Hillary Clinton Is a Monstrous Politician

Well, this should be entertaining. 🙄

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? That aside from the name calling and the ethno-religious demagoguery, no one has demonstrated to my satisfaction that HRC actually *is* the lesser evil when compared to Trump — because she has a track record of evil that no reasonable person can overlook.

And tangentially, if you haven’t read this indictment from John Pilger at Counterpunch you really should.

Right on partner…, write on.

Sanders is winning with the people you’d expect him to win with, and losing with the people you’d expect him to lose with. His job this time was to figure out how to win with people he would be likely to lose with. And he didn’t. And when you read the form of teeth-gnashing that his supporters engage in, it’s not hard to guess why:

I’d guess a few reasons she’s doing well in the campaign so far include the backing of the party establishment and the corporate media, name recognition, identity politics tribalism and anti-Trump scaremongering.

The comments about “identity politics tribalism”, “genitals and gun control” (as one notable Tweetyperson hint hint put it, apparently) seem to typify the reaction to the fact that Sanders is not able to reach particular key primary voter constituencies. But, why would anyone be surprised by that? Those voters can presumably smell the contempt for aspects of politics that they certainly don’t think are peripheral or deserve to sit on the back burner behind student debt charts.

Take blacks, for instance. After the election of Obama, blacks have lived through a decade of hardly-veiled racist vilification of a picture-perfect example of a mainstream president. In that emotional narrative, who do you think has the advantage? The primary election of Obama’s former rival, but someone no less hated by the Republican right and someone who represents an identity-political rude gesture in the direction of those people? Or the primary election of someone whose supporters represent (to many) a more palatable version of placating the concerns of “poor white males”, the people whom black voters are the least interested in placating?

And as for the subjective experience of blacks on the economic front, I got this link for ya, from some people at NC:

Perhaps a better explanation for Mr. Sanders’s divergent performance is that while African-Americans and white working-class Democrats are experiencing broadly similar economic trends, they interpret them differently.

A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last week found that African-Americans rated the economy as good by a ratio of about four to one, versus about two to one for white Democrats and an even narrower margin for white Democrats without a college degree. A Times/CBS News poll in December found that, relative to two years earlier, roughly three times as many African-Americans said their family’s financial situation was better as said it was worse, while Democrats without a college degree were almost evenly split on this question.

Geoff Garin, a strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign who currently polls for Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton “super PAC,” posited that for a more economically marginal group like African-Americans, the unemployment rate — which has declined significantly for all racial groups in recent years — carries more importance than growth in incomes and certain assets, which have been slower to recover. For whites, even working-class whites, whose jobless rate is substantially lower than that for African-Americans, the latter took on comparatively more importance.

“The major source of economic anxiety for working-class white men is not whether they have a job tomorrow,” Mr. Garin said, “it’s that they still haven’t had their personal recovery. Their recovery is about assets and income.” For African-Americans, on the other hand, “you don’t take job growth for granted.”

So if you’re upset that Sanders is at a disadvantage, you have two choices: be angry at primary voters and talk as though one group of them (white millenials) is pitted against the other groups or understand how it is that a progressive candidate must position him/herself to hold together enough of a coalition.

On the topic:

Bernie simply failed to get the right message out to Black Voters.

Trump knows how to message and so does Hillary.

If Bernie doesn’t hit the ball out of the park in the next few big states, he is done.

If its Hillary or Trump, I’m going with Trump. At least he will do less damage to the world.

Oops I missed your rare marginally on topic entry. I guess you have to in order to maintain credibility.

The media arguments against Trump, at their best, are based on future conjecture. This from a group of people with an unmatched record of failure in such endeavors.

The media arguments for Hillary, at their best, are based on past amnesia. This from a group of people with an unmatched record of success in such endeavors.

While I am still hoping Sanders will pull it out, but damn, the guy won’t punch, I suspect Bruce Dixon has been right all along.

@ Seamus whenever I contemplate Sanders’ campaign I’m reminded strongly of the this he talks a good game but as you say he won’t even attempt to climb out let alone try to land a punch. But then neither has any other vaguely leftish movement or politician in the US during my lifetime and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Your comments about the people with unmatched records of both types are sadly all too accurate.

mfi

If its Hillary or Trump, I’m going with Trump. At least he will do less damage to the world.

