Nate Silver has written a post on Hillary’s chances for 2016. I find it the same kind of insufferable “she ran a strategic mess in 2008 and thought she was the pre-ordained frontrunner but now that we’ve taken her down, completely humiliated her and the Republicans have lost interest in beating the shit out of her reputation, which is strengthened by her executive level management skills that we didn’t require of Obama because he had Penis Years, she is now acceptable to us as a candidate for 2016″*. You know, the same meme diarrhea we’ve seen from all of the Democratic operatives since 2007. Lots of mythology about the blinding brilliance of the Obama campaign that overlooks the facts that he was carried over the threshold to the nomination by the DNC because his Wall Street backers were willing to throw lots of money at the party. Lots of lying about Hillary’s popularity and her “polarizing” personality.
This is bullshit. I don’t care what his success is as a statistician or how many people would vote for Hillary grudgingly or un. What’s good for the country is not necessarily good for Hillary. I also don’t think any position is worth that much humiliation and kowtowing. It’s likely that she will have to kiss a lot of asses and promise a strictly hands-off policy to the corporate and finance industry overlords. And you know what? As much as I would have liked to see her as president, I don’t think it’s worth it if you can’t be your own person and set your own goals. I will always be of the opinion that that’s why she didn’t get the nod in 2008. She wasn’t willing to play the same kind of game as Obama. Well, we know what kind of game Obama was playing so he must have been courted and pressured very heavily by the finance industry gurus who have gone virtually unpunished for ruining our lives. They found his ethics and values to be quite flexible and much more to their liking. Can we stop the nauseating hagiography of Obama’s 2008 campaign?? When the historians write about what really happened, the young, male graduate student factions of the Democratic party are going to look like the self-interested Obama fluffers that they turned out to be. In fact, next election season, read whatever those young Ezra’s and Yglesiases and Kevin Drums say and carefully consider the primary candidates they loathe. As far as I’m concerned, the new, young and almost completely male “progressive” opinion makers have shot whatever credibility they ever possessed when they signed on with Obama.
Make no mistake, one of the parties is going to try to run another historic candidate in the very near future. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is a woman. If it is, I sincerely hope that the Democratic voters take a good hard look at her record and pay very close attention to what the media is saying about her. There is sure to be a lot of hype around the next woman candidate and it will be very hard to resist.
But let’s not get sucked in again, OK? The last thing we need is to get another stealth candidate like Harvard educated, financier toe-kissing Obama. It’s the policies that matter above anything else. That was the only reason I voted for Hillary in the 2008 primary. The fact that she had lady parts was only icing on the cake. I suspect that posts like Silver’s are just setting us up for disappointment because Hillary will not run and that the next “historic” candidate is going to be another Trojan Horse. Let’s not let it happen again.
* Beating down a politician by using constant humiliation and misogyny ala Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove album cover is a weird criterion for making a presidential candidate acceptable. It says more about the guys who had a baitball frenzy in 2008 than Hillary Clinton. I don’t think you guys know how over-the-top horrible you looked. We won’t forget who you are and we’d be nuts to ever take you seriously.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Barack Obama, financiers, Hillary Clinton, Nate Silver |
The Confluence 
One thing I’ll never let again is be sucked in. I don’t care about records anymore. Anyone that either of the two parties allows to even run has to have the 1% stamp of approval. Even Sarah Palin who wanted to make a run this time, was pushed away by the Rs BEFORE any primaries for being too populist. I doubt I’ll ever vote for a D or R for the rest of my life. And I know nobody else stands a chance. If they were, the 1% would get to them too.
Oops! I triggered the moderation thinghy by naming a R woman candidate. if you don’t get to it, the short of it: elections are a farce. never getting sucked into it, period.
I agree. A total farce. And I’m not sure where we go from there.
A sneaky way to evade moderation radar is to respell phonetically the name in question. Like this for example . . . Sahra Pei-lin.
I’m not convinced that elections are accurate – maybe they never were. I think it will take voter ID and ink marks for me to believe the actual voting is fair. Next would be paper trail and openness to ensure honest counting.
“Voter ID” would be used to stop whole pre-defined classes of people from voting at all. Indelible ink marks could be useful.
A “paper trail” by itself is meaningless and worthless. The same pre-hacked digital machines which would deliver a fake total would also deliver a pre-hacked fake paper trail. Only a “legal paper ballot” would have any value . . . a paperboard sheet/card of some kind on which analog meatspace marks are made by the analog meatspace voter. They can then be digitally read-tabulated if one pleases . . . but if suspicions arise, then the Legal Paper Ballots with the Legal Ink Marks on them would still exist in Meatspace to be analogly counted by
Meatspace human ballot counters in Meatspace.
