Want another "Tricky Dick" in the White House? Then Hillary Clinton is your "man"

I have to admit that while the margin of victory in Hillary Clinton’s win in the South Carolina primary was wider than I expected, that merely points to a few unfortunate facts. I saw one poll taken before the primary that showed the shocking level of unawareness of black voters in the state in regard to the relative ideological standing of Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Eighty percent of black voters considered Clinton “liberal,” when in fact she is a product of the DNC’s “moderate” political wing, as proved by Bill Clinton’s “reforms” during his presidency that had adverse effects on minorities, and both his and Hillary’s rhetoric appealing to the bigotry of white voters in the 2008 primary season; note that one of Hillary’s “selling points” is her alleged “ability” to work with Republicans (such as in 1993?), and we saw how that worked out for minorities when Bill “worked” with Republicans.

On the other hand, less than half of black voters thought that Sanders was left of center, and a quarter actually thought he was “conservative”—an “obvious” conclusion since he is just an “old white male.” It is amazing how so many black voters seem to be confused about the relative merits of Clinton and Sanders, and the media’s attempt to marginalize Sanders has been successful among them. While white progressives have made great strides in overcoming media efforts to make Sanders a “mystery,” most black voters apparently have made no such effort; even the fact that while Sanders was being arrested in 1963 for demonstrating against discriminatory housing in South Chicago while Clinton was a “Goldwater Girl” hardly makes an impression.

Another uncomfortable fact that should be pointed out is that South Carolina is the reddest of states, and no Democrat has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the state in November. But the "silver-lining" is that it means there is still a little time left to get the truth across, and that starts with asking this question: Who is the most ethically unqualified person seeking the presidency? It’s not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, but Hillary Clinton. 

While Republicans keep beating each other on their ethics, or lack thereof, there is curiously little discussion in the media of the most unethical candidate running in the primaries: Hillary Clinton. The media—consumed with the idea of a female president no matter what—consistently accuses Sanders of “sexism” the few times he has attempted to address even in the subtlest terms her absolute dearth of moral or ethical authenticity.  The reality is that she must be stopped now, because it will be too late to switch horses by November, by which time there can be little doubt that the right-wing PACS and their “hit” commercials will have no queasiness in exposing the real Hillary, a person whose absolute contempt for voters and the “little people” in general is something that keener observers than those who inhabit the media have long known.

The various scandals of the Clintons have shown the pair to be serial perjurers, although some claim that Bill “learned” it—perhaps from Hillary who is a natural born one; in other words, a pathological liar. You need “proof” of Hillary’s lack of qualification for the highest office in the land, beyond the fact she has no positive accomplishments on her cover sheet, save those that have to do with the mere fact of gender? Here is a list of her true accomplishments:

Whitewater: The ever avaricious Clintons got together with Jim and Susan McDougal to take out a loan to buy property adjacent to the White River in Arkansas, with the intention of making a quick buck by selling the property later at an expected large profit from dumb Yankees looking for summer homes. The “dumb” Yankees proved not so cooperative when high interest rates persuaded them to keep their money in their own pockets instead of the Clintons.  Jim McDougal then set his sights on banking, establishing the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, from which he illegally “loaned” himself $1.75 million for another real estate scheme called Castle Grand; it also seems that money was questionably used from the bank to cover the Clintons’ losses in the Whitewater scheme, apparently in exchange for other “mysterious” considerations. 

Apparently because she needed clients, Hillary became principle legal “adviser” for the Castle Grand operation. This arrangement soon came under federal investigation, and the venture turned into another bust, with Madison Guaranty going under—but not before the Rose law firm had made an “undisclosed” amount of money from legal fees. Although the Clintons and McDougals were “equal” partners in these ventures, the Clintons were not impacted as hard financially, and it was suspected that Gov. Clinton used his position to make his and Hillary’s contribution “equal” in value; it is not known exactly what this “contribution” was, because no one ever talked. 

As far as Hillary’s involvement in this byzantine affair in which 15 people were eventually convicted for various crimes, it seems that it is still not known precisely what “services” she was paid for in all of this, but according to a New York Times story in 1996, “an examination of Hillary Clinton's public statements suggests someone less passive in her behavior, less consistent in her answers, and less committed to full disclosure than the figure in her own self-portrait” as a mere “bystander” and “victim” in the scandal.

