Hillary Clinton Hasn't Won ANYTHING Yet

[senz]

231. Hillary Clinton's gender is unrelated to our criticisms of her.

I do not see "strength and resolve" in Hillary, but I do see those qualities in Angela Merkel, Elizabeth Warren, Cecile Richards (and saw them in her mother, Ann), Michele Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and numerous women Senators and Representatives, all of whom are just as "female," just as "gendered" as Hillary. HRC fans are well aware that most Bernie supporters would have favored Sen. Warren for president with as much enthusiasm as we do Bernie, and you cannot deny that Warren is as female, as fully gendered, as Hillary. As a female myself, I am embarrassed by this absurd pose that the only thing anyone rejects in Hillary is her gender and that all the qualities we find so hideous in her would be fully acceptable in a man.

That is a load of crap. It's an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Hillary vacillates and changes her stance on important issues too frequently to be called "strong and resolved." The war-mongering and blood-thirst that many of us have objected to in Hillary have nothing to do with failed gender expectations; if anything, it seems more closely related to a damaged psyche -- which is part of what makes her such a bad choice for president. My "no center" criticism has nothing to do with strength and resolve and is only tangentially related to coldness and calculation. It means she demonstrates no firm commitment to any principle, any value at all, except her own personal advancement and perhaps middle-class women's rights and middle-class children's welfare. This is not a person who should be given power over millions of people.

You complain about Bernie Sanders' early 1970s essays for a Vermont left-wing revolutionary paper, and you claim that if Hillary had written such essays it would have ended her and her husband's career. I had to look up the cervical cancer/frigidity claim and found that it stems from his having quoted a medical journal, to wit,

“Sexual adjustment seemed to be very poor in those with cancer of the cervix,” he wrote, quoting a study in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine.

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/07/362178-bernie-sanders-has-an-unconventional-cause-of-cervical-cancer-the-cure-for-it-is-more-orgasms/

Big deal. The late 1960s, early 1970s were a time of intense sexual questioning and curiosity by politically leftist intellectuals who were reading and influenced by psychologists who theorized that the repression of the 1950s had damaged people's psyches. Many tried to drop their repressions by various forms of promiscuity, and for a while "open marriages" were popular even among otherwise average suburban couples. It was a brief but widespread phenomenon. If Hillary had been a young countercultural leftist intellectual writing on similar subjects, I seriously doubt it would have had an appreciable effect on her later political career. It was an early 70s fad and I remember it pretty well. Much of it stemmed from the writing of Wilhelm Reich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich). I had an in-law who was a Reichian psychologist with some unusual theories. People tolerated these things back in those days.

As for Hillary's young Republicanism, I agree it's a cheap shot since most children adopt their parents' political views until they grow up enough to form their own. I think what makes it so meaningful for some is her current rightwing attitudes and behaviors.

As her and Obama's relationship, I do not buy the story that they genuinely like each other; I think their "friendly" relationship is purely political. Those who were familiar with the post-election principals considered Obama's appointment of Hillary as his SoS to be a manifestation of "keep your friends close and your enemies even closer." Hillary's anger at losing the nomination was so intense that it seemed almost childish for a while, and her relationship with Obama, though smiley, never seemed relaxed and natural. She was unbelievably ugly toward him during the primary, and I have a sense that Michele never forgave Hillary for the things she said. The photo you put up is probably the friendliest I've seen, but it really doesn't say much. Politics is like that. We've all seen Hillary's adoring smiles at Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump. Politics is a very phony business.