of the ACA, expand the social safety net, strengthen public education and address the devastation of income inequality.
Where can I sign on board?
Kropadope
@different-church-lady: The repeated assurances I’m getting that she’s better than Republicans, without anything to back it up other than the D after her name, are the only bullshit I see from here.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Rand Paul would be more likely to keep us out of international conflicts than Hillary. As far as those other things, I don’t expect Hillary will make any progress for us and even if she did, I don’t care. She’s a liar of the worst sort and I don’t trust her.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: You’re just fucking stupid. Go fuck yourself.
Don’t come in here and tell me you’re an independent and you think any fucking R would be better than a person who has spent her entire adult life serving the public.
You piece of fucking garbage. Go back to glibville or RedState or wherever the fuck you like to hang out and masturbate about how putting an R in charge for the next four years would improve our country.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: I don’t see how anyone can excuse that one.
WaterGirl
@Corner Stone: I might use different language (actually, I’m pretty sure about that) but I can’t say I disagree with your assessment.
I tired of this guy’s schtick hours ago. Disingenuous at best. Waste of time and space.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Hey, at least I have reasons to believe what I believe. You don’t care anything about a politician other than the party, you would vote for Stalin if he put a D after his name and stuck it to the Republicans. Why don’t you think of a real reason to support Hillary instead of just flinging more and more personal insults?
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: I denounce Stalin. But not broccoli. Fuck the haters.
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone: Yeah, broccoli’s good. Prevents cancer too, right?
Corner Stone
@Kropadope:
Fucking moron. You believe a Republican in the WH for the next four years is a better result than having a lifelong D politician in charge.
The reasons you have given are roughly somewhere between Days Of Thunder level of believability, and that Bob in Portland is a non-biased interlocutor.
Listen. You, “have reasons to believe what you believe”. And these reasons inform you that electing a D into the WH is the worst thing that can possibly happen for the D party for the short and near term.
Oooooo….kay.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Does this troll seem to have a similarity about him?
I’m detecting an odor, one I’ve smelled before.
Can’t put my finger on it but the stench is such that I’m going to have to put him in the bakery to hide it.
different-church-lady
@Jewish Steel: Rand Paul would get us into fewer wars than Broccoli would.
Suzanne
@Kropadope: Moral high ground? That and a dollar, etc etc etc….
Forgive me, and the rest of the people here, who actually want to Get Shit Done for thinking you’re a taco short of a combination plate.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: Hell, there might not even be a plate here.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone:
Someone forgot about Hillary’s Goldwater days, huh?
No, just this one.
Kropadope
@Suzanne: Hillary and her long history of not getting shit done and failing to get shit done whenever she tried? Okay. Maybe next time she tells Congress to adopt her plans wholesale, it will go better for her.
And the only thing you lot have succeeded in is convincing me that Hillary is for the blind partisan. That’s what she is and that’s the only reason anyone, even her supporters, have to vote for her.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Put the pipe down, kid.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
This thread went to Crazytown.
Jewish Steel
@different-church-lady: True, but Broccoli has ties to Wall Street that will reassure the investor class.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@different-church-lady: Rand Paul would get us into any war that any other GOPer would.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
Hmm. Don’t see what you mean.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Jewish Steel: Reeeaaally?*
*Assume sarcastic tone and (for some reason) fake British accent.
different-church-lady
@Jewish Steel: Broccoli has a history of getting shit done. Or was that Spinach?
WaterGirl
I’m ready for a thread that isn’t about Hillary Clinton. Several weeks of them, as a matter of fact.
Jewish Steel
@different-church-lady: Spinach is a master of machine politics. Decorated naval veteran too.
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): Might have gone off the rails somewhere in there. But me & d-c-l are bringing it back down to earth.
Corner Stone
@WaterGirl: Tell mistermix to get back to his Mac v PC posts.
He’s shitting on the blog because he knows what he’s going to get.
And personally, I’m happy to get all you fucking fuckers on record how you won’t be backing the D nominee if it’s “that one”.
I had all you sons a bitches castigate and preach at the rest of us.
