Friends and frienemies,
Today, I was going to write a diary that we do not have “two great candidates.” I get why Clinton supporters are trying to create a false equivalency on this as they believe that if Clinton wins, they will be able to rely on Sanders’ supporters for support. And in any normal election, if Senator Sanders were a “regular” politician and received his campaign funding like everyone else, that statement might be true, although I wouldn’t use the term “great” to describe corporate funded candidates. But they would have some equal footing if that were the case.
But the fact of the matter is, Clinton is more liberal on social issues than Republicans, but Sanders is by far the more progressive candidate of the two.
Most Sanders’ supporters recognize that there is far more daylight between Clinton’s policies and Sanders’ than between Clinton and any of the Republicans.
The only “sameness” between Clinton and Sanders is the fact they are running under the Democratic banner. The establishment, this site, Clinton’s supporters both on this site and at large, are backing the more conservative candidate of the two. WHY?
I’m done trying to figure out why Clinton supporters are voting against their best interest, my best interest, and America’s best interests. Clinton supporters are not progressives, they are centrists, moderates. Just own it, and stop trying to coopt the progressive label. Just because a candidate seems to flit between being progressive, being moderate and being straight up Republican (Kissinger love), supporting her not only does not make one progressive, they actually standing in the way of the rest of us supporting the more progressive, the more and better Democrat, in office. The honest politician is rare, but not a myth.
Those who support the corporate-sponsored established oligarchy are the gate keepers for the one percent and their rarefied overlords who comprise the .01%.
There seem to be a large minority of Democrats who support the multi-millionaire candidate, with an extremely horrendous foreign policy record (Honduras, Lybia, Syria), who is financed in more ways than one by some of the most odious entities on this planet: Wall Street, Health Insurance Industry, for-profit prison industry, MIC, the Saudis and other ME potentates, etc. Clinton’s role is to protect the interests of the .01% and she is paid very well for that job.
Please see this article from today’s Salon, www.salon.com/…
On claiming that the Reagans began a national dialogue on AIDS/HIV:
Clinton’s surreal historical revisionism – which she walked back after a firestorm of criticism – is typical of the eagerness with which she embraces even the most dubious figures, as long as they are members of what my colleague Scott Lemieux calls America’s “overcompensated and underperforming elites.”
In race-baiting and red-baiting:
A few weeks ago she repeated the racist myth that “radical” Northerners imposed corrupt governments on the defeated South after the Civil War, and thus paved the way for Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. This week she engaged in some good old-fashioned red-baiting, criticizing Sanders for opposing America’s sordid history of dirty wars in Latin America, which she mischaracterized as his support for Communist dictatorships.
All of this is both wrong as a matter of principle, and stupid politics to boot. How many votes does she think she’s going to get from (increasingly imaginary) “moderate Republicans” as a consequence of this 1990s-style triangulation? Not nearly as many as she’ll lose among disgusted liberals, who remember that the Contras were terrorists, that Kissinger is a war criminal of the first order, that Reconstruction didn’t cause the virulent racism that undermined it, and that the Reagans’ silence regarding AIDS contributed to countless unnecessary deaths.
The only thing in this article I disagree with is: “I will, of course, vote for Clinton if she’s the nominee – she is after all vastly preferable to either Trump or Cruz – but by now this is starting to feel like pointing out that a sprained ankle is preferable to a heart attack.”
“Sprained ankle” is not exactly accurate, I think it’s closer to an aneurysm.
Happy Ides of March.