If we lose in November, we have people like Digby to thank.
Two times today, she posted about what she imagines to be the typical Trump voter. Naturally, racism played heavily into this image. I’m not linking to them. To be fair, she’s not the only one who does this. Paul Krugman and many, many others do it too.
I’m not going to deny that there are certain Trump supporters who are definitely racists. But she is completely missing the point. Or is she reinforcing it?
Whatever it is she and other lefties think they’re doing, I would advise them to STOP. DOING. IT.
I will spell it out: There are many people on the left and right who are very unhappy with the way government has been run since the financial crisis hit in 2008. But as soon as they open their mouths to lodge a protest or complaint, the left rolls out this meme that they MUST be racists.
That makes people who are already angry even angrier. Because what if their complaints are legitimate? You are giving them no where to complain and making them feel like they can’t get their point across.
That’s why they are turning to people like Trump. He’s promising to not shush them up. He’s going to give them a voice. And the thing that Fox News has been pounding into its viewers’ heads is that political correctness is wrong. That doesn’t mean racism isn’t wrong. What is wrong is for one group of people to use race as a tool to stifle dissenting voices.
I don’t happen to agree with Fox News that it’s Ok to be a racist ignoramus but it is certainly more than ok to make your grievances known without having to feel like you’ve become an instant bigot overnight when you celebrated the Civil Rights movement in your youth.
This is what the talking points arm of the Democratic party has been doing. They are turning a lot of people into instant bigots. It’s guilt by association. It’s not going to work. In fact, it is going to make the typical Trump supporter even more determined to shove it up your ass. Not all of Trump’s supporters are going to the rallies for the policies. They’re going for the empowerment. They’re going because it confounds and pisses off liberals. The more you lose your shit over them going and pointing out the racism, the more pumped they get about their candidate because the goal is to make you angry and it is working.
No, it is not rational, but it is very human.
Now, there are a lot more women in this country than there are african americans or hispanic people or any other group you can name. Women are NOT a minority and they shouldn’t be a “special interest” group. They are the majority of citizens in this country and the fact that so many of us are underpaid compared to men and that our issues and concerns are so downplayed on Op/Ed pages and in Congress should be a cause for general alarm. Because when the majority of people in our country are treated like second class citizens, that means it holds down all of the people who are dependent on them. Sexism is definitely a huge problem. But if the left keeps accusing everyone on the other side of the aisle as racists, then that means that they in turn will accuse everyone on our side of using a <fill in the blank> card whenever we want to shut down debate.
It will backfire on Hillary Clinton.
The typical Trump supporter is not as insecure as the typical lefty about being called names. We’ve been calling them stupid, uneducated, low-information, hicks and bigots for a long time. And some of that is definitely true. But they have Fox in their corner where typical Clintonistas have, well, absolutely nobody in the media. It’s a very lopsided situation. If you go after the typical Trump guy, he won’t give a shit. His cheering section will just keep going.
On the other hand, if even one little thing Trump says has even a tenth of a nanoparticle of credibility with respect to Hillary and her supporters, the New York Times is going to be all over it. She has no cheering section. That is no exaggeration. We’re it. Well, us, a few other blogs and some very determined people on Twitter.
Ok, nevermind. Just do it your way. The jini’s already out of the bottle. Keep it up. Force them to turn the card business around on us.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If you haven’t read this post by Digby at Hullabaloo on the media gearing up to use the 2008 election campaign tactics as a way to crush women politicians in 2016, go read it now. I’ll wait.
In this one post, Digby comes so close to seeing the political landscape the way we did back in 2008. What she writes makes perfect sense but at the last moment, the thought-stopping conditioning springs into action and she calls anyone who draws the obvious conclusions racists.
I don’t have time to clear this up for her but I will say that we called the phenomenon that she is describing as “Penis Years” back in 2008. That is, no woman, no matter how much experience she has, regardless of her accomplishments, is as qualified as a man who simply wants the job. The presence of a penis adds eight to ten years of authority to his CV over any female that gets uppity enough to get in his way. This is hardly relegated to politics. It’s rampant in the private sector as well.
As for the racism aspect of all this, that’s in the mind of the beholder and that was the whole point of the 2008 campaign exercises. There are some Democrats who saw two potential interest group constituencies and through clever messaging, made sure that sexism was combined with the desire to finish the Civil Rights movement. It’s called marketing.
I think we can all agree after six long, painful years that Obama was not ready to be president, that his candidacy was rushed by some self-interested financial industry donors and that he has been the most conservative Democratic president of our lifetimes. He got the nomination using Penis Years reasoning and his campaign was ruthless in describing anyone who opposed him as a racist. The fact that some political scientists are making a bungling mess of pointing out this reality doesn’t make it less true. The legacy of the 2008 “Bros vs Hos” campaign is going to haunt the first woman nominee no matter who she is. We will be lead to wonder whether another inexperienced, less than competent in a time of economic crisis president is going to be shoved down our throats to satisfy some politically correct teachable moment.
You can pretend this is not true but when both Amanda Marcotte and Digby start writing posts about Penis Years in the lead up to 2016, they are actually acknowledging this fact.
Looted museum in Baghdad circa 2003. We were the superglue.
