Who brought up Hillary? That Was Last Year.

Baltimore Post Examiner McCain’s Thumbs down.

They will take this embarrassment out on America. These are the people who can’t let abortion go. These are the people who can’t let their goddamned religion go. These are the people who can’t let Benghazi go. These are the people who remember every slight and every offense and they cannot let their overwhelming desire for revenge go. It’s nearly two hundred years, they still can’t let the Civil War go. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO CAN’T LET EITHER BARACK OBAMA OR HILLARY CLINTON GO — hell, 20 years later and they are STILL determined to get even with BILL Clinton. They will learn NOTHING from this, in fact they’ll become even more secretive, intolerant, scheming, and revengeful.

Stonekettle Station

Every single argument I have with Trump supporters (even with relatives) ends up with the question, “but what about Hillary?”

I keep wanting to ask in response, who brought up Hillary? I didn’t bring her up. I wasn’t even thinking of her. I couldn’t care less about her now than I did ten years ago (Go look. Harsh? Yes, I know) I only voted for her because she was who the Democrats picked, the presumed Democratic nominee that was so certain to win that I resigned myself to voting for her two years ago when I wrote Hillary for President? I resigned myself to voting for her because I knew the Republicans would pick a lunatic. Wonder of wonders, one of my predictions came true and they did pick a lunatic from a group of ten lunatics (and Kasich) and now that lunatic is president.

They’ll make the destruction of their efforts to repeal Obamacare about Hillary too. They’ll make it about Hillary and Barack Obama at the same time if they can. It was Hillarycare that started them all down this long, deep slope into madness. I can easily see how this is all linked to Hillary Clinton somewhere in their minds.

Saying I only voted for her because she was the nominee is selling my support for her a bit short. After she won the nomination. After Donald Trump co-opted the Republican convention and Republican party and made it his own personal propaganda vehicle. After all of that, I decided I did really like Hillary Clinton after all. I mean, at least she wasn’t a lunatic. Wasn’t a fraud. Wasn’t engaged in demonstrably criminal activities that have simply never been prosecuted. I mean, the haters (now Stormtrumpers) tried to prosecute her (#Benghazi) but there simply wasn’t anything that they could get a conviction on. This is more than could be said for Donald Trump, as we are now discovering. So yeah. Knowing real estate developers the way I do, and seeing the cluster fuck that a Trump presidency was going to be, I wholeheartedly embraced Hillary Clinton in 2016. But that was 2016.

Republicans are so caught up in the past, with all these grievances that they just can’t abide, they can’t begin to think about what comes next. Which is how we find ourselves here in this mess today, them still talking about what happened in 1998, and the rest of us outraged about what is going on around us right here and now.

Donald Trump’s race baiting. His misogyny. His probable coordination with Russia during the election. His continued money laundering for the Russian mob. His uncontested control of 2/3’s of the federal government, with the last third one simple SCOTUS nomination away.

How about we, the sane 3/4’s of the United States, start talking about what comes next for a change? Let’s start now so we know where we’re going in 2018. Screw the Republicans. They’ll still be nominating lunatics twenty years from now. #SignedByTrump

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Her explanation for the Gap is simple enough. “There’s a lot of behavioral science that if you attack someone endlessly — even if none of what you say is true — the very fact of attacking that person raises doubts and creates a negative perspective,” she says. “As someone Exhibit A on that — since it has been a long time that I’ve been in that position — I get that.”

Understanding Hillary – Ezra Klein – July 11, 2016
09/12/2017 – What Hillary Clinton really thinks – The Ezra Klein Show (youtube)

Consider, for a moment, two people. One, as a young woman at the beginning of a promising legal career, went door to door searching for ways to guarantee an education to the countless disabled and disadvantaged children who had fallen through the cracks. The other, as a young millionaire, exacted revenge on his recently deceased brother’s family by cutting off the medical insurance desperately needed by his nephew’s newborn son, who at eighteen months of age was suffering from violent seizures brought on by a rare neurological disorder.