Cattle Futures "lottery": Ever heard of anyone winning a 100-to-1 wager lately? That is the miracle Hillary Clinton somehow managed to perform with a $1,000 investment in cattle futures in October, 1978. By January, 1979, she was already $26,000 ahead, and despite supposedly being behind at certain times, she claims to have finished ahead by $100,000 by the time she got out at the end of 1979. Those with experience in such trading called Clinton’s explanations of how she accomplished this “highly implausible” and a 1-in-31 trillion shot to be duplicated. It is generally believed that insider trading or other illegal shenanigans were used by her enablers to “maximize” her profits. Others, however, claim that it was more likely a laundered “bribe.”

Travelgate: Today the firing of supposedly non-partisan White House travel office employees to be replaced by Clinton cronies seems innocuous, but again Hillary Clinton is a prominent figure. It seems that she was involved personally in the firings, and was found to have perjured herself in statements to investigators about her involvement. New York Times columnist William Safire referred to her as a “congenial liar,” and as is the Whitewater scandal, others ended-up paying the price—including Vince Foster, who was pressured by Hillary to do the firings.

Vince Foster Affair: Foster was found dead in a park outside of Washington, DC. Several investigations concluded that he had committed suicide by gunshot. Foster had apparently become depressed as a general counsel for the Clinton White House; among other things, he had become the dart board in the media for the travel office firings, even though he was acting on the desires of his alleged lover, Hillary Clinton, a woman who felt comfortable only in the presence of sycophants and fanatical disciples. Foster had a highly successful career at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock where he worked with Hillary, and was extremely reluctant to join the Clinton White House; one suspects that the Clintons’ were desperate to bring him with them to keep an eye on him. In fact, Foster’s increasing depression was a worry to them in more ways than one; immediately after his death, his office was ransacked to uncover any “incriminating” information he might have kept.

Monica Lewinsky: A lot of people then and now have a low opinion of Linda Tripp, who “outed” Bill Clinton’s Oral Office affair with Lewinsky. But one shouldn’t discount her so readily, since she worked for years in an office next to Hillary’s in the White House—meaning she had a “ringside” seat to what was going on there. In a 2015 story in the UK’s Daily Mail she admitted to be flabbergasted that this born liar and deceiver could possibly be in a position to snake her way into the presidency. While Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s impeachment was front-and-center, it was really about Hillary:

But according to the woman who outed Monica Lewinsky as the president's mistress, the real story was never about Monica. It was about 'subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice… a true abuse of power.' And it was about Hillary. Because, according to Linda Tripp, it was Hillary who manipulated and stage managed the story, converting herself from a lackluster First Lady with unimpressive approval ratings to admirable First Victim - the blindsided wife standing by her man. She made him forgivable. She 'orchestrated the cover up' and she made damn sure that she moved on. Nothing, and no-one, was going to stand in her way.

Tripp claims that Hillary was the “key player” in a host of scandals in the Clinton administration, the “true ruler” of the White House, and this included  “blatant lies to the American people,” being “utterly ruthless” in her pursuit of power. Tripp claims that “I think the most compelling thing about Hillary is that she will stop at nothing to achieve her end and that she views the public as plebeians easily seduced into believing her point of view.” Nothing, not a Gennifer Flowers, not a Paula Jones, not even a Monica Lewinsky was going to stand in the way of “Eight years for Bill. Eight years for Hill…So this is a runaway train. Nobody is going to stop it.”

Tripp claims to have come forward back then not merely because of the Lewinsky scandal, but because of the accumulation of many years of corruption within the Clinton administration, for which she gives Hillary a prominent role. The Clintons’ were able to get away with it because “Bill Clinton is a gifted politician and he was able to charm and seduce the country. The Clintons presented a disingenuous front.”