One thing the Democratic activists love to crow about is how they’re not like conservatives who think that conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
Disclaimer: I am not a conservative, not a Republican and actually align myself with the left. But for some peculiar reason that I can’t quite figure out, I have been the vocal outlier on this tiny asteroid in the blogosphereic Oort Belt. There are a few like minded dust specks out here but the left seems to be dominated by people who screwed up in the most spectacular fashion in 2008 and yet still insist that they are the smartest, most peace loving, accomplished citizens ever. Let’s just call them the left’s very serious people.
So, the left’s very serious people, LVSP for short, are wringing their hands about ISIS because when push came to shove, Obama did what most American presidents have done in the past. He turned the FUD up to 11. I’m glad I don’t have cable so I can safely ignore all of the hysterical arguments for war in Iraq again. And let me make this clear, I was against the war in Iraq in 2003 because none of it sounded plausible to me. Al Qaeda had the ability to strike the US in 45 minutes? As if. There was clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction? Please. What do you take me for? I think we entered the hall of shame with Freedom Fries, though. It was about that time that the US put the screws to raw milk cheeses from France, which was really uncalled for.
Smart people knew that there was no reason to go blow up Iraq. It was just Dick Cheney’s wet dream. He and his buddies wanted to cash in big on government military contracts and private oil contracts. They raced into Baghdad, allowed the ruin of some of the most important archaeological sites in human history, destroyed the government and then set about playing some kind of right wing version of Monopoly. Mission Accomplished indeed.
It’s no wonder that so many of us hated the Iraq War and all the damage it did to real human beings. It was greedy, careless, ruthless, selfish, expensive and stupid.
OUR side would do it differently. WE would get out of Iraq. That was THE most important thing. Because OUR side was for peace and prosperity and turning the other cheek and not making war or spending lots of money to blow things up. And THAT’S why so many young, ideologically pure, left wing doves voted for Obama over the candidate with the lady parts. Heck, it’s why Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize before he had even done anything. (I’d still like to know what nefarious group nominated him. They were clearly up to something.)
In any case, peace would rein, oops, sorry, was doin’ a Bush there, reign in Iraq and the people would cheer our exit and get back to their shawarma and all would be hunky dory. Because that is what the left is all about, getting out of stupid wars because they are stupid. And so it was.
And that’s where the left made it’s mistake. As Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker has said in two Fresh Air interviews, here and here, Iraq is an artificial state. The only way it stayed together after the fall of Saddam Hussein was by having an American presence there acting as an intermediary between all of the disparate groups. The Sunnis have a persecution complex, the Shias are being helped by Iran and the Kurds, currently the only group in Iraq that has its sh&* together, just wants out. Bummer about that whole landlocked Kurdistan thing.
In his interview on Fresh Air in June this year, Filkins reported that Obama lost interest in Iraq early and just wanted to pull Americans out. The timing of the pull out, before the 2012 election year, seems to me to have been a way of pacifying the lefties and keeping them quiet, but I’m only making a guess based on past performance. al-Maliki was getting pressure from Iran to get the US out of Iraq but he was hoping to negotiate some kind of deal with Obama for a residual presence. But the White House wasn’t giving any guidance to the State Department. So, when the last troops pulled out, the American superglue that held the whole place together fell apart.
Now, I’m really sorry if the left’s very serious people, like Digby, didn’t see this coming. Certainly, she’s smart enough to figure out what the fall out of the troop withdrawal would likely be. But the left seems to be of the opinion that peace can never fail, it can only be failed. All those Iraqis should have gotten along when we left. It was in their own best interests.
More likely, peace needed to be a long term investment whether we liked it or not. It’s not surprising that Obama had way too much on his plate to think this through properly. But as I have observed before, Obama governs in campaign mode and his policies rarely have the deep thought and execution that is required from the most powerful man in the world. Experience probably would have helped here but we didn’t elect the guy for his experience, did we? No, we hired him because he was not like a powerful politician.
Too bad for us. Believe me, it doesn’t give me any pleasure to keep pointing out what a disaster 2008 was. No, indeed, the suffering here and abroad just never seems to end and we will come to regret our choices for generations to come. You can make excuses for him and throw accusations around that the CIA is out to get him but it won’t change the fact that he’s directly responsible for the urgency of the situation in Iraq because he neglected this problem and the United States’ role in keeping the country together.
If you don’t take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
We’re about to find out.
One more thing: Could it be that the left’s very serious people are really upset by the fact that the right wing has gotten smart about Obama and has given up pushing the ridiculous right wing memes, like birtherism, for an accurate assessment of Obama’s performance? Because if they’re latching on to accuracy, the Democrats better have a better defense than just whining about how unfair it is to blame Obama for everything he does. It’s not a winning formula.
Digby has a post about a rather nasty but extremely to the point ad that the Republicans are running. It’s of a woman discussing her bad boyfriend and how he made promises he didn’t keep and now she wants nothing to do with his friends. And, you know, we’ve used that same metaphor here at The Confluence. The other one is “Don’t hand me no lines and keep your hands to yourselves”.
The difference is that we’re liberals. Yep, we’ve never been onboard the Obama bandwagon because we knew he was bad news. That didn’t stop the other Democrats from jumping into bed with him. I would have distanced myself a long, long time ago if I had been a Democrat running for Congress but who listens to us?
Oh, that’s right. We’re liberals. Wait, I already said that. But you know, you don’t have to be a knit-your-own-sandals type to be bashed by your own side as being insufficiently servile to the Obama mystique.
