Hillary Clinton Casually Suggests Bernie Sanders Not Messiah, Which Is Just Fucking Rude
Happy book release day, Hillary!
Today is the day! It's the scheduled release date for Hillary Clinton's new book, These Words Will Enrage Certain Weirdos, And It's Entirely Unclear Why , and we're writing about Hillary Clinton again! Yes, we wrote about her yesterday, and this morning, but we're following up either A) just to annoy you, B) because we like her or C) a savory combination of A and B.
For serious, though, Hillz was on the CBS "Sunday Morning" television program this weekend, and she gave a good interview, so we decided to share this bit she said about Bernie Sanders. We know, we're supposed to be harmoniously healing from the primary and never saying a bad thing about Bernie because he is the king of us and people concerned with the future of the Democratic Party shouldn't ever point out that Bernie isn't even a Democrat, or that he's made clear he doesn't give a solitary fuck about the party.
(Obligatory sidenote, for saying something nice about Bernie Sanders: Single-payer healthcare is GREAT! We are glad all kinds of Democratic senators are hopping on the train with him, presenting a united front on an issue that really does unite us, even if maundering hacks like Chris Cillizza and Joe Scarborough never can seem to figure out what Democrats are for. And we are glad for the passion Sanders inspired in lots of people! OK that's enough for now.)
In the clip, Hillary puts her deplorable foot in her mouth by saying the following thing is true, just because it happens to be true:
"I won a landslide victory in the primary."
WHOA WHOA WHOA, HILDEGARD OF BENGHAZI, WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING RIGHT NOW? Isn't it a proven fact that Hillary #RIGGED the primary by getting early endorsements and convincing the base of the Democratic party to like her more, to the point that several million more people voted for her? That is unfair and unkind.
Let's have a full quote:
I know what it's like to win and I know what it's like to lose. And when I lost to Barack Obama, I immediately turned around, I endorsed him, I worked for him, I convinced my supporters to work for him. I didn't get the same respect from my primary opponent. And a lot of his supporters continued to harass and go after my supporters, all the time.
And that feeds in, I think, to the whole sexism and misogyny part of this campaign. I had large groups of supporters who had to be private because if they lifted their head up online, if they were responding on a YouTube comment chain or on Twitter or something, they were just attacked, and the attacks were so sexist about "well you're supporting a woman because you're a woman!" [...]
I think a lot of what he churned up in the primary campaign was very hurtful in the general election against me. [...] He doesn't disown the things they say about ... some of my favorite Democrats, people like Kamala Harris, who is out there speaking up and speaking out and she's being attacked from the left. Enough!
You know, if you don't want to support Democrats, then go somewhere else, but if you are willing to work with us, we're gonna have disagreements. We're going to be pushing and pulling to get to the right solutions. I've been for universal healthcare coverage my entire adult life. I've worked to achieve it. And we got closer than we ever had with the Affordable Care Act. I was defending it, he wanted to start over. We were at 90% coverage. I thought that was significant.
This is just ... true. Goddammit, Hillary, stop it with your quote-unquote "REALITY." How many times did we hear about people "voting with their vaginas" during the primary?Many . How many times have we pushed back against insane, out-of-left-field attacks on Kamala Harris? HERE and HERE are two examples of that.
During the 2008 Democratic primary, if you were around for that, things got VICIOUS. There was a particularly obnoxious online movement of Hillary supporters called the PUMAs (PartyUnity,MyAss -- sound familiar?) and they were GRRR and ARGH and threatening to blow everything up because Hillary Clinton had lost the primary fair and square. She did not put up with that shit from her own people. She showed up, she embraced Barack Obama wholeheartedly , as personally painful as it must have been for her.
(She details this in the early pages of her book Hard Choices , which you can buy along with your copy of What Happened , if you haven't yet done so!)
If you dive into the numbers, it actually seems that fewer Sanders supporters rejected Hillary than Hillary supporters rejected Obama in 2008. (Like we said, that primary was BRUTAL. It also should give us hope for < insert platitude here about time healing all wounds >.) So that's good!
