Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Good morning, fellow-travelers. Hillary Clinton wrote another book, this one rehashing her losing battle to become the first female President of the United States, blaming everyone but herself, which is what politicians are supposed to do. I don't fault her for this. Unlike some of you, I don't think she is a special war criminal. She is certainly no more a war criminal than Condoleezza Rice or Madeline Albright, and all three of them stand like wispy seedlings beside the mighty sequoia of US war criminals, Henry Kissinger. Have they named a sequoia after Kissinger? It's long overdue.
But neither is she such a shining light of uncompromising progressive leadership that preferring an ancient left-leaning Jew indicates a psychosexually genocidal motive.
There were certainly some Bernie supporters whom it was reasonable to suspect of hating Hillary out of misogynist resentment. Likewise, though the majority of Hillary supporters are not unself-aware auto-inductees into a reactionary, self-pitying cult of personality, some are, too many, it's embarrassing, it's grotesque, and it's disappointing to see Hillary in her new book feeding them back the very lines of thought their psychoses generated. But, again, she is a politician, and it is fair play.
Did Bernie's primary candidacy hurt Hillary? Of course. An election is a contest. A popularity contest. If the person opposing you in a popularity contest gets popular, that is by definition an injury to you. Furthermore, Bernie remained popular, but, let's be fair: trying to be popular is part of his job.
To those with an actual leftist critique of capitalism, Bernie's campaign highlighted Hillary's shortcomings in that regard. It is good that we are now, thanks to Bernie, suspicious of progressives who are unwilling to speak forcefully against the miscreants milking our communities of resources. It's unfortunate that Hillary lagged behind the rest of us in understanding that kissing corporate ass could be considered a drawback to a large portion of the liberal coalition. Now that we all understand it, though, maybe next time we can field a really good candidate who is prepared not only to go at least partway to the mat for people of color, women, and the gender non-binary, but one who also doesn't suck corporate ass like it's a cream-filled doughnut.
Yes, Obama got away with it. He got away with being soft on banks and financial manipulators even after their frauds and predations destroyed the world economy. Hillary in her book calls the mimed remedies Obama initiated "strong reform." Only someone with her mind on something other than preventing another 2008 could consider Obama's capitalization requirements either "strong" or "reforms." A great many of us who supported Obama were unhappy with his weak response, and, unfortunately for Hillary, we weren't interested in excusing corporate and financial appeasement again. Hillary, perhaps unfairly, took the hit for her husband's "free trade" and deregulation initiatives, not only because she was there when he took them, but also because after yet a second round of inaction on capitalist excesses under Obama, a lot of people were legitimately frustrated at yet a third Democrat taking a "sensible" approach to the economy. Yes, a promise to do no more than tiptoe around the systemic economic abuses killing our communities and our planet NOW did alienate people who otherwise might have voted for her.
One could argue that such anger was unreasonable, but it wasn't unpredictable or incomprehensible, and had Hillary been a more astute strategist, or had had one on her team, she would have corrected her course quickly instead of barely or not at all.
Instead of making mealy-mouthed reluctant concessions to things Bernie was taking the lead on, she could have come out swinging against a system that is bleeding everyone but the very rich. But she didn't. Now, why not? She's a politician. She had to know it wouldn't have hurt her among her supporters to be more critical of capitalism, and it would have won over many Bernie supporters.
Incidentally, she didn't lose me. And I tried to talk many of you into voting for her, as you probably recall. And a glaring and possibly accurate statistic floating around is that more Bernie voters voted for Hillary in the general than Hillary voters did for Obama in the 2008 general by about 50 percentage points, which is a huge margin. Seems Hillary supporters are far more racist than Bernie voters are misogynist, in case that's the kind of thing you're keeping track of, and Hillary fanatics certainly are. In a recent article by Ta- nehisi Coates in the Atlantic he makes a pretty convincing case that racist reaction against a two-term black president was more a factor in Donald Dump's victory than misogynist reaction against Hillary was. He may not be entirely aware that he made that case, or he may not want to admit it, but he did. Good article for the most part.