Anything digital is pre-fraudulent by definition and of course comPLETEly ILLegitimate.
“If elections would bring real change they’d be illegal” Democracy is an illusion to divide us. Instead of 99% you now have the 53% (who think they’re rich) against the 47% whom they want to dispossess. The percentages are purely fictional btw, but the beliefs are accurate. I think from the other side, you’d have the 63% who think themselves smarter and better who think everything is game to silence the stupid old poor 37%. And of course, there’s the 1% who directs the ‘narrative” and laughs all the way to the bank.
I’m not convinced Hillary Clinton will run. I won’t be convince until I hear it from her lips alone. I do suspect all this Hillary adoration is nothing more than a distraction–look over here, something bright and shiny–so we don’t zero in on how the country is being flattened and extracted by the powers-that-be.
True too that if she were to run with her hands tied, oaths of allegiance sworn to the MOTU, then we’d only be looking at a repeat of another Obama Administration–death by slow poison. Though I believe that HRC is made of firmer stuff, history has proven that those who ‘turn from the gods’ are frequently punished severely.
Under the circumstances, I don’t know why she would want the job, putting her neck into the guillotine and hoping no one released the blade. Accidentally, of course.
We shall see in due time.
Amen.
I’m really sick and tired of the speculation on Hillary’s run in 2016.
Do we have to go back and point out that she was the most qualified candidate of the democratic party in 2008 and we could have had her then? but noo, keep the boys club intact…
Is nothing but BS at its worst…
Nancy Pelosi threatening to pressure her to quit was over the top for me, and the ‘Party’ leaders not counting Hillary Clinton’s votes and giving her delegates to Obama was unforgivable if you believe in the ideal of the democratic process. Still with all that rigging Hillary went on and won the popular vote and Nancy Pelosi, David Axelrod, Donna Brazil, Obama and Howard Dean know what they did was wrong.
The press to this day hasn’t the journalistic courage to tell the truth to the American WOMEN about President Obama’s Stupak Executive Order and what that executive act did to their reproductive care.
Wouldn’t Hillary – by virtue of her enormous popularity – have some real clout where party issues were concerned? If I were in her position I’d be making some hefty demands of the party in exchange for agreeing to run again. Demand #1 – Grow a Spine.
You would think. But I wouldn’t be surprised if those assholes think they would be doing her a big favor by letting her run.
Then at the last minute, they would replace her with someone else who is newer and male and say “sorry, but this isn’t 1992”
Would they do that?
Sure they would.
But the point is, no matter who they throw up as a historic candidate, the candidate should get a lot more scrutiny than Obama did no matter if it’s a Hispanic, openly gay, Asian, female or any combination thereof. No more passes to historic politicians who make back room deals with obscenely rich sociopathic plutocrats.
Obysmal has been doing the elites bidding since he figured out how much could be gotten from going along to get along, and he figured that out a long, long time ago. His Indonesian stepfather was steeped in that weltanschauung. You can go a long way in life on that belief. That and utter self-justification. Right to the top. (Saw a bio of Steven Seagal that made his complete selfishness repellently clear. But it also took him to the top.)
In many environments, there is no better foundation for advancement than an unshakeable belief in your right to advance. Does anyone who’s familiar with his story think Jon Corzine was ever, in any circumstances, the best person for the job at hand? Good lord. Before he was exposed in the MF Global theft, he was pimping the Grand Bargain to lift his chances at Treasury when Geithner (presumably) left.
Exactly, ‘Letting her run”…they (including Pelosi) have the male patriarchy attitude towards women so I don’t expect any respect…none was shown during 2008.
Politics is absolutely not about respect. It’s probably the dirtiest contact sport outside of outright war.
Beyond all that, frankly, I think she’s something of a disappointment as a Secretary of State. Where is her climate change treaty? What happened to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Surely those cannot be considered as anything other than failures? It seems to me that her functions as SecState were limited to things that the rest of the foreign policy team was not interested in. Or managing consequences of disasters caused by the DOD. Or being the Colin Powell to Panetta’s Rumsfeld in her effort to encircle Iran and China through diplomacy.
She should have stayed outside the tent and provided the “loyal opposition” in the hopes of changing Obama admin policies. Instead she jumped on board and became part of the problem. She’d have to explicitly campaign on a platform of undoing all the “grand bargains” Obama is about to foist on us to get me interested in voting for her.
>>She should have stayed outside the tent and provided the “loyal opposition” in the hopes of changing Obama admin policies.