Really?

This has been a dispiriting election season. People that I have known for a long time, that I did anti-war marches with, that I’ve demonstrated with in our state house, that in short have been active dissenters say, “I like what Sanders says, but you have to be realistic.” I just want to scream, “Well, REALISTICALLY, what the hell have we accomplished in the past 20 years?” I resist notions of collective guilt, but I’m about to conclude that Americans deserve condemnation.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/03/httpswwwalmasdarnewscomarticlesouthfront-iraqi-army-prepares-liberation-mosul-isis-seems-occupied-war-syria.html

Here from Pat Lang. Research the war’s history here and you won’t be far off.

The primary weapon of class war is distraction. So if the rich and elites can set angry white men (Trump) against African-Americans (Clinton) or millennials (Sanders) against older white voters (Clinton), it’s mission accomplished.

I should say right off the bat the problem is not in the messaging. Trump and Sanders are portrayed as outsiders and anti-Establishment, but they wouldn’t be running inside the Republican and Democratic parties if they really were outsiders. It’s just the party Establishments prefer other candidates. If you are a billionaire or an inoffensive Senator, guess what? you are part of the Establishment.

Running within one of the two parties is much easier than the movement building needed to run outside them. Trump was lucky that the Republican field was so splintered and fractured. It played into his strength as a showman, allowed him to dominate the media (despite themselves), and make it all about him (free publicity). Sanders had a much harder road. From the start, it was a two horse race, him and Clinton. Clinton had the whole party machine behind her. It didn’t matter what his message was to the black community because it was never going to get past what Bruce Dixon calls the “black misleadership class” (who were all supporting Clinton) to the black community. It is possible to get around obstructive leaderships like these but it takes movement building and a lot of hard work to do so, and when Sanders ran as a Democrat, it was clear he was not going to do this.

Out of the current candidate field, Clinton is the one who is different from the others. Trump and Cruz really do believe most of the incoherent nuttery they flog. Sanders has high credibility marks, as in he believes what he is saying. But Hillary Clinton, like husband Bill, is a grifter. She believes in nothing. It is all and always about what sells the con. Bill was always much better at the sell (although if you notice nowadays, not so much). There is nothing so lame as a grifter who’s lost the gift of his patter. What Hillary lacks in the sell, she makes up in persistence. This persistence, unfortunately, also explains her penchance for doubling down on failures and never seeming to learn from her mistakes. Of course, we also need to understand that what looks like a mistake from the viewpoint of the good of the country and ordinary Americans often isn’t when looked at from the perspective of the con.

Perhaps the Clintons’ greatest con was wrapping themselves up in what has come to be known as the Washington Consensus. They identify themselves so closely with Establishment group think that nobody can attack them without attacking and alienating that Establishment. Of course, what this means is that all you ever are ever going to get out of the Clintons is lies and more of the same, but I think you all knew that.

Pitchforks and Trump
I’m in.

A’ la lanterne

Ian:

The idea that Bernie doesn’t know how to message is deranged.

I agree with that completely.

I think Sanders’ problem is exactly what nihil obstet points to: “I like what Sanders says, but you have to be realistic.” “Realism” here, I think, means “a ‘socialist’ ‘can’t win’.” The reasoning, if it can be called that, is that Clinton is more “electable”—the invincible “Republican attack machine” would make Sanders into mincemeat the moment he got the nomination—which denies the actual polling or the broad appeal of Sanders’ positions or Clinton’s actual record or any combination thereof. (I have yet to see any evidence anywhere that people prefer Clinton’s positions as positions to those of Sanders.)

It’s as if many Democratic voters have factored our completely broken system into their voting—and cannot imagine taking even a tiny step outside of it; it’s a bit like, hypothetically, voting for the corrupt candidate rather than the anti-corruption candidate—even though everyone desperately wants corruption to end—because everyone “knows” that, in the current corrupt system, the anti-corruption candidate can’t win.

