...sang DEVO, in 1980, and 36 years later it's still true! Meet the Brand X and Brand Ecch of Election '16:
photo via Stop Me Before I Vote Again
Meanwhile, Benjamin Studebaker analyzes the logic of the "unite behind Clinton" pressure Democrats will be feeling from now to November.
A Democratic voter concerned about the Clinton e-mail scandal has created a timeline website -- based on public sources -- that attempts to keep all the facts straight. A big part of the story is The Clinton Foundation (Bill's charity), which was very popular with foreign governments and investors while Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State. The Foundation has its own skeptical timeline [1 / 2 / 3 / 4]. Read it and tell me you want these people back in the White House.
1. Hellery or Hitlery
...frequently used by left-leaning bloggers, ironically appropriating rightwingers who fear the Clintons for different reasons
2. Imelda Clinton
...via naked capitalism commenter "polecat"
What’s to say, after the presumed anointment of Imelda Clinton, that she doesn’t start to escalate the Ukraine clusterfuck to 11 on the dial, so as to direct scrutiny elsewhere, ... igniting the big one ??
duck n cover-----------
3. Crooked Hillary
...Trump's name for her on Twitter -- say what you will about him, he's not wrong
4. Queen of Chaos
...Pepe Escobar
5. Killary
...from roadrider. Seems harsh but Killary did say "we came, we saw, he died"
6. Hillary Clanton
...extrapolating from naked capitalism commenter JTMcPhee's reference to the "Clanton Campaign Machine." Does this make the Trump family the Earps?
[Ongoing updates]
Stop Me Before I Vote Again has a couple of posts noting authoritarian language used by Team Hillary. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich admonishes Sanders supporters:
[Y]our conscience should know that a decision not to vote for Hillary, should she become the Democratic nominee, is a de facto decision to help Donald Trump...
[M]y morsels of advice may be hard to swallow...
But swallow it you must -- not just for the good of the Democratic Party, but for the good of the nation. [emphasis added by TM]
And Markos Moulitsas, who has been bossing Daily Kos readers around for years, lays down the law for 2016:
I will no longer tolerate malicious attacks on our presumptive presidential nominee...
Constructive criticism from the Left is allowed. There’s a difference between constructive and destructive criticism. Do I need to spell it out? ... In general, if you’re resorting to cheap sloganeering like “oligarch” or “warmonger” or “neocon”, you might want to reframe your argument in a more substantive, issue-focused and constructive matter...
Saying you won’t vote, or will vote for Trump, or will vote for Jill Stein (or another Third Party) is not allowed...
If you are going to be pessimistic, you better support it... Rank, unsupported pessimism is anathema to our data-driven, reality based culture.
If you are a Clinton supporter, spiking the football in the face of Sanders supporters isn’t a productive way to move us forward. After March 15… such spiking [is] bannable. [emphasis added by TM]
Lambert Strether sums up the Clinton "win" on Naked Capitalism:
Clinton’s presumptive nomination comes with a number of key policy decisions that liberals must own “going forwards,” as we say:
1. Corruption. To protect Clinton, liberals have adopted the majority doctrine in Citizens United: Only a quid pro quo is proof of corruption.
2. Transparency. To protect Clinton, liberals maintain that high government officials can, at will, privatize their communications to shield them from FOIA.
3. Militarism. To protect Clinton, liberals minimize her AUMF vote, ignore Libya, ignore Honduras, ignore Ukraine, and treat unwavering support for [US nuclear-armed mideast ally] as an unqualified good.
4. Health. To protect Clinton, liberals reject Medicare for All.
5. Working Class. To protect Clinton, liberals deny that there is or can be a working class electorate. The electorate is only to be viewed through the prism of identity politics. Two category errors follow: The “white working class” is deemed to be racist, by definition, and the non-white working class is erased. Consequently, it’s impossible to think through the universal effects of the FIRE sector on the working class, [and] its differential effects on particular working class identities. This is not an accident.
For "liberals" one could substitute "Democrats."