It’s sad that I have to keep repeating it though because suddenly we’ve become Rush Limbaugh listeners. How did that happen?? I’ve never listened to Rush in my life except in those clips at Media Matters- that I chipped in to help fund back in 2006.
The Democrats have got a real problem. There is a war on women, no question about that. But they have done nothing to fight back. In fact, they made it worse by tying themselves to Obama and his campaign, which, incidentally, was the most sexist political campaign that I have ever seen.
I don’t know how many women this ad will appeal to. I am of the opinion that “friends don’t let friends vote Republican” but Democrats are not giving me a whole lot of material to work with.
If I were Democrats, I’d be uncomfortable too but blaming the victim is uncalled for. But they are so taken in by their own self-delusion that they just don’t get it.
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Here’s a little reminder of what they put us through to get Obama into office:
I’ve come to think of this in a slightly different way. I think this was decided back in Denver in 2008. The primary campaign was a near tie with Clinton continuing to win races all the way up to the end. (In any previous presidential campaign there would have definitely been a convention challenge to such a tight outcome.) It featured two important “firsts” with an African American and a woman competing for the same prize. It was very emotional. The political arguments among the two camps were fierce but they were both coming from the same center-left policywing of the party, which means there was an agreement, somewhat by default, that this agenda was the preferred agenda of the voters. Both sides fought tooth and nail for the same policies.
In essence, the result of that 2008 near tie vote was that Obama got to go first with the understanding that Clinton would automatically get the nomination 8 years later. What this means is that (barring unforeseen circumstances)there will have been no left wing challenge in presidential races for 16 years and I think that suits the Party and its rich donors just fine. They hate primaries. And since they will have had 16 uninterrupted years of preferred policy, even as the voters get to feel the inspiration of the two historic firsts, why would anyone rock the boat?
Progressives might have been able to leverage that fierce competition in 2008 but they got caught up in the emotion just like everyone else so there wasn’t any real ideological challenge. Unfortunately, it probably ended up being the last primary in which they could have had a voice for a very long time. Too bad.
Savor that for a moment. Just an instant and no more. What Digby is saying is what all of us Clintonistas have known for 6 years: the primary was a virtual dead heat and at any other convention, there would have been a floor fight. But *someone(s)* didn’t want a real primary. Those someones found it more expedient to ram Obama down our throats whether or not the country wanted it or not and they were willing to rig the nomination to get it. I suspect those someones were the same people who looked a bit further into the future and didn’t want any cramdowns on securitized mortgages or policies that would force the medical/insurance business to negotiate on costs.
Ok, the moment has passed. Digby will never admit to being one of us because she is a chickenshit. This is as close as we’ll ever get to the notion that Digby and the rest of them were perfectly aware of what was going on with the primary. They’re no different than we are except they said nothing. I think there is a Edmund Burke quote about that. Come to think of it, how do we know that Digby isn’t just messing with our heads? Maybe the slight acknowledgement that the Clintonistas were right is meant to soften us up to whatever happens in 2014-2016? I don’t trust anyone who didn’t pipe up in 2008 or 2012.
But I do not think that anyone offered Hillary a deal. Ok, maybe someone in the Obama campaign floated it at one time but Hillary is not stupid. I’ll go to the grave believing that it was Hillary who asked for State before someone locked her into a political grave as VP. (Biden who??) If my hypothesis is correct, she was smart enough to know that she didn’t want to become permanently associated with Obama’s domestic policies on the financial crisis and health care. That would mean she was shrewd and also not totally onboard with what she saw coming.
No, the reason why Hillary’s name has been floated for the last 6 years as Obama’s successor is because that’s what Obama’s backers want everyone to focus on. (You read it here first, folks.) The push to defer everyone’s gratification is not for Hillary’s sake. It’s so that we will placidly go along with every banker and medical/insurer friendly policy they cook up. We are lead to think that when Hillary is in office, it will all be ok. It’s merely a formality. We had to let the African American go before the woman, that’s all, as if we were all so shallow and simple-minded and easily lead to believe that being the first something is more important than being good at your job. (Insert picture of the Grinch lying to Cindi-Lou Who who is no more than two) Just wait until 2016 and there will be another historic victory for the Democrats, as if competence and good policies have no place in this strategy. We will finally get the Democrat we wanted in the first place in 2008, instead of the guy who is in the White House now who ramped up the exploitation of everyone not making a living off their investments.
And if my “Promote Deferred Gratification- Pull the Rug Out From Under Everyone Who Waited for 2016 Strategy” (Let’s call it the Cindi Lou Who Strategy for short) is correct, then maybe Obama and Clinton were not as close in policy as everyone was initially lead to believe, right? Because if they were as identical as the Obama contingent says they were, it wouldn’t have mattered which one was nominated in 2008. But we know intuitively that this isn’t true because rigging the nomination in Obama’s favor in 2008 was maniacally important to someone(s). We saw it happen. And those people knew what was coming in 2008 (read Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short) which suggests that it wasn’t a matter of electability. Anyone who lived through September 2008 was going to prefer the Democrat to the Republican and, Clinton, had she been nominated, would have won in a landslide. She would have been the most visible reminder of the last prosperous economic times and good government that we had. Given the series of events in 2008, one might almost be tempted to believe that the nomination of Obama was to ensure that a real Democrat would *not* become president. So, who’s zooming who?