According to Tripp, “I believe for all his faults as a flawed man, Bill Clinton is not as unscrupulous as his wife. He is complicit but he is not as deceitful as Hillary Clinton is. Don't get me wrong, they are both missing the integrity chip but while she is inherently dishonorable, his seems to be learned behavior.” Even worse, “Hillary Clinton ruled the White House even as early as 1993 and every scandal that originated in the Clinton administration was the brainchild of Hillary. When I think of Hillary Clinton I think of a lingering taint of scandal and wrongdoing and, in my opinion, possible criminal activity.” All in the pursuit of the one thing the Clintons’ share in common above all else: naked power.

Far from being your typical “First Lady,” Hillary was involved one way or another in a host of other “small potatoes” scandals, like Chinagate, Filegate (in which she called her illegal access to and use of FBI files a “completely honest bureaucratic snafu”) and Lootergate, in which Hillary decided to keep some items as “souvenirs” that were the property of the White House. 

Hillary's contempt for everything outside feeding her own megalomania continues. It is clear that she has been deceiving about her involvement in the Benghazi affair, and there can be no doubt that the email scandal is related to it somehow. Tripp also has an opinion about the email scandal, which shouldn’t be discounted since many of us share that opinion:

The scandals simply continue. She covers them up and moves on. People should be aware that she is probably the first cabinet secretary in the history of our country who has operated with their own private server, for a reason. Every lowly government employee understands that electronic communication on government-operated computers belongs to the United States. Hillary knows this and it's why she chose to break the rules. Because every document written on a government device is a record and it is retrievable forever more. Hillary's voluminous documents are not retrievable. She is answerable to no-one. She was clearly not answerable to the president for whom she worked and more importantly by actions she took she was not answerable to the American public. She hands over what she chooses, deletes the rest and wipes the server clean. That is Hillary Clinton in a nutshell.

This is the person the media is working so hard to shoehorn into the White House? No former occupant of the position even comes close to the level of absolute indifference to ethics and lawful behavior than Hillary Clinton. Not even Richard Nixon, who unlike Hillary was not necessarily the instigator and active participant of illegal actions, but looked the other way when illegal activities were occurring in his “name,” and acquiesced to efforts to conceal them by his underlings (to be honest, that also describes Ronald Reagan, but his mind was going by then). 

Those famous 18-minutes erased from a Nixon office tape is absolutely small fry compared to the astonishing audacity of Clinton taking it upon herself to delete 30,000 supposedly “personal” emails from her personal server in her personal residence amongst classified and top secret information—which she illegally kept since she left her post as Secretary of State. Just how “personal” were those emails, and why was that server not confiscated by federal authorities immediately when it became known  of its existence? Were they not supposed to be a matter of public record? And what was Clinton planning to do with all that information? Use them in her bag of “dirty tricks,” much like the Nixon administration?

The bottom line is that the criminally unethical Hillary Clinton must be prevented from achieving the White House, preferably by Bernie Sanders. But it seems that too many people have deliberately allowed themselves to duped and blinded by her and her media fanatics.

There is no "logic" in supporting a bad candidate

I had to laugh when media reports claimed that Hillary Clinton's win in the Nevada caucuses was “huge,” a state where just a month ago she was supposed to win “huge.” The problem, of course, is that the pro-Clinton media once more exaggerated her “victory” to puff her up. Exit polls actually showed that a majority of Latino voters opted for Bernie Sanders, but that didn’t stop CNN from claiming that Clinton had “won” their support. In fact, her narrow 53-47 percent victory was possible only because of a black vote margin of 4-1 in her favor. 

It seems that there is some confusion among black voters about who exactly the Clintons are, which apparently has led to “forgetfulness.” In 2008, Clinton and her bulldog spouse unashamedly used racial “code” in South Carolina against Barack Obama; Hillary even denigrated Martin Luther King, Jr. in a local interview. In Pennsylvania she again used racist code against Obama before a crowd of white voters, and her feminist supporters used barely concealed racist language. Have black voters already forgotten that? 

Have they also forgotten what her husband did as the first “black” president? While Bill Clinton (no doubt prodded by Hillary) managed to pass numerous laws that mainly benefitted well-off white women and their self-serving “feeling good about feeling bad” gender agenda, the Clintons’ had other plans for minorities: use them as bartering chips to get what they wanted from the Republican-controlled Congress after the disastrous 1994 mid-term elections (with “help” from Hillary’s arrogance, which alienated lawmakers on both sides of the aisle during the health care reform debate). Jail-filling sentencing and welfare “reform” were all understood to have racial inflections (at least to Republican voters), and agreeing to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Banking Reform Act was later used by the Bush administration as an excuse to end low-income housing subsidies while allowing now-unregulated financial institutions to spread the myth of even low-income people being able to afford their own homes—the result of which contributed to the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. 

