I read all 15 pages of this thread and the supposed "smack-talk" free for all that should have happened looks more like petty drive by kvetching. So here's my attempt.
Act 1: Power at all costs
or
She's basically Lady Macbeth and ruins everything
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She messed up healthcare reform. Fifteen long, painful years before there was a black liberal messiah by the name of Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the first unelected public figure to try to dramatically change the country with legislation. "HillaryCare" was a resounding failure both politically but also intellectually. The reason why the healthcare industry was so entrenched against its passage was because it was extraordinarily out of touch with the healthcare industry as it truly existed. There were significant other problems with it: it was developed in secret and without the healthcare industry's involvement, it was far more revolutionary than the Affordable Care Act, and it would have angered many Americans who were already satisfied with their coverage. Most importantly, it was being written by the first lady - a tremendously inappropriate action given that Hillary Clinton neither had the qualifications nor the electoral mandate to be the deliverer of healthcare reform. It doesn't matter that normally, presidents let political appointees or policy centers design their initiatives anyway; this was a very brazen, very public action designed specifically to give a notch in Hillary's career. Such projects belong to the vice president, not the first lady.
If the vice president, who had been a senator, had designed the policy from the eyes of a politician, the bill may not have died before it even hit the floor of a
Democratic congress. The bill might have been designed more in the open. And we might have been heralding the Clinton's tremendous 1993 Health Security Act to this very day.
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Her senate race cost Al Gore the election.
Yeah. It did. Here's Politico with
the hot take:
The 2000 Presidential Election famously came down to a few contested counties in Florida, resulting in a red meat Supreme Court stealing the election for George "Born with a silver foot in his mouth" Bush. This was about as close to a 50-50 split election as you could get, so every ounce of energy mattered. One does not need an imaginative mind to conjecture what less of a Clinton presence might have done for Gore in Florida. So the next time someone complains about the Iraq War, the Bush year recessions, tearing up the Kyoto Protocol, Katrina, Lawyergate, or pretty much any one of the other million evil deeds that Bush committed, you know exactly who to blame. But at least she became the junior senator for New York.
Act 2: No trust, no vote
or
There is a strong likelihood she is actually a robot
- She pretty much never admits when she's wrong. One of her principle problems with the "email" debacle was that she took a long time to actually come out and say that the setup she had was inappropriate for a cabinet member and public official. In terms of building relationships with the public when you're on trial for your trustworthiness, responding to "Did you wipe the server?" with "What, like, with a cloth?", despite being objectively hilarious, is actually a horrible way to do that. Compare that to Tim Novokaine (because he's there to dull the pain) immediately jumping on the "short circuit" news recently and being completely prostrate in his apology to the American people... on Clinton's behalf! If Clinton does not actually seem authentic in any apology she makes, it's because probably never is. I mean, she doesn't
really need to apologize for having, uh, an email server, but a key tool in every abjectly psychotic politician's toolbox is the ability to feign emotions. Clinton's really bad in this department.
That's just one example of mental obstinance to human regret in her long life of public service. Another recent example was
her infamous interview with Terry Gross about whether she switched her opinion on gay marriage. See, the right answer here is "yes." She did. And that's not bad. So just, you know, say it. Spin it. I don't know. Even Terry tries to throw her a significant bone here. Why? Because Terry
loves Hillary Clinton. Most women in the world do. I love Hillary Clinton, for Christ's sake, so when you're a role model for little girls everywhere
for the love of God, don't lie in the age of the internet.
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Lol, sniper fire. I don't even need to elaborate on this one. It's indefensible. Ya blew it, Hill.
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The reason I can speak so confidently that I don't believe Hillary Clinton a lot of the time is because we know what she looks like when she's believable. On March 13th she participated in a town hall hosted by CNN where a man asked her if she supports the death penalty. This man had been improperly convicted of murder and spent 39 years in prison.
The way she responds is legitimately amazing, but I want to point out the clear signs that she's engaging with the individual asking the question, as well as speaking authentically.
1) She admits the question is "profoundly hard".
2) She uses very harsh language against state attorneys because she feels personally about this! She was a criminal defense lawyer for many years and purposefully took hard cases because she believes that criminals have rights.
3) The way her voice wavers and modulates when she tells the man that what happened to him is a travesty is a clear sign that she sympathizes with him greatly.
4) She explains that she still supports the death penalty but is practically apologizing for it the whole time.
So compare that with pretty much any time she apologizes for the Iraq War.