I have no illusions as to whether these Obama backers want Hillary to run in 2016. If they feel that their new policies are concretized and their ability to harvest money from us has no chance of being deterred, they probably won’t care who gets into the White House. It won’t matter if it’s a Democrat, Republican or The Rent Is Too Damn High candidate.
This is Hillary Clinton’s reality and the reality by which the left should judge her fitness to run in 2016. If she is just going to be a placeholder, why vote for her? On the other hand, if she is going to represent real change, isn’t it likely that the Obama backers are going to try to bring her down again? If she’s silenced her critical voice for 6 years in the hopes that she’ll get the nod to run again, she hasn’t done us any favors. A politician who cares about the fate of the middle class and the loss of policies that made us a great nation shouldn’t have gone along with the campaign to defer our gratification for her run 8 long suffering and destructive years down the line. Or maybe she’s going to be a stealth candidate, in which case, no one should or would trust her. The powers that be can’t take that risk and how would the rest of us know for sure what she was up to?
So, there you go, folks. I have no idea what’s in her head and no one else does either, except Bill, I suspect. But the one thing I don’t want in 2016 is to have to vote for a person who said and did nothing to rock the boat for 8 years because she was promised another shot at the nomination.
I am not a stupid woman.
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One final thing: Obama didn’t run against McCain in 2008. His campaign had him running against Sarah Palin, a pretty low bar, when you think about it, considering that his campaign had already softened up the media and American public to accept playing to overt sexism a part of Obama’s rite of passage.
Decreasing the surplus population in Ireland through starvation and homelessness
He’s not the only one. Digby is also cautiously optimistic about how things are going to go. Both of them seem to think that the increase in premiums are only going to affect a small subset of people and everybody knew this from the start, had they been paying attention. They seem to think the people most irked are going to be relatively well off younger people, like entrepreneurs who work for themselves.
But that’s not really true. I’m not surprised that neither Digby or Krugman are seeing who are going to get slammed by Obamacare most severely because it has become almost a habit not to talk about them. I’m referring to the millions of long term unemployed, many of whom are over 50, who are now forced to cobble together some kind of living as self-employed. That affects just about everyone I know who was laid off since 2008. To these people, the premiums are not just a nuisance. They are extremely burdensome. And if Lambert has been reading the tea leaves correctly, lumping these people into the Medicaid pot puts whatever estate they have left at risk. So, to recap, Obamacare is putting an extra burden on these people who are now forced to a.) work for themselves, b.) pay all of the payroll tax by themselves and c.) pay for their own retirements.
Today, Krugman writes that the states that are opting out of the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare are going to create a backlash against Republicans. Oh, if only I could believe it. But I have always felt that the systemic exploitation that our current politicians have allowed to happen over the last 30 years has lead to a repeat of an Irish Potato Famine Scenario, not the beginning of a new Golden Age of rationality and righteous indignation. The right wing noise machine is still strong and the people who get royally screwed by the Medicaid opt out will be portrayed as a bunch of fricking losers who can’t pull their weight in this new economy. They will be spat upon by the people who are only a rung or two up the ladder who are simultaneously terrified it will happen to them and triumphantly crowing about their moral superiority. Yeah, they will look like a bunch of stupid hicks to the rest of us but the message they will be getting is that the world is a random, chaotic, evil place and the only reason they’re surviving is because God favors them, or some such nonsense. That will keep the whip kissers in line, keeping them from raising their hands against their masters, demanding better wages and benefits. If they don’t remain obedient and passive, bad things will happen to them.
It’s not that much different than what happened to the starving Irish against their landlords who owned everything, took everything and rented the rest. Back in the early 19th century, Irish workers had no rights and employers and landlords took full advantage of that. Why would they not? What laws were going to constrain them? When the famine hit, the Irish couldn’t stand up for themselves and the rest of Great Britain acted like they brought it on themselves for being Irish and Catholic. Some of the onlookers even argued that to help them would be wrong and go against God’s plan. A lot of people died before the population dropped sufficiently and the potatoes developed some resistance.
Throwing the over 55’s into Medicaid and taking their property to pay for it is very reminiscent of the workhouse and relief rules the Irish had to contend with. If you had a quarter acre of land, you were not too poor to support yourself. In order to get any kind of relief at all, you had to give that up. Then you were eligible for the workhouse where you might get some food in exchange for losing every other possession you had. In the Medicaid opt-out states, you won’t even get relief. You’ll just get access to the emergency room and bill collectors. Back in the 1840s, most people looked upon this as wretched and bad but the ones who were not suffering put up with it. Opting out of Medicaid is like the landlords pulling down the roofs of starving tenants. It happened and people were both homeless and starving but no one stopped the billhooks.
So, I don’t expect that there will be much backlash against the loss of Medicaid funds in the bible belt states. It’s still a plantation down there where labor is expected to be obedient and pious and if you end up poor and sick, it’s because you didn’t follow the rules or were insufficiently religious. You’ll see. The right wing media and some of the regular media, will continue to reinforce learned helplessness in the public and Americans will start to accept this hardship when the alternative, public options, Medicare for All, cost controls, etc, will start to seem like impossibilities.
In the meantime, the left’s willful ignorance and denial of just how bad Obamacare is going to be is doing them no credit. It is BAD policy. All of the potential problems that the left wants to minimize or deny could have been avoided had the policy been carefully crafted by a president who cared about average Americans and by a Congress who wasn’t rushed to make some really bad concessions.