Like all craven opportunists, Hillary Clinton says whatever is necessary to achieve her aims, but the actual doing is another matter altogether. Everything she does is principally to satisfy her colossal ego; even her feminist ideology is merely a tool to take short cuts on her way to personal inflation. Not that this bothers the media. After all, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was named TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year,” despite the fact her principle “accomplishment” is being head of the ruling party in Germany; a popular local saying, “to Merkel,” is in fact an uncomplimentary reference, meaning to “do nothing.” For the media, all one has to do is satisfy the narrow personal political and social demands of its members; if there is nothing else to show for it, just charging “sexism” and “misogyny” will do.

Unlike Obama, who wanted to do great things like his idol, Abraham Lincoln, and seemed at home in the white as well as black world, Clinton—ever the career opportunist—chooses whatever implement happens to be useful to her, whether she actually believes in or not. In the beginning, as a “young Republican” like her family, she didn’t “like” JFK—you know, the guy her future husband proudly shook hands with as a “young Democrat”—and received training in sneakiness canvassing for votes for Richard Nixon. In 1964, she was nearly a legal adult, so she didn’t have quite the excuse of ignorance and impressionism for “working” for Barry Goldwater, whose right-wing extremism was obviously a reaction to JFK’s and LBJ’s “quasi-socialist” policies, as he called them—particularly as they had to do with integration, civil and voting rights (for many years, his state of employ, Arizona, refused to recognize the MLK, Jr. holiday).

Clinton was still a Nixon supporter in 1968, although she toyed with the idea of supporting a candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, which she would have never had to fight in anyways, and her future husband was desperate to stay out of.  But Clinton apparently discovered that radical feminism suited her better, and conservatives generally were not supportive of this brand of ideology. Frankly, feminists were and are off-putting in their intolerance, tyranny, hypocrisy and bigotry, but for Clinton, their “promise” to run over “obstacles” rather than use persuasion and work also suited her ego. We can see that now, as Clinton clearly believes that her own conceit is sufficient reason for people to support her; she cannot fathom why anyone would want to vote for anyone else, since she is, well, a woman. It’s her time, after all, even though many voters wish they could vote for a different woman, not her and her record of deceit, lies, self-entitlement, failure to have accomplished anything of real substance, her laundry list of scandals; it seems her only other "qualification" is to have some inflated title in front of her name. That wasn’t the same dynamic that led people to vote for Obama; he was the “right” black man at the right time.

Before anyone counts Sanders “out,” let me quote from the 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica Year Book concerning that year’s Democratic primaries, and see if it sounds “familiar”:

Obama had a far-more-difficult road. Although he attracted enthusiastic crowds and solid fund-raising totals from the start, he plodded through innumerable 2007 candidate joint appearances without distinguishing himself. Clinton's campaign successfully portrayed her as the inevitable nominee, with a substantial early lead in establishment support, fund-raising, and public opinion polls. Clinton also had serious problems, however. Many Democrats feared that she and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, were polarizing figures and that she could not win a general election; in addition, her campaign staff fought internally and failed to produce a winning strategic plan.

Obama, by contrast, combined an uplifting speaking style with a smoothly functioning campaign that became known as “no-drama Obama.” While Clinton went for knockout victories in early deciding Democratic states, Obama played a longer game, seeking delegates by the ones and twos all over the country. His campaign tapped thousands of small contributors through the Internet and then approached them repeatedly for more funding. To counter Clinton's inside experience, Obama underscored his status as an outsider, promising “hope and change” and encouraging rally supporters to proclaim, “Yes we can.”

Yes we can. In response to a Nevada caucus voter who believed in Sanders but decided to vote Clinton, there is no “logic” in supporting a bad candidate, no matter how much the media puffs her up.