Trump has the potential, in my view, to disable both political parties as they’re presently constituted, at least temporarily wresting control from the current crop of oligarchs controlling both.
Nothing else initially matters, as nothing is possible before stopping them.
Trump himself, I’d posit, is nearly incidental compared to the broader current propelling him.
Of course, where we’d go from there is a crapshoot at best.
However, there simply isn’t a viable option on the horizon – and we’re already living under fascism, inverted totalitarianism. And it will only get worse.
There’s nothing to loose, as we’ve already lost.

A’ la lanterne

This year’s (likely) general election in a nutshell: one candidate is a warmongering, money-grubbing, lying, incompetent fraud; and the other is Donald Trump.

I have to second MFI across the board. We cannot afford this nonsense any longer.
2016 is “IT”! There will not be a second chance!

The idea that Bernie doesn’t know how to message is deranged. He came from virtually nowhere to within striking distance of a candidate with more money, institutional support and fame. Anyone who thinks Bernie is a bad politician is on crack. He has essentially zero institutional support, is a “socialist” and is winning multiple states.

Thank you. I have seen multiple times in multiple places that if he doesn’t win it’s a problem with his messages. I initially supported him hoping he would get to 10% & this would cause Hillary to move leftwards when she saw that there was a viable constituency for those policies and she didn’t *have* to pander rightwards.

(You may all die laughing at my misperception on HRC now. I rarely misread people that horribly, but I did in fact believe she was a decent person who meant well and was only compromising rightwards because she thought she had to. I was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong on all counts. )

He … has done a little better than that. Basically pulled even. Maybe ahead. And that’s with a media blackout for the most part, and a full court press disinformation campaign the rest of the time, which I had not expected at all. 3 of the states he lost involved outright cheating, 3rd world level blatant in the case of Arizona. NC may not have been election fraud, but the campaign infiltration should repulse anyone who has any conscious at all (actually, I’ll go further and say anyone who still supports her basically doesn’t care about the democratic process at all as long as their candidate gets in. Which is fine if you admit it, but basically, if you are still defending her then as far as I’m concerned you have no business complaining about voting fraud ever again, or saying you care at all about promoting democracy anywhere else, cause you damn sure don’t care about it here. Those who feel like they are being insulted should, unless you have been paying absolutely no attention to anything but CNN, in which case you’re just ignorant.) At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m far from the only one who no longer trusts any result not backed by a paper trail.

Bernie is resonating with the public because everyone who isn’t so disillusioned that they think EVERYONE is an untrustworthy fraud realizes he is something different. He actually means what he says. No, he isn’t perfect, but no one ever will be. O’Malley had the same message and is a terrific speaker and debater but got no traction because, well, you have two guys saying the same thing and you know one is trustworthy and you’re unsure about the other, who ya gonna vote for? Hillary adopted some of the same message but has been practically salivating to run back to being a more obvious corporate lackey plus she always sounds desperate to attack Iran for some reason, so I don’t think anyone bought her for a second.

And AZ/IL/NC? Those have ended any chance of her getting a HUGE chunk of his supporters, unless Donald announces he wishes to legalize murder in the streets (and we’d prolly still go to a third party instead). MA was cheating too and some of us were pissed, and it was really weird that Bernie won the hand counted parts by double digits, but now we’re way past “this seems a little strange…”

At this point, I think we’re at “Hillary just as unconcerned with Democratic process in US as in Honduras” & “The DNC and MSM are basically endorsing cheating to put her in, and don’t give a shit what the people want, if you vote for him we will do everything we can to stop you or switch your vote”.

They have just insured that they are the party of the terminally stupid, people who don’t have internet or time to keep up (but stuff eventually filters down even to them) and people who don’t care at all about corruption, period. I do tend to overestimate people, but I don’t think the openly pro-corruption, pro-cheating party is a winning slogan with the American people, even today. They probably hope people will just quit voting, or that no one will care when they rig the voting machines, and that they can get away with it because Republicans (rightly) loathe and distrust their party leaders too. but I don’t think they have any idea what they are laying the groundwork for.

Or, Bernie pulls a comeback, we toss out all the business as usual sacks of shit and replace them with people who either aren’t corrupt or at least understand the need not to be too obvious about it and are committed to enacting actual policies that will make the world a better place instead of a worse one.