As for Digby’s silly rationalization that so many lefties were duped by Obama back in 2008 but that she and a few of her friends were not but couldn’t find enough people who agreed with them, that’s incredibly offensive bullshit. WE were here. We still call ourselves “Democrats in Exile”. We saw through Obama and knew what he was because we actually listened to what he was saying. He was not a brilliant politician. His campaign staff simply took advantage of demographic trends and realized that a lot of baby boomers would vote for an African American candidate over a woman because of the period of time when these voters came of age, in the Civil Rights Era. That’s probably why the well off older baby boomers are still in love with Obama. He completes them. The campaign would stampede the rest with fear, vicious misogyny, outright lies about our intelligence and racism and blatant bullying of delegates. Predictably, the activist Democrats acted like the herd animals the campaign psychologists thought they were.
But there was absolutely no truth to the lie that Digby and others are propagating that they couldn’t find like minded Democrats who felt the same way they did about what a fraud Obama was in 2008. We were here and there were a lot of us. We were simply defamed and called racists and Digby and her ilk went along with that characterization because they were cowards who were afraid of guilt by association.
If you don’t stand up against unfair propaganda and you allow the bad guys to weaken your side, you should not be surprised if you find that you too are eventually powerless. I don’t expect that the left will every stop rationalizing about why they invited vampires into their house but I really wish they would start putting more of their energy into getting them out. We don’t have time for silly self delusion. Obamacare is almost upon us and about to take out the Democratic party and what remains of whatever defense we have left.
Addendum:It looks like Glenn Greenwald is public enemy number one for, you know, being doggedly persistent about civil liberties and stuff. It goes without saying that we stand with Glenn against all the nastiness heading his way.
If only Glenn had stood with us five years ago when our hair was on fire when Obama bamboozled everyone, got Hillary to suspend her campaign and then voted for the telecomm immunity bill once he thought his nomination was secure. But of course, we were only stupid, racist, women back then and people like Digby refused to acknowledge our legitimacy or, unbelievably, our existence.
So, even though Glenn was more than happy to jump on Obama’s bandwagon back when all the lights were flashing red, we are going to stick with him no matter what. Because he happens to be right about the intrusion into our privacy and it is wrong to publicly harass and defame people who expose uncomfortable truths and wrongdoing. Glenn is a human being and we do not approve of harassment investigations, personal attacks or dehumanization of him or his family. In this respect, we have been consistent with respect to Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. It is acceptable and morally responsible to criticize unconstitutionality, poor policy and unethical behavior. But we don’t get personal, racist or go after family members because that’s wrong. You can check our archives.
By the way, guess who voted against the telecomm immunity bill back in 2008? Of course, the candidates were otherwise indistinguishable. {{rolling eyes}}
The whole post is just lame but the excuse that there wasn’t a bit of difference between Obama and Clinton is incredibly easy to shoot down:
1.) If there wasn’t any difference between them, why was such a tsunami of money thrown his way in February 2008 after she beat him in the big state primaries on SuperTuesday? Apparently, SOMEBODY thought there was a difference.
2.) If there was no difference, why wouldn’t you go with the person who had the most relevant and comprehensive experience overall? If you were worried about getting things done, wouldn’t it make sense to go with the candidate who might have a clue and be able to hit the ground running on the first day?
3.) If there was no difference, why wouldn’t you go with the female historic candidate who would represent more people overall including voters in the other camp? It was even a winning formula among african americans because half of them are women. I never understood this argument that african americans would walk away from the party if Clinton was nominated. At the worst, I could see half of them walking away. The other half would be thrilled with either choice.
And let’s not even get into the real, tangible differences between the candidates. I can’t take seriously all the lefties who are screaming “neoliberal!” at Clinton. If Clinton is neoliberal, what does that make Obama? It’s a lot like the brain dead tea partiers who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a socialist. Note that Clinton has said over and over and OVER again in the past 4 years that she does not comment on domestic politics. So, we have no idea how much she agrees with Obama on all the weak policy he’s driven in the past 4 years. We can only assume that they agree on foreign policy.
But I suspect the bankers *did* know how much of a difference there was between Clinton and Obama back in 2008. The real estate bubble was already clearly collapsing in early 2007 according to authors such as Michael Lewis of The Big Short. They knew that the degree to which they would personally suffer was contingent on which candidate was nominated. And the last thing they wanted was some kind of homeowner bailout. How do we know that? Because the last thing homeowners got in the last 4 years was a bailout. The people who got bailed out were the bankers and ONLY the bankers. They did not want to see Hillary Clinton implementing a HOLC style program where principals were crammed down and mortgages restructured. I haven’t got time to track down all of the videos of Clinton on the early morning talk shows from September 2008 where she discussed her HOLC proposal but there were at least 3 separate appearances. (readers? can you track them down and add them to the comments?) Of course, by the time she gave those interviews, she was already out of the picture.
She also gave an incredibly forceful defense of abortion shortly after she was confirmed as secretary of state. You will never in a million years see or hear Barack Obama defending abortion like this:
No difference, Digby? The issue of abortion and women’s reproductive rights are extremely important to you and yet there’s no difference? How about gay rights, Digby? Can you imagine Hillary Clinton inviting Rick Warren to her inaugural? The same Hillary Clinton who ordered the State department to equalize the treatment of gay State department employees and their families as far as the law would go?