Huffingtonpost – Larry Womack – Stop Pretending
Postscript

As for the embarrassment of having their eight year long quest to repeal Obamacare ended by one of their own, on the brink of death, voting against party leadership as a final fuck you? They should learn to live with it. Live with it, because that will be the legacy that the Moral Majority and Reagan Republicans will be saddled with. The United States and the world has turned a corner now, and there is no going back to the time when the United States was a shining city on a hill, if that time ever existed in the first place. We might move forward into respectability once more, but that road is a long and hard one, and won’t be the direction that Trumpists will go if they ever return to power.

facebook.com/RBReich

Robert Reich was more on topic for the subject in the featured image, all the way back in March of that year. I replied with Look, they are stealing our Medicare! and linking the Indivisible podcast on the subject of the AHCA. They are taking healthcare from the poor and charging more to the middle and giving all of that to the wealthy! How is this even vaguely fair? None of it was fair, and in the end it mattered not at all because John McCain threw himself on that grenade.

I was triggered by Jim’s hearkening back to the question of Hillary Clinton and the fact that Republicans haven’t been able to let their hatred of her go for thirty years now, and so consequently sold us all down the river to an known con artist rather than admit that their Qanon delusions were untrue. I can admit that now, looking at this article from the perspective of four years in the future. I was triggered and went off on the tangent of rebutting the general whataboutism rather than breathing a sigh of relief at the crisis averted by McCain’s noble sacrifice that day. It’s hard to be thankful to a loose cannon like McCain turned out to be, but there is no denying that Americans all owe him a debt of gratitude.

We took back the House of Representatives in 2018. We took back the Presidency in 2020, and took back the Senate after a highly unlikely runoff result for Georgia in January 2021. We own two-thirds of the government now, with Republicans having stuffed unqualified judges onto federal benches at a breakneck pace throughout Trump’s presidency. We’ll be a lifetime weeding them back out of the courts, but at least here and now we have the power to do something good. I hope we don’t waste the chance this time.

For the Last Time: Bob Barr for President

Bill Quick over at the Daily Pundit endorsed Bob Barr the other day:

I just dropped my absentee ballot in the mail box. After waffling around, first saying I wouldn’t vote for John McCain, then saying I would, I ended up voting for Bob Barr. Not because I think he has any chance of winning, or even because I think he’d be a great president – although he would certainly be a much better one than either of the two major candidates.

I voted for him because it was the only way I could think of to get my libertarian/conservative preference on the official record, in hopes that the GOP might see what it had thrown away with its nomination of McCain, and its general move away from conservative and libertarian principles.

I guess I ended up being convinced by my own arguments.

dailypundit.com via the Wayback Machine

I briefly came up for air from a 7 hour stint on my diversion of choice these days, and decided to visit some of my old haunts (like digg and blogger) for a brief reminder as to why I have need of some diversion. I noticed a shout on digg from Bob Barr to the article above, and while reading through the comments on the site, I ran across one (buried to the level of -9) which offered up the same old “thanks for voting for Obama” argument in response.

Here’s a little counter spin for you.

As a Texas resident living in Austin, I am surrounded by yellow dogs who voted for Kerry 4 years ago, and are dutifully touting their Obama stickers which have mercifully replaced the Kerry stickers. I mean, leave the advertisement for the also ran on your bumper for 4 years? What does that mean? Does it mean I need a guide to tell the real Democrats from the fake ones?

They are now trumpeting their intention to vote for the guy with the best teeth and hair running in the presidential race (like all Americans do) the man who will be the future president of the United States. As almost anyone who pays attention to politics could have told you the minute that Barak Obama became the clear Democrat favorite, Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. Up to the point where he won the Democratic nomination the next President of the United States was going to be a woman. He’s going to win because the Republicans never stood a chance this time around and they stand even less of a chance now that the markets have tanked.