Scalia’s sudden passing shouldn’t be cause to ennoble him and his extremism on the court

If you are ideologically or politically left of extreme-right, the late U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia was probably someone you didn’t want the power to make decisions effecting ordinary people’s lives. Now, I realize that a lot of people—particularly white people—are not particularly concerned about what right-wing justices on the court do, for the same reason that the Republican Party is perceived as the “white people’s party,” and the belief that these justices decisions principally serve their interests, particularly as far as civil, voting and the accused rights are concerned, setting the tone for an unjustified paranoia about the “rights” of the majority. 

However, feeding off the prejudices of people merely blinds them to the long-term cost of narrow-mindedness. Such people tend not to notice that extremist justices adversely affect their lives in subtle ways, such as the recent blocking by the five right-wing justices of president’s executive order on curbing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, particularly from coal-powered plants. The administration’s plan would not go into full effect for another 15 years, yet the coal industry once more trotted out the tiresome mantra of “potential” job losses. This is the same industry that a 2014 NPR report found that while most companies were perfectly willing to pay fines instead of improving safety conditions in the mines, the companies that were delinquent on their fines “reported close to 4,000 injuries in the years they failed to pay, including accidents that killed 25 workers and left 58 others with permanent disabilities,” and that “Delinquent mines continued to violate the law, with more than 130,000 violations, while they failed to pay mine safety fines.” 

That is just one of many examples of the right’s using outdated ideology to stifle the needs of the future. We don’t need to discuss Scalia’s smarmy asides in his dissents to the Affordable Care Act to discover that issues of public concern and safety are utterly anathema to the right-wing of the Court, and that it is utterly contemptuous of the security of the vast majority of Americans—most of whom happen to be white. In fact it seems it is more concerned with the “rights” of gun fanatics and bigots of every stripe, and Scalia was its leader and principle ideologue.

Scalia was also a racist; let’s not quibble about that fact. Like many Italian-Americans (such as his fellow far-right colleague, Samuel Alito), he was extremely conscious of his place in Anglo society, and this self-consciousness “required” that he out-bigot the bigots. Take for instance his stand on the current anti-affirmative action case, involving Abigail Fisher, a pudgy redhead who is yet another white female face on the attack on affirmative action. She whines that she was denied admittance to the University of Texas law school because of racial “preferences.” In fact her grades were not all that great, and as the university reported in its brief, and she would not have been admitted based on them because the school gave preference on admittance to students were in the top ten percentile of their graduating class, and Fisher failed to meet that standard. In fact, the brief noted that 26 white students compared to only six minority students received any kind of “special” consideration for admittance. 

The arrogance and self-conceit is typical, but so is the hypocrisy. No one wants to talk about the on-going affirmative action that white women have benefited from under the guise of Title IX. Although the law is usually thought of having to do with “equality” in sports participation, that isn’t its principle purpose, and it has essentially been a quota system providing what some may consider unfair and partial consideration for women in college admissions. This is affirmative action for women, yet no one dares call it that, because they are afraid of offending women and being called names. Yet who is afraid of belittling minorities in the most condescending of tones? Certainly not Scalia: 

“There are ­­there are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well. One of the briefs pointed out that most of the black scientists in the country don’t come from schools like the University of Texas…They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them … I'm just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some you know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing to admit as many blacks as possible. I just don’t think…”

Scalia’s blatant racism—which in the past he has justified by claiming that the 14^th Amendment does not prohibit private discrimination—seems to have exasperated Gregory Garre, speaking for the university:

“This Court heard and rejected that argument, with respect, Justice Scalia…If you look at the academic performance of holistic minority admits versus the top 10 percent admits, over time, they fare better. And, frankly, I don’t think the solution to the problems with student body diversity can be to set up a system in which not only are minorities going to separate schools, they’re going to inferior schools. I think what experience shows, at Texas, California and Michigan, is that now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student body diversity in America.”

(The great irony of California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, passed in 1996, is that white enrollment in the University of California system actually decreased from 40.2 percent in 1997 to 26.8 percent in 2010, while Asian enrollment is nearly 40 percent and far over-represented--such is the benefit of rote-memory-based "merit"--the reason why a measure to repeal the proposition was opposed by Asian advocates in the state. It is not the under-represented minorities who are the "problem" for whites.)