Hillary might truly love capitalism too much to call it into question, and she might really believe that campaigning on single-payer health care is as trivial as "promising the public a pony" to paraphrase her words in her book. But loving a thing wouldn't prevent a good politician from criticizing it to win an election. She might have calculated that she didn't need Bernie's voters, but then why blame Bernie for hurting her if his voters didn't matter? So either she was a bad politician or a bad statistician, or a believer in capitalism to a fault, or some permutation of the three.
The fourth non-mutually exclusive possibility is that she sees some value in not offending the financial industry. That's how it seemed to many of us who held absolutely nothing else against her, despite what her fanatical cultists believe.
But her cultists believe a lot of strange things, things even Hillary doesn't believe, at least not most of the time. For example, they believe that criticism of Hillary's new book and of her campaign, and I quote one these cultists, "is really about the idea that neither Hillary as a person nor the coalition she represented has any right to public life."
Jesus Christ, what a persecution complex. At first it reads like teenage self-pity, but no. That is Donald Dump-level wounded narcissism. No, that is the kingdom's subjects identifying their bodies as identical to the body of the king, a wound suffered by the king makes them all bleed. Personally, I, who shamelessly ridicule a few out-of-context parts of the book, and criticized Hillary and her team's performance during the election (because I voted for her and wanted her to win), do not want anything as drastic as for Hillary, and least of all the coalition she represented, to disappear from public life. I want more of that coalition in public life. There are times I would have liked for Hillary to die of natural causes, such as a natural meeting with a piano falling out a window, but I felt the same about John Kerry, maybe more so. And when I'm reading tweets from her superstitious fanatics, I want THEM to die of natural causes, like salmonella, salmonella, or salmonella, but then there are also times I want MYSELF to die of natural causes. It's nothing personal.
It's not funny, it's sad and annoying and tiresome to read their garbage, such as: "Everything she predicted is coming true. She's like Cassandra and we refused to listen." The mind sputters, the eyes blink in disbelief. The lips cannot form a jibe vicious enough to deliver the quantity of humiliation under which such a person should properly be buried. These are the breast-beating words of repentant sinners drowning as they watch Noah's ark float away. How much do you have to hate yourself to think that Dump's current racism was singularly foretold in a warning you didn't heed, even though you were supposedly an awake progressive with the active faculties of a conscious person? What the hell is wrong with you? "We did not heed the words of the prophet, and now our temple is destroyed and we are in bondage to Babylon, and yea, we weep."
What this is really about, and now I'm claiming my speculation as fact, is Hillary's direct line to God. For God gave us Hillary, and she warned that if we did not love her with sufficient fervor, a pumpkin-colored racist would bring ten plagues upon our land. And she came down from the mountain and saw that Bernie had made them a Golden Pony and the people did worship the Golden Pony that Bernie made. And she became sick at heart on seeing this stiff-necked, backsliding people worshiping the Golden Pony of Bernie, and she slunk off into the woods like a chagrined raccoon and worked on her book in which she would write many complaints. And lo, God brought the hurricane and the earthquake and the wildfires and hardened Dump's heart, because the people did not love Hillary enough.
The idea that Hillary's special devotees are suffering to a gut-wrenching, soul-searing degree the rest of us opposed to Dump are not is bizarrely self-centered. She was a politician and she lost, and we didn't want Dump, and now we have him. And it's a disaster. And that's all there is to it. Her loss is a symptom of a lot of things, but if it's a symptom of insufficient worship, then it's probably for the best. People shouldn't worship flawed candidates like they were Joan of Arc, who incidentally suffered bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. If you love Hillary, let her go. If she comes back, I'll frickin shoot myself. PS: Hillary says if you really love her, you'll eat raw chicken left on the counter overnight.
This has been the Moment of Truth. Good day!