JHan
JHan's Journalwhat could have been...
I just posted this in the pinned video thread , hope it's not a problem to re-post it in its own thread.
This video sums up for me why HRC was my only option this entire year. And what a great President she could have been.
thoughtful, insightful, detailed positions backed up with a solid assessment of our economy.
About those coastal/urban elites..
A lot of hand-wringing-liberals have gone and swallowed up the "coastal elites" narrative thrown at us from the republicans.
One day we'll learn to stop fighting the battles the GOP wants us to fight...
And since I don't have the energy tonight for a rambling screed, I'll just pinch a quote from Marlon James' ( the author) fb page.
"
SHUTTING DOWN ELECTION BULLSHIT FROM LIBERALS, Day 3.
And then we've got those URBAN ELITES. Heard you heard of them URBAN ELITES? Even liberals hate them, because they're not "in touch" with what's going on in middle America. Funny thing though. URBAN ELITES just won the election, and they have middle America to thank for it. Trump, Kushner, Bannon, Milo Whatthefuckopulous, Guliani are all city boys with wealth and/or extreme privilege. You know, URBAN ELITES. The rest of us in urban areas are still trying to find a decent integrated school, trying to make 40 bucks stretch at Whole Foods, and living in fear that gentrification is going to leave us homeless, since our neighbor just got replaced by a new branch of Chase Bank. I'm about to go all DMX up in here."
Yes, Millennials also cost us the election.
There was no populist "uprising". A Razor thin loss in the Blue Wall doesn't spell rejection, it tells me a couple thousand people were too damn clueless and I include my generation in the clueless category - millennials.
I saw the shit unfold myself, I was neck deep with my friends , my peers, in discussions about Hillary, trying to persuade, trying to get them to contextualise what was at stake. That politics is never "Perfect", that flawed Democrats have accomplished great things - LBJ anyone? JFK..FDR??? I was persuasive sometimes, but not all the time, but hell I tried. Yes a flawed democrat could lead us to the health care we want, could prepare this country for the future, that this year was NOT the year to fuck around with alternatives. Politics is ALWAYS a choice between the greater evil and the CONSIDERABLY LESS evil/partly good. You don't survive in this game without dirt under your fingernails. No fight is completely fair, to get into the arena requires cunning, subterfuge, tools we don't like to talk about but should, strategies to ensure outcomes to benefit those dependent on those outcomes -And Americans are desperate, now more than ever we need our civil rights protected, the health of us all and the planet depends on the choices we make so spare me the whole "I am tired of voting for the lesser evil". The only perfect candidate we ever had was Jimmy Carter, and I'm sure someone somewhere has a story about that one time he got a speeding ticket or some shit.
Part of critiquing Hillary must involve how successful the Republican propaganda machine has been against her and against the Left. And once again,like 2000, the Left cannibalized itself, unleashing potentially 8 years of fuckery, the consequences of which will be felt for far longer.
And how easy it was this time - a barrage of stupid $Hillary memes - Shillary, Killary, hilLIARY, Hellary. The stupid accusations of corruption ( spare me the faux outrage about Wall St speeches and all the other BS), the dumb edited YouTube videos, all successfully worked to drag Hillary - a hard working public servant - to the level of a short fingered, vulgar narcissistic egomaniac - a billionaire who took advantage of the housing crisis, stiffed small businesses, discriminated against black tenants, a shameless groper of P***y , born with a silver spoon in his mouth, bailed out by banks, has a litany of business fails, on top of possessing no convictions other than helping himself - this fucking asshole was "anti-establishment".
And let's examine the "anti-establishment" BS. What was so wrong with the establishment? You feel they wouldn't have heard the message this time around? Hillary's feet would have been held to the fire like NO OTHER PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY. She would have been expected to do things a President cannot even fucking do but now we have a President who is sure to be graded on a curve- how's that for irony?? We had 8 years of Obama where we got Obamacare, which was the beginning of a journey towards healthcare for all. The Economy is now showing some signs of recovery. There was the recognition that Climate Change will bite us in the ass and , under Obama, an understanding that while we can't phase out all fossil fuel extraction RIGHT NOW, we can continue to invest in renewables and start a phase out period. Well we can say fucking goodbye to all of that progress. But it was all worth it right, we sure showed "the establishment" right???
I had to endure the never ending bullshit of Hillary and Donald being the two most dislikes candidates in History and my generation lapped it all up. It's small comfort to know that the majority of them couldn't stomach voting for Donald, but at the end of the day we have to fix the shit he has stained the Oval Office with, and immediately he's let us know just how much he's going to fuck up with an abysmal choice for Health Sec who doesn't respect Science, a Climate Skeptic as head of the EPA, an asshole as AG, a white nationalist as his top advisor, the possible dismantling, instead of fixing, of the VA, a Transport Sec who is the wife of the Senate Majority Leader and our top diplomat will likely be military general.
I don't want to hear any bullshit about "they should have given it to Bernie" Crap. It was obvious the Dems would have chosen a dyed-in-wool Dem compared to a newbie who arrived yesterday. It was obvious Hillary was going to win the Primary, the math was on her side , the votes were on her side. So I don't want to hear that shit.
Yes I am still fucking angry.
I'll paraphrase a Hillary Email where she asked "Why are liberals the world over so clueless?" Well Hillary, if you ever read this, you'll have some idea..