I too agree with Mark. Our elites, of which Clinton is an extremely high level member, justify their wealth and privileges on the basis of their knowing more and better than the rest of us. But as the history of the last 35 to 50 years has shown with its ongoing destruction of the middle class and a series of endless wars they have lied us into and lied to keep us in, they have not known more or better. As Mark says, there have been plenty of us non-elite Untermenschen who have been right, and consistently right, even as our privileged elites have been just as consistently wrong. These are not well intentioned people. If they were well intentioned, they would look at their record, admit they don’t know what they are doing, and leave. But they don’t. They stay and defend their privileges.

People, like Clinton, visit one disaster after another on the rest of us, fail upwards themselves and make millions doing so. Neither chance nor incompetence can explain how no matter how badly they screw up/us, they make out like bandits, unless of course we recognize them as bandits. If we look at our elites as a criminal class, the history of the last 35 to 50 years suddenly does make sense. I call this period the construction of kleptocracy, the rule of criminals. And it is by no means a uniquely American phenomenon.

Do Clinton and our elites believe they are criminals? Almost certainly not, and again as Mark says, it doesn’t matter. The SS officer conducting mass executions of thousands probably believed in the rightness of his cause and his actions. And those beliefs change nothing. He still was acting in bad faith, because bad faith is not about what you believe or how strongly. It is about what any ordinary person of those of us in the hoi polloi would know and consider evil and wrong.

You might be thinking oh no, a nazi reference. The argument is too extreme, but here too you would be mistaken. Our elites inflict great violence on us and on the people in the rest of the world. But when it is done to us Americans, it is never called violence. So our elites can foreclose on a million families, and that’s not violence. They can send millions of US jobs to China and kick those people out of the middle class, and that’s not violence. They can force us to buy crappy health insurance that, with its deductibles, is too expensive to actually use, and kill off a few hundred thousand of us that way each year, and that’s not violence. They can use the markets, the tax structure, and Fed policy to transfer trillions away from us and to themselves, and that’s not violence. The hell it isn’t! And when it is done to the rest of the world, it is always depicted as a great crusade, necessary violence but still heroic. But none of them would have given a damn about Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein or Libya and Iraq if they had had no oil. And ISIS? They don’t care how much ISIS destabilizes Syria. They are concerned about it destabilizing Iraq, the Gulf, and Saudi Arabia, again because of the oil.

The truth is the only violence that our elites find unconscionable is violence directed at them. And how do they define such violence? Making them liable for the crimes they have committed, making them pay back the money they have stolen, reducing their power and eliminating their undeserved privileges, you know making them look more like the rest of us and, in doing so, tying their fates to ours, in other words replacing privilege with responsibility. Just imagine the howls that would produce. People, like Bill and Hillary, having to live like the rest of us, going down if the rest of us go down. The ignominy and injustice of it all. It would be communism, the end of the world, and against all the laws of nature wrapped into one!

How do we know? Because our elites would be telling us so. They would be telling us that we can not exist without them. No matter how often they are wrong, and I mean disastrously, catastrophically wrong, or how much they loot and work against us, we need them. And why would they be telling us these laughably transparent lies? because it has always worked in the past, because they count on us rubes always giving them the benefit of the doubt.

It is unfortunate that evil doesn’t grow horns and fangs on all its practitioners. Apparently some of us follow a materialism so narrowly circumscribed that even actions are too un-embodied for diagnosis.

Thanks to Mark and Hugh for stating how elegantly what I cannot seem to express, these so called leaders have no heart or soul as evidenced by their on going actions, yet we’re called on to vote for scum after scum after scum, oh what a great country I belong too !!!

There has never been a time that I’m aware of that the upper echelons of the US political class have not been monstrous, have not engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity, and have not been the servants of the rich and powerful. It’s baked in, and it won’t be changed through electoral politics.

Hitlery/Hellary is no unique avatar of evil. Sorry, she just isn’t. Anyone who rises as high as she has in the government of this country will be tainted with the same brush of evil she is being tainted with by her opposition.

Bernie is not entirely free of it, either. No one serves in the Congress for as long as he has without being tainted.

As for Trump, the man revels in his urge to commit even more crimes against humanity than Arch-Demon Kissinger or his hell spawn Hillary. Giving him a pass because he hasn’t done so yet is insane.

