“When asked this morning by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, [Hillary Rodham Clinton] said ‘I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,’” reports Robert Reich. “In case you’ve missed it, we now have a president who doesn’t care what most economists think. George W. Bush doesn’t even care what scientists think. He rejects all experts who disagree with his politics. This has led to some extraordinarily stupid policies.”
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“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income,” said wingnut Bill Clinton as the setup to a bizarre, hypocritical, and nonsensical attack on Barack Obama, “it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules.”
“There simply cannot be any greater priority than preventing a John McCain Presidency, one which would empower the same faction and continue the same policies that have been slowly though inexorably destroying this country, its institutions and political values,” writes Glenn Greenwald while discussing his book Great American Hypocrites. “Understanding and neutralizing these tactics and the enabling media behavior is a prerequisite for preventing that.”
“Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles,” reports Politco. “A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.”
Just what does Barbara Ehrenreich have to say (disclaimer: she’s a stated Obama supporter) about Hillary’s religion problem?
The Family avoids the word Christian but worship Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the “meek.” They believe that, in mass societies, it’s only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God’s “dominion” on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it’s all about power – cultivating it, building it, and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or “cells.” “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe has said, and “build new power where we can’t.”
Perhaps a philosophy that’s “all about power” might explain the campaign tactics which (finally) have led to superdelegates speaking up and warning the Clinton campaign that the “calculated, desperate-to-win” antics likely will cost her their support.
As the campaign of Hillary Clinton tries to make continuing political hay out of Obama’s former pastor, perhaps it’s time (as pointed out by Middle Earth Journal) to revisit Hillary’s religious problem (one actually raised, recently, by the mainstream media): Belonging to a secretive and generally right-wing and fundamentalist group in Washington DC.
According to a new Gallup poll, 19% of Obama supporters and 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for McCain if their candidate is not the Democratic nominee.
While the fact that about one-fifth of Obama’s supporters would throw their party under a bus in the general election is extraordinarily shameful, the fact that nearly one-third (nearly one-third!) of Hillary’s would do the same is a little mind-blowing. And there’s no one but Hillary herself to blame for it.
I’ve little doubt that a fair number of Obama supporters simply do not like Hillary, and rightly or wrongly have a decade or more of experience from which to draw that personal opinion. It’s unlikely that very many within that shameful 19% of his supporters would throw the election to McCain simply because of anything Obama has said about his Democratic opponent.
But when it comes to the mind-numbing one-third of Hillary’s supporters who would throw the election to McCain, they don’t have a decade or more of experience from which to draw their personal opinion of Obama. Mostly what they have are the lies and deceptions about him told by Hillary herself and her campaign. In essence, nearly one-third of her supporters have become the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads”, swallowing whole anything she says which tarnishes Obama, puffs up herself, or (because we can’t forget this part) touts John McCain.
Voters in both camps — Obama’s 19% and Clinton’s 28% — need to grow up. For those supporters of Obama, it needs to be recognized that even if you don’t believe Clinton will right the nation’s course dramatically enough for you, she certainly won’t maintain the direction we’re in, and at full throttle, the way McCain will. I don’t like her either. Sometimes rather dramatically so. But come November, if she is the Democratic nominee, I will vote for her.
But for those supporters of Clinton, it’s time to recognize the degree to which their candidate has been going out of her way to destroy her Democratic opponent’s credibility. There simply is not enough difference between Clinton and Obama (beyond the former’s reprehensible campaign tactics) to justify throwing the general election to McCain. Your candidate of choice, in her petulant sense of entitlement to the presidency, has been needlessly undermining the other viable Democratic candidate in this race (and the one who is winning, no less). You would reject such tactics if used by Republicans, and you need to reject them when used by your candidate. If only just far enough to get it into your heads that when push comes to shove, the point in November will be to stop John McCain.
Everyone just grow the fuck up already. Unless you really do want to endure another four — or even eight — years of the policies of George W. Bush. In the end, that is the one thing, the only thing, that matters in this election.
For those who remain unclear as to the depths of depravity to which Hillary Clinton will sink in order to deliver unto herself the Presidency to which she believes she is entitled, witness the latest evidence. She’s (in essence) conspiring with Richard Mellon Scaife to pimp her own spin on the story of Obama’s former pastor. Scaife, of course, “was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” which embattled her and her husband for years.
“As the Clinton campaign now concedes, Sen. Clinton’s claims about running from their military aircraft to evade sniper fire are not borne out by the video of the events in question,” says Josh Marshall, of Hillary’s trip to Bosnia in the 90s. “[T]his is an anecdote that’s become something close to a staple of her foreign policy experience resume. And it’s pretty clearly false. And it comes in the context of a whole slew of exaggerations — some minor, some major — that she’s used to puff up her Commander-in-Chief resume.”
The problem with the most recent Bill Clinton remarks which have stirred controversy isn’t that they questioned Obama’s patriotism, because I don’t believe that’s what they did.
He’s out there campaigning for his wife. And the context of his remarks, it seems to me, was the larger context of campaigns in general, not a comparison between Hillary and her Democratic opponent. So when he says that a Clinton/McCain presidential race would be “two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country”, I think he’s simply trying to position her as an equal to McCain on the patriotism front.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem with the remarks. The real problem is that they are yet another example of the Clinton campaign talking up John McCain’s credentials.
And in a media landscape in which the press refuses to call out McCain on not understanding (or, perhaps, lying about) the most basic facts about Iraq, preferring instead to excuse them as “gaffes” or “senior moments” or “mistakes” which “anyone could make”, the Clinton campaign needs to stop putting McCain on a pedestal.
Otherwise, the de facto conspiracy between the Clinton camp and the nation’s news media will leave us with President John McCain, no matter what kind of campaign the eventual Democratic nominee runs.
Addendum: It should go without saying, but won’t here, that there of course is another problem entirely with his suggestion that in a Clinton/McCain race “all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics” wouldn’t be an issue. That suggestion doesn’t pass the laugh test.