But, Ok, we’ll never really know, although I think given her record at State, Benghazi notwithstanding, that she would have been an exemplary president. Let’s put that aside for now. I don’t think she’s ever going to run again. Why should she? She doesn’t have the advantage of 2008 when all of the auspices were in her favor. In 2016, it will be a different America and she’s smart enough to know this. I’d rather she get her own column in the Washington Post or the New York Times.
Let’s talk about the suggestion that Hillary Clinton brought out the misogyny in the media and the parties. Wow, I guess we could do nothing about that except become passive observers, right? I guess we couldn’t threaten the party to walk away from it and their candidate if they didn’t stop using misogyny to further their chosen candidate’s goals. I guess it would have been silly to point out that gratuitously taking advantage of that misogyny might backfire on women in general.
Ok, we know that our side had a fair share of cowards who were either unable or unwilling to speak up and defend a woman. They would have defended a female candidate, just not this female candidate. Well, it’s a good thing it was only one female candidate in 2008.
Except that Sarah Palin got it too. Now, I don’t care whether you like or dislike Palin. I don’t like her even if I thought she had a lot more political talent than the left gave her credit for. For some bizarre, freakish reason, the left still hasn’t let up after 4 years of bashing her. The left still seems to think she’s relevant even if she’s not. That kind of obsession is pathological if you ask me. There must be a reason for the persistence of the Emmanuel Goldstein treatment of Palin. She’s useful for a good, unifying 3 minute hate, right? That’s why the left just can’t quit her. But she’s been useful for years to the Democrats.
With Palin, we saw the same kind of misogyny pick up where it left off with Clinton. So, clearly, it wasn’t just Clinton that was bringing out the misogyny. Misogyny became a convenient bludgeon because it worked so well taking out the candidate on the left so it was employed to take out the candidate on the right as well. And who was one of the leaders of that club?
Digby.
Yep, day after day, week after week, we read how stupid Palin was, what a disgrace her family was right there in the posts of Hullabaloo. Digby piled on with the rest of the left.
You can say a lot of negative things about Palin. Justifiably. You can attack her political philosophy, her conservatism, her opportunism. All of that makes sense. But the attacks on her in 2008 were horribly misogynistic. Remember the effigies? Remember the “Sarah Palin is a Cunt” T-shirts? Remember the jokes about Caribou Barbie and the photoshopped pics of Palin in a bikini holding an assault rifle? Remember the big fucking deal that Katie Couric made over the fact that Palin didn’t have an immediate list of national newspapers in her head that she read cover to cover before breakfast while she took on her responsibilities of running a state? She should have asked Couric, “How many state budgets have you prepared in a year?”, because that would have been a good question for feminists. She was a governor who got to be governor without family connections. That’s something that Katie Couric hasn’t done. That’s how feminism is supposed to work, Digby. You are supposed to credit women for their accomplishments, not bury them with your stereotypes.
Whatever you think of Palin, dehumanizing her in 2008 was misogynism like I have never seen.
That’s what misogyny is. It is the intentional dehumanization of females. It denies women their personhood, dignity and accomplishments. It’s belittling and relies on stereotypes, like the idea that a pretty woman must be a light weight or that women need to develop executive experience while men are born with natural authority. And in 2008, it wasn’t the case that only Hillary Clinton brought it out. Misogyny was used as an intentional campaign tactic just like rape is used in some countries as an act of terror and political strategy. Just as the accusations of racism were used to shut up the supporters of Clinton in 2008.
Digby, YOU were part of that. You decided to not buck your team’s leadership. If you said anything, it wasn’t forceful enough to get them to stop. You didn’t stick up for your half of humanity. Even if you were right that it is Clinton personally that brings out the worst in people, that was no excuse for giving those people a pass to behave as badly as they did. Isn’t that like blaming the victim and don’t misogynists make an art form of blaming the victim? You had an opportunity to stand up and make a difference even if it meant incurring the wrath and shunning from people who you thought were your friends. To do nothing was to tacitly admit that Barack Obama could not win without using misogyny and racism. What does that say about the candidate? It said enough to me that I could never support him in a million years.
What kind of friends use misogyny to get their guy in at any cost, especially if that cost will have significant repercussions for half of the people living in this country? Those people were not your friends, Digby. They were financier class driven political operatives who would have killed their own mothers to get what they wanted from this president.
And this president is no hero when it comes to championing the rights of the socially disadvantaged. He’s certainly no Martin Luther King who famously said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
I don’t know why so many people on the left abandoned women and thought they were doing everyone a favor. Or maybe they were so driven to elect Obama that the ends justified the means. I’ve never found that sentiment to be very rewarding. If fighting the misogyny had meant that Clinton had a fighting chance for the nomination, would that have been so horrible? After all, NY, NJ, PA, OH, TX, MA, FL, MI, WV, KY, RI, NH, NV, MO, NM and CA (this list not exhaustive) voted for her in the primaries. It’s only in a parallel universe where we would consider that candidate a failure against a guy who won a bunch of rural, prairie states with cheap, undemocratic caucuses. I suspect the country would have embraced her and a Clinton/Obama ticket with her in the top slot would have been unbeatable even before the September crash.
But that’s not what happened, is it, Digby?
Don’t look to misogyny against Clinton as the cause. Look at it as the method. The bad guys got what they wanted. They got the weakest nominee and president. If women got caught in that fight and got taken out, fuck’em.
