Bernout: Why I'm Supporting Hillary Now
Excellent article. Explains beautifully many of the things we have been saying for months. Hopefully more will see the light.
The more they know Sanders, the clearer he is a one issue candidate.
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Bernout: Why I'm Supporting Hillary Now
By Bruce Jackson
/ Feb. 17, 2016 1am EST
1. Scalia
While I was writing what comes below, a New York Times web notice came in about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Presidents do important things during their four years in office, but perhaps the most important thing they do is nominate new justices to the Supreme Court. Long after those presidents are gone, those justices are there, on the bench, deciding what kind of lives we are permitted to have.
In the next year, the Republicans will do anything they can to keep an Obama nominee from getting a seat on the Court. They will block hearings; if there are hearings, they will keep them from going anywhere. Their majority leader, only a few hours after Scalia’s death, said so.
Presidents matter.
2. Bernie I
At first, I really liked Bernie Sanders. I liked his passion, his opposition to the way Big Money dominates so much of American life and politics, his opposition to villainy in the financial industry.
I sent him money. It wasn’t that much, but I soon started getting emails—sometimes three of them a day—beginning, “As a major donor to Bernie’s campaign…” The emails soon began to feel like spam, but I let it go because, if the little I gave made me a “major donor,” then his claim that his campaign was funded by small donations from ordinary people seemed true. That, I thought, was nice. It was before I found out he was drawing from at least one Super PAC.
3. Bernie II
Then, after listening to him a lot, I realized I was hearing things again and again, but I wasn’t hearing anything more, anything new, anything deep, anything practical. It was all slogans.
Everything comes back to villainy and grand goals. I keep waiting for specifics: How are we going to pay for this? How are we going to make those changes, given that the Republicans will surely continue to control the House and may in all likelihood continue to control the Senate? How are we going to make any of this happen?
Sanders’s response is, “Trust me. It will.”
Specifics never come. The hand-waving and finger-pointing and shouting continue. The unmodulated, angry voice continues. The list of monolithic villains—“Wall Street” in particular—continue. It is all, “My intentions are good. Trust me.”
For a while, I was mesmerized by Sanders’s passion and his singular vision.
But now I think his singular vision is as narrow as any of the Republican front-runners. They hate foreigners; he hates Wall Street. They have no foreign policy; Bernie has no foreign policy. They are pissed off; he is pissed off. They have no ideas about how to run a country; Bernie has no ideas about how to run a country.
Pissed off is not a desideratum for electing a president.
Bernie is easy to identify with. He’s pissed. We’re all pissed. But he offers us nothing.
Hillary is complex. Some people want to dump her because her husband got a blowjob in the Oval Office from an intern. That is blaming the wife for the husband’s frailty. Some people want to dump her because of the Whitewater scandal; that scandal was entirely a Republic construct.
Others want to blame her because of her ostensible connection to Wall Street: She has gotten contributions from individuals in the finance industry (a significant amount) and financial organizations (not very much). Find a president in the past century that didn’t have a connection to Wall Street. Find a current Republican candidate. She was a US Senator from New York. Wall Street is one of New York’s major industries. What is your connection to Wall Street? I’ll come back to that canard.
And some people want to dump her because she has more experience, has achieved more domestically and internationally than any other candidate. If she’s done all that, she’s part of the Establishment, right?
No: wrong. That is lunatic. Go to Snopes.com and you will find pages of Hillary Clinton canards, and how none of them plays out. You or I might disagree with some of her votes, but there is no evidence—none—that she has been bought or sold.
They are canards, lies, but they show up again and again in the so-called “social media” as if they were facts.
http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/02172016/bernout-why-im-supporting-hillary-now
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