If you want this to change, you’ll have to change the institutional nature of the US government. Presidential politics cannot do that.

Che Pasa makes quite a bit of sense. The candidates will all say more or less the same things about foreign policy; such are the imperatives of the Empire of Capital (not the Empire of the USA; Capital is Sauron; Uncle Sam is merely the Lord of the Nazgul). That being the case, I can choose among them based only on their positions on domestic issues.

“Youngster”? My increasingly creaky body wishes SB was correct about that. I complete my 53rd solar orbit in May. 😆

Yes, our gulag system imprisons wrongly convicted people. Now, how many were wrongly convicted deliberately, on the basis of political dissent?

@Tom,

The accusation that “Assad gasses children”, “Assad gassed his own people” etc. is a DC FedRegime lie. The DC FedRegime and its allies in the Global Axis of Jihad know very well that regional Axis of Jihad Powers used their alphabet jihadi proxies in-country to use that kitchen sarin on those people. They know this because they are the people who fabricated that kitchen sarin and transported it to their pet jihadis in Syria. You can read all about it on Colonel Lang’s most recent Sic Semper Tyrannis thread . . . here.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/03/httpdailystarcomlbnewsmiddle-east2016mar-12341885-iraqi-officials-isis-chemical-attacks-kill-child-wound-600ashx.html
You can also read previous posts posted further back in time on the SST blog on the same subject.

There is “another” way the war in Syria can come to an end. The R + 6 can get every rebel in Syria either recruited back to loyalty or at least sullen surrender to the SARgov . . .
or exterminate every single unreconcilable rebel in Syria . . . most especially the “foreign” jihadis. Russia in particular would like to see every Chechen and other “former Soviet Space” and/or Russian-Federation-citizen jihadi in Syria carefully exterminated within Syria to prevent them from ever returning to bring their jihaddery back to Russia. I should think China would also support such an exterminate-the-jihadis program within the borders of Syria.

And there are some schools of thought which see a very fair chance that the COLA (Coalition Of Legitimate Authority) can defeat and exterminate the GOAJ ( Global Axis Of Jihad) within Syria before a Borgist President can take charge after Obama in America. You can read all about that too at SST if you care to. And remember, things go better with COLA.

And remember too, reality is the stuff that stays real no matter how hard you pretend otherwise. We will see what is real when the fighting has stopped within Syria.

Ché Pasa, you are using a variant of the “same as it ever was” argument. People who deny manmade climate change use it as well. We have had warm periods and cold periods so what we have now is nothing new. But you are wrong for the same reason they are. Sometimes things really are different. Throughout American history there has been an ongoing struggle between the haves and have-nots.

But something changed in the 1960s. Average real wages of the lower 80% stopped growing. In 1968, their share of total income, i.e. put everyone’s income in a basket and compare how much goes to the lower 80% vs the top 20%, peaked and it has been declining ever since, a 17.2% negative swing as I wrote recently. This was a really big deal. First, because to have wealth you need disposable income, that is income over and above what you need for necessary expenses. Second, because wealth is cumulative, it is a multiple of disposable income. If you are just making ends meet, your wealth will be close to zero. But if you have disposable income, you can use some of it for savings. That money not only accumulates over time but grows through investment in a compound way. So while the difference in two incomes (one with and one without disposable income) might remain stable over time. The wealth of the higher income will accelerate over the same period. But as I just said, incomes did not remain stable. The share of the top 20%’s income increased and that means their wealth increased a lot, lot more.

Or to look at it another way, into the 1960s, it was still considered something of the norm for a person with only a high school education to be able to afford a family, a house, a car, and be able to send their kids to college on their single income without incurring mountains of unsustainable debt.

Then in the late 1970s, things changed again. Usury laws were repealed, industries were deregulated, private sector unions were weakened, and the Fed began its long war against growth in workers’ wages.

In the 1990’s, there was NAFTA and the beginning of the free trade movement which decimated American manufacturing.

Then in 2000, we saw the ascendancy of financialization. Derivatives were deregulated, Glass-Steagall was repealed allowing banks and insurance companies to gamble with their customers’ money. At the Fed, you had not only the Greenspan put but de facto deregulation of the financial industry.