Many on the right accuse “liberal” or moderate justices of “judicial” activism; those on the left could make the same accusation of the extreme right on the court. Scalia whined in the gay marriage case that “Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.” 

Yet Scalia and his colleagues on the right repeatedly ignored past precedent and reality on the ground in regard to a wide range of issues of public concern because of their hostility to “liberals.” Of course they hid themselves behind the sheer cloth of “intent.” Scalia claimed to be an advocate of “textualism”—that is “interpreting” laws as their writers “intended.” Yet in regard to the U.S. Constitution, the vagueness of “intent” was frequently the intent. The wording of the Second Amendment was arbitrarily abridged numerous time, indicating that the Constitution’s drafters were seeking a means both to justify by law their own “revolution,” and seeking a means to contain the issue of gun rights with the insertion of a “well-regulated militia.” The Constitution’s drafters certainly had no clue that the technology of weapons would go well beyond one-shot-at-a-time breach-loaders; they certainly would have been horrified to learn that “citizens” would go around with automatic weapons killing dozens of innocent people at a time. This was rule by mob violence, something they certainly would have not considered within the bounds of “rights.” Taking the Constitution “literally” in this day and age without consideration to vastly change circumstances is thus an emperor with no clothes. 

Nevertheless, Scalia’s apologists praise his “intellectualism” and “wit”; I call it a mockery of all human decency. “The world does not expect logic and precision in poetry or inspirational pop philosophy; it demands them in the law,” Scalia wrote in his dissent in the same-sex marriage case. Yet Scalia is infamous for his use of “zingers” and contemptuous and otherwise extremely unprofessional and even juvenile asides. Sometimes it seems he uses it to mask his own limitations in understanding the issues: “Troposphere, stratosphere, whatever. I told you before I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to have to deal with global warming, to tell you the truth.” That is someone we need making decisions on environmental protection?

Scalia is gone, and now it is time to put an end to this contempt for reality majority on the court. Not surprisingly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is calling for the current vacancy to be filled after the presidential election—and what far-right flakes can we expect from people like Trump or Cruz if either one of them is elected? “The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” McConnell said. Well, from what I can tell, I’m not sure this presidential election is how that should be determined; this country has suffered enough from its short-sightedness.

Despite Sanders trouncing Clinton yet again in a debate, the media still "counsels" defeatism and fatalism to Sanders supporters

This past Thursday’s PBS Democratic debate in Milwaukee was apparently not important enough for the Seattle Times to put on its front page, or at least above the cutline. Political commentator Buck Sexton, offering an opinion on CNN’s website, claimed that Hillary Clinton “won” the debate by not “losing” it, or at least she said all the things her diehard supporters wanted to hear. While this seems to be the general consensus amongst the mainstream media following her unprecedented 22-point loss in New Hampshire, this once more flies in the face of current reality, as more and more Democrats and left-leaning young voters are getting “The Bern.”  

While Saturday Night Live is showing its “age” by airing skits that clearly show a pro-Clinton bias and suggesting that Bernie Sanders is “insensitive” to blacks despite a civil rights record dating back to at least 1962 as a student activist (back when Hillary was a teenager canvassing for votes for Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater), in the real world on-line polls once more showed Sanders trouncing Clinton, in some cases by 4-1 and even 8-1 margins. What are the pundits listening to? They certainly are not hearing what the “people”—or at least those who are politically and socially aware—are, only those who have already made-up the minds that it is Hillary or else, like real racial bigots like Harriet Christian in 2008.

No, the problem wasn’t that Clinton looked “unpresidential” in that outfit she was wearing, but  that many people remain unconvinced of her “commanding” way of delivering her manipulative and opportunistic lines,  women being told that they will “burn in hell” if they don’t vote for her (that didn’t sound like a “joke” by Madeline Albright), or turning people off by making accusatory demands on their gender consciousness (Barack Obama for his part never demanded that people vote for him because he was “black”). I admit that Clinton’s late night talk show appearances made her look like a “good sport,” but that is easy to be when you are the center of attention of a captive audience--and the audience isn't "captive" anymore, and those who are not following the "party" line are feeling the backside of Clinton's hand.