THAT’S what you and your buddies were either too stupid or too complicit to realize. It’s human nature to want to find a way downplay the effect of “follow the herd” mentality or cowardice or to find excuses (you should at least make an attempt at logic) or distance oneself from the fallout. I understand that impulse. We are all guilty of that in some aspect of our lives or others.
But ultimately, we are responsible for the effect of our decisions. In 2013, women are feeling the effect of the 2008 election when the people who should have put their foot down on the brake hit the accelerator instead. Digby can lie to herself about what happened in 2008 but she can’t lie to us.
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Note to commenters: Sarah Palin has been talked to death here on this blog and there are filters in place to send all comments containing her name, or variations of it, directly to the moderation queue. Please don’t tell me about how unfair the left has been to Sarah Palin. There are very good, non misogynistic reasons for loathing her. She might be worthy of human dignity but she’s no Hillary Clinton. If you’re in her corner, you’re wasting your time here.
There are a lot of interesting nuggets in the intertoobz these days. Some of these things go together and show the lengths we will go to delude ourselves or cling to tribal beliefs.
Let’s start with a podcast. So, you’ve given up the Judeo-Christian belief system for God 2.0 or no god at all. Some of us would call this progress. Giving up bronze age superstition and tradition for something more modern and relevant is quite a bold step. So, why are so many of you turning to woo? Woo is defined as “ideas considered irrational or based on extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers”. Woo includes the belief in astrology, auras, energy fields, homeopathy, accupuncture, chiropracty and vaccination phobia. Seth Andrews of the Thinking Atheist interviews various professionals who debunk these woos and tries to explain why otherwise rational people are attracted to them. Let’s put it this way, if you’re into woo, it’s hard to take anything you say seriously. You’d might as well be a nutcase fundy eschatologist. Check out Seth’s recent podcast here.
Jay Ackroyd tries to lead Digby to the light when it comes to Obama’s commitment to a Grand Bargain on Social Security and Medicare. First, go read the piece from Digby where she actually sounds like she’s blown right on past where Conflucians are sitting straight into the arms of the former Democrats who are so angry they’ve started to identify with the Tea Party. Wow. That’s quite a leap. I know the party will reel her back in and, to be honest, we don’t really need more Tea Partiers in Congress, thank you very much. But, yeah, Digby. Jay’s right. The Obama contingent are not liberals. However, Jay is not right that they’re centrists. The Obama contingent is definitely on the right side of center. Nooooo doubt about it. The only way that they are centrists is if you consider moderate republicanism centrist. That would make Bill Clinton a flaming commie. No, no, don’t go there, Jay. We have seen the studies. There’s no way in hell that Bill Clinton is a centrist in the same way that Obama is a “centrist”. The center moved in the past 12 years. You guys have got to accept this because your irrational belief that Clinton is an evil Republican dude compared to Obama, is what got Obama elected in the first place. You’ve been done in by your tribe’s woo. I mean, think about it: your group is asking us to believe that Bill Clinton is, was and always will be more conservative than Barack Obama. Step back and think about that and ask yourselves if that’s rational given everything you now know. If YOU can’t swallow it, why are you asking US to believe it?
As for Digby, I really like her and I’ve found her recent evolution to be promising, if only temporary in the lead up to the election. I expect her to chicken out even though her “Hey! We’re eating grass!” moments are fun to read. There is a place for left of center Democrats who don’t have our minds so wide open that our brains have fallen out. We just need to create it. It probably won’t happen this election cycle unless the Obama half of the party is defeated by the Clinton half of the party. That’s where we are now. You may not think the Clinton half is sufficiently liberal but the American people do. In any case, they’ll drag the party back leftwards like an earthquake in Japan. It could be a true realignment on the way back to sanity. And remember, Wall Street rejected the Clinton half last time. So, you know, how much more proof do you need?? Besides, there is no hope for Howard Dean. Most people don’t know who he is and wouldn’t like him if they did. We need to be realistic and work with what we’ve got. And as far as I can tell, Americans would be ecstatic to return to the Clinton years, even if they were supervised by his wife. A woman in charge would be very good for women in general, wouldn’t you agree? Especially when that woman is a passionate defender of women’s reproductive rights? I mean, can women really trust Obama after they way he dragged his feet on the conscience rule, betrayed us in the healthcare law and kept Plan B behind a counter?
As far as everyone having “skin in the game”, Obama’s term for sacrificing in the upcoming Grand Bargain, um, I’ve seen my industry devastated by Wall Street grasshoppers and I’ve lost a very good living, permanently. So, you know, I’ve already been flayed. Not only that but I’m in the age cohort who has to wait until I’m 67 before I get the Social Security I prepaid for decades. I’m not sacrificing anymore skin. No, do not even ask. Don’t make us come down there to Washington to make your lives miserable. You do not want crowds from the size of my graduating class on the mall. No, you do not. I suggest that Congress go hunt people with an excess of skin, ie wealthy people. Give them a good reason to whine.
The last bit is an interview of Jane Mayer on Fresh Air with Terry Gross entitled “Obama in Impossible Bind Over Donors”. The Impossible Bind is that he wants and needs money from the wealthy and Wall Street but he doesn’t want average voters to know how indebted he is to his big donors so he has to blow the donors off in public. It’s a sad, sad situation. Terry, to her credit, seems to have come around after being such an insufferable Obama fangirl in 2008. Jane Mayer valiantly tries to make Obama look good when it comes to fundraising. You can almost hear Jane pleading with the audience to understand what Obama is up against but I found her extreme earnestness irritating. It’s a cruel world out there. Poor Obama, forced to accept SuperPAC money and trying to make it look like he doesn’t like it. It’s all the fault of the mean Republicans that he’s sucking up all the money he said he didn’t want. And while Romney is appearing at the SuperPAC soirees, Mitt has a deputy actually ask for the money, while Obama goes to the soirees and the money just mysteriously appears for him but he doesn’t suck up to anyone to get it. I find the distinction indistinct.