In 2007-2009, things changed again. All this upward transfer of wealth resulted in a huge property bubble which went splat in 2007, and then in 2008, a very much larger bubble in derivatives exploded threatening to take a by now endlessly criminal and corrupt financial system with it. Together these represent the largest frauds in human history. Yet not one person ever went to jail for them.

In response to these events, the Congress, Treasury, and the Fed bailed out the rich and left everyone else to twist slowly in the wind, collateral damage doncha know. The Fed alone ran more than $27 trillion in activity through its “emergency” programs, and this does not count its regular operations which it has always kept secret, or ZIRP, or the three iterations of QE.

All this is simply unparalleled in human history, and certainly our history, in terms of the sheer size of the thefts and frauds, the time frame (35 to 50 years) over which they occurred, and the lack of response to them by their victims in the lower 80% of the population. In the 1930s, we nearly had a revolution. Now the best we can do is a marginalized milquetoast progressive, a billionaire populist hack, and of course a corrupt, more of the same Clinton.

@Different Clue,

The fact that Assad is a bloody tyrant who was the only one capable of gassing his citizens doesn’t excuse the US for anything or support any apologies for their behavior in the ME.

Using rumors, unverified reports and propaganda as apologia or to deceive people about Assad’s treachery is not unlike what some people do to bolster the power and reputation of the Hegemon and it also reeks of agenda.

The only verified documented information we have seen about the four gas attacks in Ghouta is that the sarin used matches Assad’s stockpiles. There has been no verified or documented evidence produced that anyone but Assad could or did produce any sarin especially the ridiculously named kitchen sarin.

Not a bad article on HRC:

“From Clinton’s support for the escalation of the War on Drugs and move to more draconian welfare policy to her longtime opposition to gay marriage to her promotion of “free trade” deals that have prioritized the interests of multinational corporations over those of the bulk of the world’s citizens, Clinton’s history is closer to many Republicans’ than to Sanders’, who has a very good (albeit imperfect) record on racial justice issues, anti-poverty work, LGBT issues, and opposing bad trade deals. To be sure, there are some causes on which Sanders has found Republican allies, but those causes have generally been ones – like opposition to corporate welfare – that Tomasky’s “actual leftists” support.”

Agrees with my thesis that Clinton is not electable:
“All the evidence suggests Sanders is a more “electable” general election candidate than Clinton.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-spielberg/common-arguments-from-hillary-clinton_b_9511008.html

Why has Elizabeth Warren choked?
Why hasn’t she committed publicly to Sanders?
She managed another supporting comment, but that’s well short of her obligation.
Warren could have made a difference for Sanders earlier – he needs and deserves her formal blessing right now.

From the world of Muggles, Gene Lyons weighs in.

Yes, but she’s a WOMAN, remember?
Can’t pass up the chance to have “the first woman president”. “Image over substance” you know.

Besides: Think of all those second-class nations who beat the U.S. to the punch on “having a woman president”: India; Israel; South Korea; The Philippines; Argentina …
The U.S. has a lot of “catching up” to do. Can’t let “character assessments” get in the way.
Besides …Hillary Clinton is “only another politician” anyway.

sluggo: So it seems Obama was willing to take the U.S. to war based on known lies about WMD–and in the end forced Syria to disarm based on those lies, and is now trying to leverage that disarmament into “regime change”.

He and his predecessor really are two peas in a pod.

“the UN investigation to determine who is responsible for the Ghouta attacks, proven to have been Sarin from Assad’s stockpiles”

Bullshit.Peter* Absolute Bullshit, you are CLEARLY a lying sack of shit…and have been since you showed up here. In order to believe your bullshit, the government would have chosen to have a gas attack just hours before the inspectors showed up. Absolute Bullshit, furthermore:

“The report, which was “careful not to blame either side,” said that during the mission’s work in the rebel controlled Zamalka and Ein Tarma neighborhoods, “individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.”[22] The areas were under rebel control, but the report did not elaborate on who the individuals were.[23] The UN investigators were accompanied by a rebel leader:[24]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_investigation_of_chemical_weapons_use_in_Ghouta

And here is full refutation of Peter’s Bullshit.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/12/dirty-war-syria-chemical-fabrications-east-ghouta-incident.html

@SB

I don’t think you are a liar, SB just stupid, emotional and somewhat reactionary but that seems to be the norm for many people these days.