Good times, good times.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: You ain’t got me. Not on this. She is not my favorite, and I am hoping for someone else to vote for in the primary, but in the general I would vote for her in a heartbeat versus anything the GOP vomits up.
dogwood
Democrats and democratic leaning voters who come around here as Clinton haters or Obama haters all a irrational. I’ve been there. As early as 2004 I developed an irrational disdain for John Edwards. I didn’t even much like his wife. I guess I could have come up with some song and dance about policy to rationalize my position, but the truth was he simply creeped me out. I kept my mouth shut because I’d like to think I’m self-aware enough to know that I could have easily been wrong about him. Turned out he wasn’t such a prince of a guy, but he’s probably not really as bad as I liked to think he was.
David Koch
I don’t see why people are so worried about this thread. This thread is pretty weak.
Weak, when compared to what is currently going on at GOS.
They’re staging multiple virtual riots.
No Way. No How. No HRC (645 comments)
“If not Hillary, who?” Is not the right question. (236 comments)
A poll that will really tell us how Kossacks feel about Hillary as our presidential nominee (196 comments)
And that’s only for today – Sunday. There were another 20 riot threads
over the past week.
WaterGirl
@Corner Stone:
That’s a pretty wide net you’re casting there.
Except for the energizer bunny this afternoon who just wouldn’t quit, nearly all of us who have said we’re not crazy about Clinton have said we will vote for her in the general if she’s the democratic nominee.
Edit: I believe I said earlier today that I would vote for a democrat who fucks chickens in his basement before I would vote for a republican for president. What more do you want from me? :-)
dogwood
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
After 5 years on offense Corner Stone is switching to defense.
Corner Stone
@dogwood: Heck if I thought you had smidge of what the fuck you were talking about.
Corner Stone
@WaterGirl: Chicken fucker!
Don’t let Betty C catch you.
David Koch
@dogwood: No, he was really bad. He co-wrote the Iraq war resolution. He handed Bush the blank check to murder 600,000 civilians in Iraq, kill 5,000 GIs, create 30,000 seriously wounded vets, and flush Trillions of dollars down the drain.
How the reality based blogosphere gave him a free pass on that one is mind boggling.
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone: I am very excited to vote for a D. If that D is HRC then I will be very excited to vote for her. No qualifications.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): We had the purity police run rampant through this fucking blog. Not the least of which was the unlamented President Stuck doing his best imitation of Blog Sherf.
Don’t like X or Y or Z? THEN TELL US WHO YOU WOULD RECRUIT AND/OR VOTE FOR IN A PRIMARY AGAINST OBAMA!!
Just tiring nonsense. Now we’re getting bullshit about Bobby Kennedy? And people threatening to stay home for 2016?
Really?
Really?
Ok.
I guess that makes sense.
Makes sense to somebody.
Or maybe it doesn’t.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@dogwood: Ah, you are one of the people who see CS as a PUMA. I don’t see it that way; CS sometimes is just an asshole, but one who back-catalogs peoples’ comments. If anyone drops a “HRC sucks donkey balls” now and later says, “She is the bestest,” CS will be there to note it.
askew
Only one person has said they wouldn’t vote for Hillary if she was the nominee and that is the troll who is shitting all over the blog. But, I love Corner Stone smearing everyone else who has criticisms of Hillary with being a purity troll or accusing them of refusing to vote for Hillary.
It reminds me a lot of 2007 when Hillary supporters were harassing supporters of other candidates and saying that everyone had to declare their loyalty to Hillary RIGHT THEN or they were traitors to the party and wanted the Republicans to win. It was crazy then. It’s crazy now.
dogwood
@David Koch:
President Obama is going to get a reprieve over at the Daily Kos for the next couple of years. The only person they hate worse than him is Hillary Clinton.
Jewish Steel
876 more days til the election. Averaging 3 posts a day between now and then on why Hilary is the bomb or how Hilary is the sux, that only gives us 2628 more threads to really hash this out.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Jewish Steel: Fuck.
WaterGirl
@Corner Stone: I always hated it when you and General Stuck fought on the blog.
WaterGirl
@Jewish Steel: Rummaging in the silverware drawer now to find a butter knife to slit my wrists with.
David Koch
@dogwood: I always get the biggest laugh when the rabble at GOS say “we put him in the White House!” When the record shows they denounced him and threw all their “support” behind Bush’s unindicted co-conspirator.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): Fuck? Or fuckortunity?