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TPP is her baby. This trade deal is going to unify a whopping 40% of the world's economy under a single free trade zone, help us enforce intellectual property disagreements all around the pacific rim, and usher in a golden age of Asian pivoting (which is not a Japanese sex move, sorry). So no, she's never going to nix the trade deal she carried her butt around all of the Pacific fighting for. Not when she's a corporatist, business friendly neoliberal.
"Kris, you're definitely wrong on this one. She keeps saying that she's
against TPP!"
No, what she's been saying is that she does not support the TPP
in its current form. What that means in politicalese is that she wants a couple of provisions changed, some more pork here, less regulations there, and then she's going to sign that sucker in her first 100 days of office if Obama doesn't fast track the shit out of it. Either that, or she's just lying to everyone to get their votes because something like 60% of Democrats are against TPP (even though a large majority of Dems support "free trade" - public opinion is a bitch).
So what that means is that Clinton doesn't "not" support TPP for quite the same reasons most people do, e.g. the usual arguments about "fair" trade, labor, environmentalism, and all that. And if she really isn't against it, she should be much, much more open about it. After all, Obama is.
Act 3: She's a devout worshiper of American imperial military adventurism
or
An eternal war for an eternal peace
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She voted for the Iraq War and it probably had nothing to do with the false evidence. Do you guys remember when Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright bombed the shit out of Saddam Hussein in 1999 to degrade and disgrace him? And how Saddam had been a thorn in the US' side for at least 10 years prior to that point? Well that's where our story starts, not with George Bush fabricating meetings in Africa and firing Generals. Bill Clinton famously told W. before the latter took office that the former's only regrets were not killing Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Georgie took those words pretty seriously and, from Day 1, tried to figure out how to kill Saddam Hussein. But this isn't a post about George; this is about Hillary. As recently as March of 2002, Hillary had been discussing the mounting invasion against Iraq with colleagues and military officials. Being, you know, Bill's wife, and personally invested in his presidency, Hillary was probably also just as set on killing Saddam Hussein as the 42nd and 43rd presidents were. So it comes as no surprise that, when the time finally comes, she votes with 29 out of 50 of her other colleagues for the invasion. It also comes as no surprise that, despite her being a policy wonk, and obsessed with every detail of war, she never read the long-form briefing of the evidence provided to Congress for the war (no senator did, in fact). No, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton was itching for an invasion in the fertile crescent.
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She's the one responsible for all of those child refugees in Central America. That coup in Honduras back in 2009?
That was her. Or, rather, she is totally complicit, even if she didn't provide material support for it. In that link she describes her decision to not call it a coup because refusing foreign aid to the country would have killed children, or something. That kind of ignores that tons of children were dying and it got so bad that they fled to the United States, where she started refusing asylum for them. Oops.
Behind the scenes, Washington officials in smoke filled rooms actually supported the aim of removing the president for a variety of reasons, so it was politically convenient to just ignore this particular coup. Thanks, Monroe Doctrine.
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She's the antithesis to Obama in every way, militarily. The New York times, as usual,
has one or two nifty pieces on it. When Obama pulls, Hillary pushes. She wanted the no-fly zone in Syria; he never did it. She wanted him to fight for those 20k residual troops in Iraq; he balked. She wanted more troops in Afghanistan; he initially didn't, and had to relent because of increased violence. He uses drones; she wants special ops invasions. The list goes on. The takeaway here is that if you were even the slightest bit starry eyed by hope and change in 2008 and thought that America would be freeing itself from decades of the military industrial complex running our show then know that Hillary probably has a model "red button" she caresses at night.
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She will definitely never cut defense spending. For some reason the liberal voices of yore have recently died down. It used to be common to hear some pundit parasite on CNN proclaim that, if we could spend a trillion and a half on our defense spending, why couldn't we have free college? Well, that's actually a good question, but I don't really hear it anymore, and that might have something to do with the fact that the Democratic candidate is a hawk (is this an anti-strawman?). If there's one thing that's most cruel about all of the Benghazi Bullshit, it's that it has obscured probably the most fundamental part of Hillary Clinton's entire political focus, which is that she is obsessed with our military and its use. The military respects her. She drinks with generals. She tried to join the marines when she was 27. She chose to be on the armed services committee despite being offered a more prestigious chair on the foreign relations committee. She's taken maybe a million trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Etc. So if a budget from a Democratic supermajority socialist Congress ever landed on her presidential desk and it slashed even 20% of our bloated bomb expenditures, she'd put it in the shredder and ask for more taxes instead. Believe me.
That's like all the stuff off the top of my head. If you're the kind of person that froths at the mouth over the sound of her name, you probably have a million more reasons, but this post by itself is, like, definitely bulletproof,
.