Furthermore, the “card” that Clinton and her media supporters believe she can play against Sanders (besides the gender card)—that his plans are “unrealistic”—holds no water. What Clinton and her supporters don’t understand is that if you think small (i.e. “pragmatic”), you’ll get even less than that from those who oppose your plans. You might even get nothing, because both your friends and enemies do not think you are even serious, expose you as being disingenuous to begin with. 

What we need now is someone who thinks “big,”  is a “populist” who can both strongly and energetically articulate the issues and make it “big” in the minds of the people, enough to convince at least a few Republicans in Congress in less hidebound states to realize it is bad for their own electability to be hidebound in their thinking. This might not be as “impossible” as some people might think; as mayor of Burlington, Sanders was able to find common ground on a variety of public programs with people who were opposed to him ideologically, which was cause for USA Today to rank him as one of the country’s best mayors back in the 1980s. 

Obama himself didn’t have quite the reach he could have had for gaining widespread popular support for his policies, since those inclined to look at the world in the narrow confines of their own prejudices chose to be completely tone deaf to anything he said. Clinton, meanwhile, is the kind of person who either “loves” those who love her—or hates those who don’t love her. We remember what happened in 2008 when black voters proved less “loving” to her—she disparaged Martin Luther King, Jr and Bill called Obama a “fairytale” while campaigning before the South Carolina primary (black leaders and voters apparently have forgotten all of that). Since Clinton needs to feel the “love,” she increasingly patronizes minorities like she is their “great mother”—or rather, grandmother. Perhaps out of desperation, she naturally plays her other “trump” card, shaming people for blocking her “historic” election, accusing those Democrats who don’t support her as misogynists, sexists or "traitors"; that in itself tells the self-obsession and megalomania that drives her. But Sanders, on the other hand, is enough of a “populist” the he will at least have the advantage of not immediately shutting ears on the “assumption” that he isn’t speaking for all of us. Because he is.

Yet the Democratic Party leadership sits like a block of lead behind Clinton, mainly because the DNC has been behind the times and has lost track of the newer generation of Democratic voters for some time. Instead of standing with core progressive principles, we are “reminded” ad nauseam that Clinton is “experienced.” What the New York Times said in its 2008 endorsement of Clinton over Obama will likely be repeated this year, that her  resumé was “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.”

I wish someone would please explain to me how her resumé is “deeper” than Sanders’—or her husband’s, or John McCain’s or John Kerry’s or even Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s. OK, I’ll concede Sarah Palin’s, but the guy elected dogcatcher probably does too. This is just more of the outrageous and dishonest hyperbole the media has bestowed on Clinton. For her time as First Lady, she is most famously (or infamously) known for her botched effort to sell health care reform. As Senator her most notable “accomplishment” was voting for the Iraq war, in which more than 4,000 Americans were killed and many thousands more maimed to no purpose. As Secretary of State, the only things that come to mind are the Benghazi tragedy and her illegal use of her personal computers for classified state department information, no doubt to keep her own shenanigans a “state” secret. In fact, her only “accomplishments” in public life have been taking up space—and giving it “substance” for the mere fact that she is a woman; someone should remind her that two women before her held the title of “Secretary of State.”

The aforementioned commentator, Buck Sexton, tells us that despite the fact that Sanders is “what the Democratic base wishes it could elect in an attempt to change the country,” he states that while being “the quintessential politician-for-sale,” Clinton’s “disingenuousness and dishonesty is the price Democrats are willing to pay in order to keep one of their own as commander-in-chief…This most recent debate served as a reminder of that unsavory truth.”

 

One can read between the lines a sense of defeatism or fatalism, giving in to the tyranny of feminist self-entitlement both from the Clinton campaign and its supporters in the media. There are many who demand that Hillary Clinton is “owed” the nomination and even the presidency, but those of us who care about the direction this country is going—particularly in the face of the demagoguery of hate being espoused by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz—don’t wish to be shackled by this defeatism and fatalism or the idea that they “owe” something to someone to satisfy an outdated ideology largely fueled by hate in the service of self-victimization. Sanders can win if people like Sexton do not allow themselves to persuaded by the myth that he can’t; that is only what the pro-Clinton media desperately wishes you to believe.