Corner Stone
@WaterGirl: I am sorry I consistently demolished his ill-thought out arguments. I didn’t have much choice.
Corner Stone
@David Koch: Who?
Jewish Steel
@WaterGirl: When you get to heaven, find out who He is backing in the primary. It’ll save us a lot of bother.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Jewish Steel: Just fuck.
Corner Stone
@Jewish Steel:
Let me know when we get to the first HRC is “the bomb” post.
Somehow I don’t see a reference to the colostomy bag as exactly…”awesome”.
LAC
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): gee, I am not the only only one who thinks that corner stone is an asshole bully. What a surprise.
Corner Stone
@askew: Wow. You mean like right here at BJ where if anyone had the mildest of critiques they first felt obligated to say, “And I say this noting that I was a prime mover on the O-Wagon!” ?
Fuck you.
WaterGirl
@Jewish Steel: What, no “we’ll be sorry to see you go” before you ask me to come back and let you all know what’s up?
Edit: though I do appreciate your thinking I would go to heaven and not that other place.
Corner Stone
@LAC: Learn to read. For one simple fucking time in your pathetic joke of a fucking life.
Ankle biting chump ass joke.
dogwood
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name):
No, I never thought of Corner Stone as a PUMA. He’s just a guy who’s spent most of the last 5 years on offense against a president he doesn’t much like. Now that his preferred candidate is again the likely nominee, he is switching to defense. Always assumed he voted for Obama twice.
Corner Stone
@LAC: “only only” ? Put down the Courvoisier.
WaterGirl
Paging Tim F. Paging Tim F. Could we have some posts about 2014 so we can get fired up for that instead of having these endless Hillary threads?
Corner Stone
@dogwood: Give us a fucking break. I can critique the policies and decisions of President Obama and still admire Barack Obama.
Just a bunch of fucking jokeholes.
LAC
@Corner Stone: read what? You drunk sad posts?Your pathological need to come a running every time Clinton ‘s name is mentioned. The only ankle biting here is done by you.
Hey, sober up.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@LAC: I didn’t say that. I basically said asshole with a good memory and willingness to drop inconvenient prior statements into one’s lap.
@dogwood: My guess is that he will be just as much of an asshole to people during the next administration. I could go all pop psych about why, but, for everyone’s sake, I shall refrain.
Corner Stone
@LAC: Ok, so you can’t read. Thanks again, chump.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop that.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: I am not actually defending you, you know.
LAC
@Corner Stone: sorry. I don’t read stupid drunk. Try again. Up until you shit the bed here, the discussion was interesting. .
Kropadope
@LAC: I mean, maybe no one like what I had to say here today, but at least I tried to address people’s responses. All CS does, literally, is cuss people out. But somehow I’m the troll. It’ll be mostly forgotten the next time I have a more popular opinion, I’m sure.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): Either way. Not a fan of your 3rd party omnesplaining.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Yes. It was me, in the Library with the candlestick that knocked your stupid nonsense out.
LAC
@Kropadope: that is his MO. Always.
Suzanne
@Jewish Steel: Seriously, oh fuck me. I really do not know how anyone can feel this passionately about HRC, either positively or negatively.
Kropadope
@Corner Stone: Now that we’ve heard, again, from the poopie-head school of counter-arguments.
Suzanne
@Corner Stone: Sometimes you troll, but you are almost always funny, and that goes a long way with me.
Corner Stone
@Kropadope: Your argument that electing an R into the WH is better than having a D has really went a long way to winning friends and influencing people.
texasdem
@Kropadope: The argument that SCOTUS judges appointed by Hillary wouldn’t differ from those appointed by a Republican smacks of Ralph Nader’s argument in 2000 that there was no difference between GWB and Gore–and we all know how that turned out.
mclaren
As everyone knows, I’m hardly the biggest HIllary fan around these parts, but the way NPR kept hammering her and hammering her on that gay marriage bullshit was just asshole-ish. Look, nobody supported gay marriage back in the day publicly, then, all of a sudden, everyone supported it. So fuckin’ what? Let’s move on, people. It’s as if some NPR reporter were to hammer away and hammer away at Barck Obama because “When you started running, no one thought America was ready for a black president — what made you so full of yourself, Barack, that you thought you were that special?”