This is incorrect. This is something the party activists should have done by adopting her as their loyal opposition. But admitting they had made a mistake with Obama was too embarrassing for them. They’ll never admit they were wrong.
As for her performance as SOS, maybe you should ask the countries she has visited if their opinion of American diplomacy is getting better. Or ask the State Department employees if their morale has improved since the “Take no prisoners” Bushies were in power.
In any case, she’s not running so you can get off your soapbox.
It’s not incorrect, it’s his opinion, which I share. Hillary showed her hand when she accepted the SecS position. However, everything I’ve read says that Obama runs foreign policy. and Hillary is very much his subordinate. I think she could have done more from the senate, but I also think she found her junior status to a domineering Charles Schumer galling. The joke she made about Schumer not understanding why NY needs two senators is very on the mark. Kirsten Gillibrand seems very adept at working with and around him. Lord knows what she thinks privately.
Gillibrand, btw, has been tipped as the first woman president. We’ll live, we’ll see.
A Secretary of State cannot “invent” a Treaty or anything else which a President does not want invented or advanced. The lack of such a treaty is Obama’s lack.
My point is, and I can see we may not have much basis for agreement here, Hillary took the job. She didn’t have to, in any sense of the phrase, but she agreed to be Obama’s SecS. And she has done his bidding. Whatever crappy, evil policy/implementation he decreed in her SecS domain, she administered and implemented. We didn’t accept that from people we tried as war criminals, we shouldn’t accept it from anyone. We all profess the belief, but we violate it to make exceptions and excuses.
I think it’s just a transparent attempt to get us to go along with whatever Obama and his starve-the-middle-class-even-though-it-makes-no-sense crew push for in the short term. Shut up and eat your cat food, because later, much later, we’ll give you Hillary. Hillary? She might just possibly have had a chance to fix a thing or two in 2008, maybe, but 2016? Things will be way too far gone by then. And what’s with the endless cult of personality? I’m not voting for a person, I’m voting for a specific platform. (Well, actually, I may not be voting at all, since I may be one of the ones who gets killed off by austerity – austerity (meaning cuts in what I paid for) put in place by my own party no less.)
Actually, I don’t know *what* this is. Maybe the are starting to have just a teensy bit of regret about killing Hillary. I suspect that’s the case with MoDo who in unguarded moments expresses genuine distress about how the whole misogynism tactic has played out.
Let’s just say that they are ambivalent. But there’s really no point to bringing it up now when there’s nothing that can be done about holding anyone’s feet to the fire in the past election.
The baggies know how to force an issue: they take no prisoners and they’re not afraid to lose. Their effect has been largely subsumed into the Republican base. The professional astroturfers did a number on them, pulling them into groups loaded with Republican regulars run under the banners of tea bagging “organizations.” Clever. That’s why Armey can walk away. He’s done his job.
Can you translate?
Dick Armey and some of his consultative bretheren did a MoveOn with the baggies. MoveOn and the Dream are Dem party orgs that siphon off attention and energy that could have been turned to independent agenda and action but have been put under the yoke of the Democratic party. One group has been sent off to work on overturning Citizens United, which might be a worthy pursuit, altho I’m coming to think not, but sucks up attention and energy in a very difficult and long term project. The Dem party regulars offer advice and conventions, just to see how things are going and make sure the Dream groups are headed in the approved direction: well within the boundaries of the reservation, as I think of it.
The term is co-optation and the RC Church has raised it to a science and an art form. Heard of evangelical Catholics lately? The professional Dems are working their insider membership hocus pocus with restless amateur Dems. Honestly, it rarely fails because people can’t resist the allure of having a place at the table. Being one of the privileged insiders. It’s a con, but as long as they make themselves useful and don’t rock the boat………….
Union workers in Michigan will soon be suffering the consequences of Obama. Notice how he came out all fire and brimstone against the newly passed right to work law. That’s because there is nothing the Federal government can do to over turn it so he can afford to look tough without upsetting his Wall Street masters.
Here’s another Hillary story, “Race for White House Wide Open After Hillary Leaves Office in 2024”
Which has a VERY weird tone, for a New Yorker Hillary story. Is it humor?
Broad humor” “I’m not a betting man, but if I had to guess, I’d say that after eight years of Hillary there will be eight years of Michelle, then eight years each for Chelsea, Sasha, and Malia.”
I wonder if these pundits know people remember and the misogyny was beyond shameful in the 2008 primaries.
Hillary Clinton: Mad As Hell/Bitch
Maybe those pundits, politicians and other backstabbers should receive a copy of the above video with a brief note..to refresh their collective memory. JERKS!!!