But how nice would it have been if Bernie Sanders had really fought for Hillary Clinton? How much could he have helped prevent the little situation we're in right now where, despite Hillary winning the popular vote by millions, 77,000 voters in the Rust Belt were able to hand the election to Donald Trump? We are just saying.
Candidates and politicians have a lot of power to move their supporters. This is why we constantly demand Donald Trump disavow his white supremacist Nazi adorers. How much difference would it make, now, if Bernie stood next to his colleague Kamala Harris, in a mutual display of "Knock that shit off, assholes"? We are just asking questions.
In other terrible Hillary news, she told USA Today that she's "convinced" the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in some way to win, which is also obviously true, but GOD, HILLARY, WHY CAN'T YOU JUST ADMIT YOU LOST BECAUSE YOU'RE SHRILL AND UNLIKABLE AND A FAKE CRIER AND PROBABLY HAVE PNEUMONIA AT ALL TIMES?
Gee willikers.
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[ CBS ]
teabaggers got elected by a fundamentally racist. Inch of reactionary idiots who never understood the purpose of government much less how it works. I don't really know what a left wing equivalent of the TP would present as it's goals that would be substantially different from what the mainstream Democrats espouse. Unless Eat the Rich becomes a literal thing. Granted anonymous, corporate money is a ethically dangerous ingredient in any political system, but that requires an much needed overhaul of the whole election funding system. Which is more complicated than I feel like going into at the moment.These days I'm thinking Bernie (who is my Senator and whom I voted for in the Primary) appealed to people, young people especially because he spoke loudly and encouragingly about their concerns. He didn't necessarily say how they were going to accomplish them. Let's label him with the "Angry Young Man" archetype. I say young because angry old men prefer the status quo. Hillary Clinton on the other hand, as always been more pragmatic. Apparently people find that boring, and uninspiring and off putting somehow. Let's call Hillary "The Wise Old woman who lives in that spooky hut in the woods." I seem to have wandered a bit there.I agree the return to "moderate/centerist" Third Way nonsense is a non-starter. I think, I hope, the Democratic Party has wished up to the fact you can't continue to be the reasonable adult in the room and deal with spoiled children as thought hey were adults too. The trick though, is how to get stuff done without resorting to the same "I'll burn it down if I don't get my way." behavior. The gerrymandering is done at the state and local level. You can't fix anything at a national level without taking those offices. I may be completely wrong, but smart people want to know a head of time what the plan is, how does it work, what are the pros and cons. Do you equate that with being moderate?ETA I got distracted by external forces at the end. Hopefully we can type at each other again later and clarify bits and pieces.
I'm going to disagree a bit with the position that Bernie Sanders didn't say how to accomplish them. He posed how to fund tuition free college with a speculation tax on Wall Street transactions. He said he would raise income taxes to fund the Medicare for All bill.
Hillary Clinton put her policy ideas and details out there but she didn't really have a plan about how to bring Republicans to the table either.
I can agree to certain extent that the ''burn everything down'' motto is not a way to govern but I don't believe that Hillary Clinton is the wise pragmatist that everyone touts her to be. She took up legislation and policy positions that were terrible for the American people. She's changed her positions so many times to appear pragmatic but the devil is always in the details.
Republicans hate her as much as they hate Bernie Sanders. If she was elected she would be in the exact same position that Barack Obama was. So even if she had a detailed game plan, she wasn't going to get it passed without doing some shady compromising like Barack Obama did.
Plenty of news articles have already shown that her and Bernie Sanders have voted the same way on legislation about 93% of the time. Where they differed was on immigration policy details, military intervention, and granting bank bailouts.
I know there are smart people who believe that Hillary Clinton was the least of two evils. I voted for her, just like I voted for Barack Obama. But there are also smart people who also didn't want Hillary Clinton in office to continue the same neo-liberal policies that has not benefited the average American worker. She was going to expand military use, rub shoulders with Wall Street and continue to give us watered down Republican light policy solutions because of her connections to high dollar industry donors.
I don't think it was unreasonable to be against the continuation of those policies. But we can agree to disagree.