Gimme a fuckin’ break, NPR. Pols change their positions along with public opinion. The best you can hope for is a pol who’s reasonably responsive and doesn’t try to drag his or her feet when the wind changes.
Now, what NPR should have hammered Hillary on was her goddamn cringing servile speech at Goldman Sachs about how “bashing bankers isn’t productive” and “it’s time for it to stop.” What NPR should have hit HIllary with is her mindless support for an Orwellian national security that has turned this country into an open-air gulag under undeclared martial law. What NPR really should’ve slammed HIllary about is her support for our endless unwinnable foreign wars.
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone: Surely someone will feel compelled to counterbalance the invective.
It’s an assignment for Cole. Give us a Hilbot frontpager!
@WaterGirl: I will sing Candle In The Wind at your funeral. Won’t be a dry eye in the house.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: I will consider stopping.
ETA: I sometimes am just annoyed at misinterpretation.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): I appreciate that, and hope you give it full consideraship.
mclaren
@WaterGirl:
Hillary Clinton blows chunks as a presidential candidate, but I’ll vote for her. Because what the fuck is the alternative?
DailyKos is full of fanatics and wankers. The Democratic party is now more united than it’s been in a century, and I for one am not about to piss that away and let another drunk-driving coke-snorting Republican lunatic infest the Oval Office for 8 long years. At this point, we’d be standing around in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome by the time a Republican president finally slunk out of office in 2024. The American national anthem at that point would be Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Warriors of the Wasteland…
Corner Stone
@Jewish Steel: I’d be happier if this stupid fucking catty latter day 90210 style analysis nonsense just stopped for 6 months or so.
Or better yet, let’s push to have someone in the MSM ask President Obama what he thinks about Hillary Clinton. You know? His SecState for four years?
Kropadope
@texasdem: Well, I never bought into that with Gore or Kerry. There’s just something special about Hillary.
Jewish Steel
@Suzanne: Anymore, two years fly by in a blur for me. 2600 Hilary posts likewise.
mclaren
So we’re going to falll apart yet again into internecine trench warfare about minutia like which particular puppet of the billionaires will be America’s Democratic presidential nominee, instead of worry about the important issues?
Like transforming the economy away from capitalism as capitalism falls apart and collapses?
Like knocking down and rebuilding America’s cities and suburbs to handle our new Peak Oil smart car society?
Like how to transition away from a debt-encumbered college-oriented society now that college grads aren’t get hired anymore and now that college means a lifetime of undischargeable debt?
C’mon, people. Hillary is small beans. Let’s talk about some big issues, like how to build out a nationwide maglev rail system, or how to transition away from coal and into solar/nuclear power nationwide. Those are the critical issues now. The particular sock puppet Democrats send to the White House remains so low on the list of priorities for America in the 21st century that you’d need the Hubble space telescope to see it.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: I might or might not depending on the circumstance.
Jewish Steel
@Corner Stone:
Yeah, but, did you hear what she said about him? Seven years ago? At the 6th stop of a 7 event campaign day? Oh, it was the living end!*
*This is how teenagers talk, right?
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): I feel well set up to explain your motives and inner voice. In case you’re in the market.
Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): Agreed. And I might also, too, as well, and heck yeah.
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: Heck, yeah.
Corner Stone
@Jewish Steel: What you have to understand about Omnes is that, essentially he is…
Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name)
@Corner Stone: …ineffable?
LAC
@mclaren: uhhh kray kray? How do you suggest these changes happen sans political action? You think that funding happens because folks occupy a park and ta dah??we shouldn’t bother about who occupies the White House or congress because “oligarchy corporatist blah blan”?
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus (the first of his name): I truly believe there is somebody for everybody out there. You just have to make yourself available and see who will eff you.
WaterGirl
@Jewish Steel: thanks, I feel so much… better?
@Jewish Steel: You were on a roll there at the end, I see!
Cervantes
@dogwood:
Strange, your view of democratic politics.
Me, when I vote for someone, never mind twice, and that person gets elected, I think it’s my particular responsibility to keep that person honest in office.