Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Still Feeling the Bern



No one likes a loser. But this is just further proof that Operation Russia worked on its intended target -- Democrats

Liberal Voter [Name Redacted]:
So many Clinton partisans are just utterly unable to look objectively at how most of the country (still) sees her. Even when they are, they'd rather prove those people wrong, and try to argue with them, than, you know, WIN a goddamn election. I always felt that fighting back against 25 years of unfair smears and self-inflicted wounds was an unnecessary and wasteful mission, when the Republic itself is on the line. 
Me:
If she is so "objectively" unpopular then why did she get 3 million more voters than her competitor? You don't have to be a so-called Clinton partisan to understand that the Trump campaign didn't collude with Russia to turn right-leaning or centrist voters against Clinton, they did it to suppress the left vote. [And as you may have heard, it worked just enough in three previously blue states.) That's not "arguing" or being blind to anything. That's a fact -- and by many accounts illegal. (P.S. In any other democracy in the world, getting the most votes means you WON.)
P.S. I don't remember polls about Romney, McCain or Kerry's "popularity" being conducted EIGHT months after they lost -- and two of them remained sitting senators! This blatant misogyny will never end.


UPDATE: 

This just posted by yet another seemingly intelligent liberal voter.


Only Democrats would blame themselves for being robbed at gunpoint ...


14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why did she get 3 million more votes... California. That isn't how you win a presidential election, obviously.
She was the worst of our choices, and this poll shows that remains true.
Misogyny? No, simple a terrible candidate, and nothing has changed.

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

@Anonymous: I can see why you didn't sign your name -- you're EXACTLY the gullible type of person I'm talking about!

Ray said...

We have the dumbest electorate in the whole world, although with the Brexit vote England is catching up. Not that I think all American voters are dumb (I'm not!), but the abject stupidity and gullibility of the dumb ones drags the smart ones down the drain with them. Some morons somewhere will still be bitching online about "Benghazi" until today's newborns' dying days and beyond.

Matthew said...

I'm sick of hearing progressives talk about how we need to fire everyone at the top and change things drastically. We won the fucking election by 3 million votes, and we only lost the presidency over 80K votes in the Rust Belt. That is not "destroy everything, start over," that is a tweak. But yes, it was Hillary. Not her fault (I'm sure aspects of the campaign can be criticized, as can the winning and losing campaigns of anyone), but she was smeared so expertly and for so long, she is JUST radioactive enough to convince 80K Dems to try someone insane, and to convince many others to shrug and not vote (a good % of the '12 voters didn't vote). Honestly, we could do everything the same with a different person and win. By a lot. And we will. (The win part; I'm not sure about how "the same" things will stay, since Bernie people will demand we change-change-change.)

Mike in Asheville said...

Kenneth and Matthew -- sorry guys, but, 5 now special elections where the Reps have held (two of them in districts Clinton carried!

Like her or not, had 3 million more votes, NONE OF THAT MATTERS. Hillary is now old news, a failed nominee.

What is clear is that machine Democrats have lost touch with the voters that carry elections. Its not just Hillary, Pelosi, thank god Reid is finally gone, Schummer -- the rest of the country does not like the faces of the party.

The poll should be a bitch slap! A Cher "snap out of it" smack across the face.

Anonymous said...

kenneth, thanks for staying on point about hillary and the election. i've recently began to label these incessant bernie supporters as the hard-left - they are only matched in tenor by right-wing nuts.

will they ever even stop to realize bernie lost the democratic primary? yet, they continue to harp on about how bernie would have defeated trump in the general election based on polling of a race that never came close to happening, without acknowledging or accepting any responsibility for hillary's defeat - any.

when you win the popular vote by 3 million votes, and lose the electoral college by less than 80,000, you at least did something right.

mwk said...

I'll be happy to state my opinion, and not be anonymous about it.

You CANNOT win a Presidential Election with a candidate that most people are luke warm about, and most of their support comes from people voting AGAINST her opponent, and not FOR her. Face facts, Kenneth, that is what happened here.

I don't give a rat's rump about the "3 million vote" margin. For better or worse we don't use the Popular Vote here in the US for Presidential Elections. For that matter, we don't use it for US House elections either, since those districts have been Gerrymandered out of control of the Majority. The question you need to ask yourself is this: Why couldn't Hillary energize HER base, the way Doofus did his? She had lower turnout in Detroit, Milwaukee, Philly, Pittsburgh than Obama did. In Florida, we had very high turnout in the Miami/Ft Lauderdale corridor, but the rest of the state turned out in crazy numbers for Doofus. Because he ENERGIZED THEM TO VOTE.

Look back to the 2004 election, Baby Bush vs. John Kerry. John Kerry wouldn't look interesting standing next to a wax figure, let alone have the charisma to win an election. I didn't meet a SINGLE person that year who was voting FOR Kerry. They were ALL, to a one, voting AGAINST Bush. I knew that Kerry would never win.

You need to come down from the Ivory Tower and realize that Hillary was the ONE candidate whom Doofus could have beaten. And he did.

By the way, I'm an Independent and I voted for Hillary. I was fine with her as a Candidate, but I met plenty of people who were holding their noses as they went to vote for her.