Oh, but Obama isn’t giving away the Lincoln Bedroom! So, you know, there’s that. And that’s presumably why the donors are complaining. They get nothing from Obama. Not even a tote bag. He won’t even take pictures with his donors so they can use that to name drop. It sounds like Obama got too much of a reputation as a schmoozer in 2008 and he’s desperate to squash that meme this year but that doesn’t mean he’ll be turning the filthy lucre down. He just doesn’t want to have to thank anyone publicly for it.
But the funniest part of the interview is when Mayer is forced to debunk the idea that Obama made the bulk of his campaign money from millions of teensy contributions. I know, you’re probably thinking that small contributions mean less than $100 because that’s what the Obama campaign lead us to believe in 2008. We were all under the impression that millions and millions of working class Joes were mailing $20 to him in gratitude with a little note saying, “Bless you, Barack! Save the Republic. We’ve been waiting all our lives for you!” Right? Intellectually, you know it’s not true because the sheer size of the amount of money he collected, plus all of the contributions from wealthy Wall Street contributors, is public information. But the meme kinda slipped into the chinks of the gray matter and created it’s own woo. It just *had* to be true because so many people repeated it. It’s sort of like that woo we debunked about Obama running a fabulous campaign. Um, no he didn’t, unless you consider gaming the caucuses and paying off the superdelegates and DNC fabulous, and we can prove it but myths die hard.
Anyway, it turns out that the definition of small depends on who is using it. Small donations to you and me would be less than $100. Small donations to the Obama campaign means maxing out at $5000. See the difference? One is $4900 more than the other. What working class stiff has $5000 to stuff into an envelope for a guy who had less than two years of national political experience before he decided to run for president? And inadvertently, Mayer exposes what the Obama campaign thinks of the people who gave less than $5K. They’re not even on the campaign’s radar.
But the final bit of silliness from Mayer is when she contrasts Bill Clinton’s extroversion against Obama’s intellectualism. That’s got to be a first. Whatever you might think of Bill Clinton, making the guy who went to Georgetown, Yale Law School and was a Rhodes Scholar sound like a high school dropout car salesman next to Obama doesn’t really work too well. What she’s really trying to say is that Clinton is a gregarious politician who likes politics and can carry on an intelligent conversation with anyone, even his enemies, but that the Obama contingent doesn’t like politics and getting hands dirty and actually doing the stuff that gets things done. I know that she didn’t mean to say that but that’s essentially what she said. If you were a big money donor, whose campaign would you rather give $5 million to? (George Soros, call me!)
Once the bloom is off of Obama’s rose, you can’t listen to this stuff without laughing at all of the holes in the arguments. The woo is gone.
Instructions for Digby to be administered to Thereisnospoon
I was headed out to the library but I bopped over to Digby’s to see if she’d posted. She hadn’t but the next young clueless pundit-in-waiting-for-a-paying-gig male who stalks her site had. I don’t know how you felt about your tax return ordeal yesterday but I was shocked by how much I had paid in taxes in my layoff year. Yes, I got some of that back in unemployment benefits but I paid more than I got back. A lot more.
So, I was gobsmacked when I read that apparently my problem with the tax system is due to my racism. Yep, that is my problem. It has nothing to do with the fact that my former salary is high enough that I fit into one of the highest tax bracket but not anywhere near high enough to hit that magic $250,000 sweet spot that everyone is yearning to get to, and now I don’t have a salary at all because some wealthy shareholders decided I was abusing their generosity. It has nothing to do with the fact that my property taxes are outrageous in this township and state income taxes in NJ are meh so that middle class suburbanites end up carrying all the weight for themselves and everyone else.
No, no, I am resentful of the unfair tax system because I am white and I don’t want to pay for poor black and hispanic people. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my anger that the rich managed to get out of their fiduciary obligations. Apparently, it is not my concern that I will not be able to put away money for my kid’s college education or my own retirement that makes me opposed to further tax increases. It’s not my opposition to the wars sucking up so much taxpayer wealth or faith-based initiatives that are actively promoting the relegation of women or gay people to second class status. It isn’t my informed indignation that we pay a hell of a lot in taxes compared to the Europeans (I have the return to prove it) but get very little in return in government services. Our healthcare costs are outrageous ($960/month on COBRA, the cost just went up), tuition is unaffordable, and every service that gets privatized means that it will cost more for us to use it.
No, all of that is irrelevant. The only reason I am opposed to higher taxes is because I don’t like black people. Nevermind that I’m not actually a racist.
Is it any wonder why independents, even independent liberal Democrats in Exile can’t stand Democrats, especially the young, white, male twit variety of Democrat? It doesn’t even matter that some of his proposed solutions are worth discussing. I can’t get past the idea that once again, in a major election year, I am a racist.
There are a lot of interesting nuggets in the intertoobz these days. Some of these things go together and show the lengths we will go to delude ourselves or cling to tribal beliefs.
The Confluence 