None of this even touches on the fact that Texas will go for McCain. The Republicans could leave the top of the ticket blank and claim that we’d be better off without a President, and Texas would still go to the Republicans because “nobody is better than anybody the Democrats would nominate.”

So, for all you yellow dog Democrats out there, wasting your vote for Obama in Texas; I just want to know, why? If you agree with Mr. Better Teeth and Hair then good for you, you did you research and know what you are getting into (you’re wrong, but…) But if you are voting for Obama because at least he’s not McCain, what planet are you living on?

The ultimate wasted vote is a vote for the lessor of two evils. Especially when the majority of the voting population disagrees with you. To use the old adage:

If two wolves and a sheep are voting on what’s for dinner, and you’re the sheep, why are you wasting your time voting?

If it’s a life or death issue, better to be a well armed sheep when the wolves come knocking looking for dinner.

Politics has become quite blasé for me. I never was much interested in saying I told you so, and I’ve found myself repeating that phrase more and more often since 9/11. I got into politics because I wanted to see a positive change in the system; and in 15 years of activity, I’ve seen things go from bad to worse to imminent destruction. I no longer care about petty little things like who the next President will be. He’s going to screw things up at least as much as the last guy did. Both major party candidates are blissfully oblivious to real problems while attacking each other over meaningless twaddle.

Obama chooses a dedicated socialist as his running mate, and McCain nominates a woman who is so backwards in her thinking I shudder to wonder what her presidency will be like after McCain kicks it. Kicks it? Dies in office. My money is on John McCain not even surviving to be sworn in; in the almost incomprehensible reversal of fortune that would inspire Americans to vote for the ugly puppet on the stage.

But in both major party candidates cases the baggage they are freighting is so onerous and the understanding of the real world around us is so absent, that I have no doubt that, whichever screwup is elected will make the most mess possible before the downfall of the dollar brings his reign to it’s ultimate end.

So I’m not wasting my time worrying about which lessor evil to vote for. I’m going to go out and pull the lever next to the L, again. Bob Barr at least talks about issues, and has the nomination of the only party dedicated to smaller government. The rest of it is just so much noise.

The reorganization of my priority list continues apace. Time to return to my W0W session.

Postscript

This was my last post as a member of the Libertarian party. I find this odd, looking back. I remember there being a finality in my having to hold my nose and vote for Bob Barr. Hold my nose and vote for the presidential candidate for my party of conscience. I remember thinking “does this make sense? I thought the other guys were evil and we weren’t?”

Looking back (eight years) I wonder how I couldn’t see it. The libertarians in Texas and through most of the US are closer to conservatives than they are to liberals. Economics is to blame for this; economics and the influence of the Midwestern work ethic. Not even they can see it from inside. It is only from outside, from the vantage point of more accumulated knowledge on the subject of money and social systems that I can say that the mantra of small government forces them into proximity with conservatives who have adopted the same talking points.

As if government in the US isn’t already small.  We just pay too much for it, considering how much it doesn’t get done. McCain died of a brain tumor right after destroying Republican hopes (fears?) of repealing the Affordable Care Act. He did something with that last act that inspires me to forgive him for picking Sarah Palin. She self-destructed anyway, just like all hypocrites do.

The dollar didn’t tank (at least not yet) Donald Trump came as close to destroying our country as anyone since General Robert E. Lee has. Obama was just a mediocre as a President as I feared he would be. I voted for him anyway in 2012. Why not?

I chuckled to myself when I read what I typed about Joe Biden. Joe Biden a socialist? Gimme a break. Just like the dog whistle that yellow dog Democrat is, calling every Democrat a socialist is just code for saying “he’s not one of us.” If anything Joe Biden is just as mediocre as Obama and Clinton were. I wish he was less like us and more like younger Americans. Here’s hoping that Kamala Harris does better when she is in charge.