Anonymous said...

@mwk
I don't have a google account, and anonymous is a choice. How is that different from you using initials?
Not a big deal, but the site should not offer anonymous posting and then complain when that option is used. Right?
Kenneth M Walsh- it's your site I believe, why allow anonymous postings, then bitch about it?
I don't get it. Oh, I'm not gullible- give me a better candidate(s) next time!

Damian said...

@mwk: By pointing to base turnout, you are actually reinforcing the thesis that the left engineered their own defeat.

Hillary carried Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and New Hampshire -- enough swing states to carry the electoral college of all the blue states held. (Ohio and Florida would've been nice, but even Obama barely scraped those out against Romney.)

Instead, three states that had gone Democratic since '88 flipped by a collective margin of voters that wouldn't even fill the Rose Bowl. Why? Because the progressive base in those states bought the Sarandon BS that somehow Hillary would be as bad as Tr*mp or fell for innocuous political e-mails released by Russian hackers, and stayed home or went Stein to "keep their hands clean." Mission accomplished!

There was nothing especially damning about Clinton that would've stuck to a man. But whatever. I'm tuned out until 2020 and hopefully we have more mature voters then.

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

@anonymous: "Name" is one of the choices and it doesn't require a Google account, just a name. (Damian posted that way.) I didn't design the commenting system, but if I disable "Anonymous" then it also disables the non-Google sign-in option that I'm encouraging you to use. Also, the fact that I excoriate "anonymous" commenters on the comment page might have been a clue that I frown upon them!

@Everyone: The fact that we're having this argument only reinforces what I said in my post. The GOP was never in more disarray than this election cycle, yet the Trump administration in conjunction with Russia used fake news and leaked emails to pit us against each other and it suppressed just enough Democratic voters. How can some of you not see how gullible you were to hand Trump the White House? And how does that put me in an Ivory Tower?

As to the other points, WHO is this candidate that could have "easily" won? The fact that Hillary Clinton lost despite being voted the "most admired woman in America" for a record 20th time in 2015 and was beloved by all Democrats as a U.S. senator and secretary of state -- and WON the DEMOCRATIC nomination and nearly won it in 2008 -- completely speaks to what I said before: It's almost as if the minute she tried to go where no woman has gone before she was suddenly being held to a completely different standard than any other candidate in history ... even by her own party. #misogyny #Putin

Leon said...

Every Democratic candidate from the 90s to today and on is or will be made to be damaged. The rise of right-wing popular media with ties to Republicans and their donors sees to that.
Clinton has the benefit of a dossier going back to the 90s and further.
Sanders is self-proclaimed Socialist, Jewish and formerly independent from the Northeast. If the first two are not good enough ammunition, then there is always the flip-flopper attack scheme from suddenly running as a Democrat.
Warren and Harris? They're both women who have opened their mouths in Congress and gotten lots of press about it.
Booker? Fiscal libertarian views open him up to the left, while his race, diet and social libertarian views will open him up to the right.
The other 2016 Democratic candidates? Two governors, a senator and a Harvard Law School professor. If you cannot spin things about people in public positions of power, you should quit.
Some random person? Like accusations of Booker being a political cipher, high opacity can also be weaponized since you can just start sticking whatever labels on them.

From those stories, I do not think that there is or will be a Democratic party candidate that can get voted into the presidency even with the debacle of a Trump presidency and Republican Congress. Any future Democratic party nominee will have to fend off attacks from both left and right. The further left learned from the Tea Party that the national parties have holes that can be penetrated, but forgot that the parties have differences. The "Democrats are like cats while Republicans are like dogs" essentially screams that the more left national party will probably fragment and be greatly weakened to slowly erode, leaving state by state Democratic caucuses and a left-wing national void to be filled by who knows.

Getting rid of gerrymandering in every state along with universal voting rights is probably the way forward. But good luck against an entrenched power structure. A revolution may be the most effective, but it will have a hell of a lot of casualties, and a hell of a time explaining why they are mostly poor or not white or not "normal" and why a number of them died before the revolution even started.

Kenneth M. Walsh said...

@Leon: Amen.

Our only chance is to STOP what is going on in this comment thread -- taking the bait -- and in progressive circles around the nation.

We need to be like the Republican Party: WHOEVER gets the nomination, we ALL have to vote for him/her ... and then push that WINNER to do better.

Karl said...

Kenneth-
I obviously didn't understand how the commenting system works, so I have no problem with what you say.
i don't know who the democrats had who could have beaten Trump, but there must be one-- up to the party to find who that is.
Republicans ran, what, 17 candidates, and Trump won- can't do anything about that side.
She lost, nothing more needs to be said.
russia? I'll wait for Mueller to see what is really there.
In the meantime healthcare infrastrucutre, and possible tax reform should be the focus, although, I'd rather have them focus on getting the debt under control. Something Washington can't seem to do, on either side.
I really have no problem with disagreement on issues, except the "pay their fair share" mantra of the left.

formerly Anonymous (Karl M.)

DC Crab said...

This is just a distraction to convince people that the US picked the better one. If you don't have an accomplishment to speak off, point to other people's failures, that is exactly what Trump is making here.