When and if you or anyone can produce something besides rumor, speculation and unverified reports to support the nonsensical suppositions about what happened in Ghouta I might change my opinion about those incidents. It has been three years and the only verified documented facts that are known are that sarin was used in these attacks and that that sarin matched Assad’s stockpile, which was offered for disposal with the assistance of the Russians. After this much time I doubt anyone will or can produce any valid evidence to contradict these facts, no matter what is written in various internet sites.

The investigators were delayed by Assad’s forces from accessing the gas attack sites and even if the sites were manipulated or evidence moved the sarin residues found were matched to Assad’s stockpile and could have come from no other source. Even if the rebels moved some of the sarin evidence it was still Assad’s sarin recovered from these attack sites.

—-“ “I’m not in this just to change the law,” Wolfson argued in 2001. “It’s about changing society.” Pushing only for more easily obtainable gains, such as domestic partnerships, he contended, was a mistake. Instead, he advocated going “into the room, asking for what we deserve, telling our powerful stories, and engaging the reachable allies. We may leave the room not getting everything we want, but don’t go in bargaining against yourself.” The movement committed itself, in the words of historian Josh Zeitz, “to a decades-long campaign to win the hearts and minds of ordinary voters.” ”—-

The problem is that voters did not vote for gay rights. As far as I can tell, everything was achieved through judicial fiat. I certainly don’t remember having an opportunity to vote on the issue.

The Goldwater support of her youth has resurfaced

Jagger It would have been landslide in favour.

However I am not sure at the logic of needing a vote. This was removing a restriction based on descrimination. No specfific vote was needed to do the similar for civil rights, womens equality and so on.

After all no vote was taken when the descrimination was put into the marriage legisalation.

This happens all the time in the US, the Fed Govt or States come out with legisalation that gets struck down or changed because they are unconstitutional. This was another example.

But it required social change first. As long as LGBTI people were seen as ‘perverts’ and ‘sick’ the Court wouldn’t even hear such a case. Only after they were seen as just people just like everyone else and not untermench, then it was prepared to do something about it as they were being singled out to be treated unfairly.

Ireland did that but that was because they had to make constitutional changes which required a referendum. In their case the dominant Catholic church had played a large part in the creation of it, hence its anti-women, anti-LGBTI parts. Yet another good example of why religion should not be allowed anywhere near Govt and legislation.

@ Lisa March 26, 2016

I am neither a cynic nor comfounded (sic). It is my idealism, my optimism, my patriotism, and my desire that my people have the opportunity to lead the best lives possible that keep me actively and heavily involved in Conservative Catholic European politics.

I am however deeply cynical about the prospects of anything good coming from having anything to do with American so-called “liberals” or “progressives” or whichever other mendacious misdescription they wish to apply to themselves. It comes as no surprise to me to learn that American liberals tried to stab the civil rights movement in the back. That’s what they were meant to do and they loyally went ahead and did it. The same as when faced with the prospect of having to create integrated communities they abandoned the cities in their droves in what became known as “white flight” the same as they turned their backs on protecting civilised values of law enforcement and the same as the they turned their backs on serving in the military. The result of this cowardice is that America now has a viciously right-wing prosecutorial service, a viciously right-wing and heavily militarised policing and prison system, and a judiciary that would make Carl Schmitt blench. Furthermore their military is now dominated by a right-wing religious officer corps.

Dictators fall when their support system is hollowed out or when a country’s ruling class lose confidence in them – in Milosevic’s case both those by losing a war and a collapsed economy. Otpor did good work but they took advantage of circumstances they didn’t create. They were also a very middle-class movement the children of the elite and its administrative class.

I don’t for one moment disagree that America and the country to which you emigrated are urgently in need all sorts of reforms I can however tell you that anyone who allies themselves with American “liberals” or “progressives” is going to be stymied at every turn. Far better to create a genuinely radical reformist movement than to be hemmed in liberalism’s dank, decaying, and blocked canals.