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/02/yes-you-can-blame-millennials-for-hillary-clintons-loss/?utm_term=.94440ce93b09
Trump's "trolling" serves a purpose
To destroy truth and "fact" and ,to paraphrase HRC ,"Create his own reality"
""When politics becomes fundamentally unreal, the nature of political decision-making changes. Everything is fiction, so voters can only choose the fiction that best suits their taste and aligns with their self-image. Thus politics becomes devoured entirely by personal aesthetics. It’s the final triumph of what Carl Schmitt called political romanticism, or what Christopher Lasch might call political narcissism: politics as self-expression and nothing else.
It’s no coincidence that authoritarians are the driving force behind this development. The suspension of reality lends itself to authoritarian politics because it makes liberal democracy impossible. Without any sort of fixed reality, we have no shared reference point we can use for political deliberation; and when my policy preferences are rooted entirely in what I conceive of as my self, there is no room for compromise.""
[link:https://medium.com/@resnikoff/phantasmagoria-3beac7fe516d#.pnzj69tll|
Double Standards : Cheating men and Cheating women.
"Cheating Men Get a Second Life in Politics, Cheating Women Get a Scarlet Letter"
On December 15, 2011, four male Minnesota state senators called a press conference. Its purpose was to issue a moral rebuke to a woman who wasn’t there, over an extramarital affair she’d had with a colleague. In the ensuing weeks, the four men would force the woman, the state’s first ever female majority leader, to move to an office far from theirs, on a different floor. Nobody would move into her vacant office before the end of the term, after which the woman would pack her things and leave the home she had shared with her husband of 18 years to move back in with her parents. Weeks later, the woman’s 64-year-old mother would die of breast cancer, only four months after her diagnosis.
Amy Koch still feels the echoes of the day of that press conference in her life. “People called it ‘The Scarlet Letter award ceremony,’” she tells The Daily Beast. “I didn’t watch it. I’ll never watch it.”
That was the day that news of Koch’s affair with a male senate staffer went public, that her colleagues turned on her, that Koch resigned from her leadership position among state senate Republicans and announced she wouldn’t seek reelection. The damage to her life and career felt complete, the shame all-consuming.
The 2016 election has offered America a crash course in double standards when it comes to how men and women in the public eye are treated. If Donald Trump were a woman, for example, a 70-year-old obese woman with a sexual obsession with her adult son and the vocabulary of an elementary-school bully, would she have been the presidential nominee of this country’s conservative party? If somebody named Donna Trump had bragged about sexually assaulting men, would she be the president today? Would a woman who famously cheated on her husband be given a second chance in politics right away? We have our answer to the last question.
Trump himself has a colorful history with infidelity. His image of a “playboy” was so important to the president-elect in the 1980’s and 90’s that rumor has it he’d pose as his own spokesperson to plant stories about his sexual exploits in tabloids (acting in a way that would get one labeled a slut if one were female, turns out, is beneficial for men). He left his first wife and the mother of three of his children for his mistress amid a flurry of tabloid coverage. In 2005, he famously bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing women “by the pussy.” In December of that year, People Magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff alleges she was grabbed and forcibly kissed by Trump when she was at Mar-a-Lago to interview him for a story. During a presidential debate this year, Trump says he hasn’t even apologized to his wife. He hadn’t done anything.
Trump’s inner circle is lousy with men who have done worse than Amy Koch, and not suffered nearly the professional consequences. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, currently lobbying hard to be made Secretary of State, married his second cousin and began dating his second wife before he and his first wife divorced. While he was still married to his second wife (not to be confused with his second cousin), Giuliani allegedly carried on a long affair with his press secretary. In the late 1990’s, Giuliani met a woman named Judith (a new one, not the press secretary. Keep up.), and used his publicly-funded NYPD security detail to escort him to and from liaisons with the woman who would turn out to be his future third wife. He announced his separation to the public and to his second wife simultaneously, with a press conference.
David Petraeus, another rumored Secretary of State candidate, carried on a years-long affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell that was only discovered in 2012, the year after he was appointed head of the CIA. Broadwell and Petraeus had been exchanging love notes over unencrypted channels that were discovered by the FBI after Broadwell began cyberstalking a socialite named Jill Kelley. In 2015, Petraeus pled guilty to mishandling classified information with Broadwell, a misdemeanor that resulted in two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine. If he’s selected as Secretary of State, Petraeus will still be on probation when Trump is inaugurated on January 20, 2017, and will continue to be on probation for the first three months of his theoretical tenure as the person fourth in line to the Presidency.
Amy Koch did not mishandle classified information like David Petraeus. She did not obscure the use of public funds from taxpayers to hide her affair from the public, like Rudy Giuliani. She didn’t use prostitutes like David Vitter, or send suggestive pictures to a handful of people over and over again like Anthony Weiner. She didn’t get oral sex from a 22-year-old intern in the Oval Office like Bill Clinton. “Mine was kind of boring by comparison,” she says. “It was just an affair.”
Koch wonders if men who have been able to pick themselves from scandals like hers were able to do so because they blame themselves less for what happens to them, if they feel less shame in the aftermath than she did. “It took at least two years before I wasn’t just broken down about it,” she says. “Before I could talk about it without being sad and embarrassed. And a lot of that came from just being in the bar, being in the bowling alley, talking to people. Having good friends.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/30/cheating-men-get-a-second-life-in-politics-cheating-women-get-a-scarlet-letter.html
/cosigned
Trump will never stop grandstanding..
And as Obama was often blamed for the effects of the economic doldrums of the Bush Years, Trump will capitalize and try to take credit for whatever economic gains come to fruition as a result of the Obama years. If he doesn't mess up he could ride out two terms on those economic gains. We have to consistently defend the track record of ALL our stalwarts, where justified, to counter this.
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