It’s the new definition of free speech! What’s not to like?

Sady Doyle says it best:

1) “The people don’t want Clinton!”
2) Systematically harass voters into silence
3) “See? No-one you know is voting for her! It’s rigged!”

It doesn’t matter who you are, some little private citizen in comments, or a Hollywood celebrity, or a well-known male political worker, or a professional journalist, or, hell, even a superdelegate. (Edited to add: and another compendium of the harassment. Eta again: also more Sady Doyle, What online misogynists really want is silence.)

So the Clinton campaign finally, finally, launches Correct the Record. It’s intended to help her supporters catch the endless lies about her and point out the facts.

The response in Dudebro-land? Hillary Clinton camp now paying online trolls to attack anyone who disparages her online.

What’s next? Defending wife-beating because she had the gall to raise her arms to try to protect her head?

You know what? Silencing people, even women!, is not free speech. It’s harassment. It’s hate speech. People are gradually understanding its toxicity, but most of our laws haven’t caught up yet.

There’s this notion about free speech that the “marketplace of ideas” will sort it all out so long as everybody can say whatever they want whenever they want. Well, you know what else? Marketplaces only work when people don’t kick each others’ stalls down and nobody brings weapons.

 
The problem is it’s false. His accusations, innuendos, and slurs against Clinton are false.

Sanders repeats and repeats and repeats Wall-St-and-Clinton-money-corrupt-Wall-St-lying-Clinton-corrupt-money-Clinton-Wall-St on an endless loop until familiarity breeds truthiness and millions of people think they know something. It only helps his message that the Republicans have been marketing similar crap for a quarter of a century. It’s very familiar.

And where are the poor little facts in this? Over in that corner sitting all by themselves, crying into their coffee.

Start with the current ginned-up scandal, her handling of emails while Secretary of State. She set up her own server. Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell had the same setup. (Clinton’s server may have had better security than some at the Federal government like the IRS and the OMB who underwent devastating hacks. Hers was not hacked.) The emails involved were not classified at the time.

Note: not classified at the time.

The only recipients were other Federal personnel who were supposed to receive those messages. She was not quietly handing over the plans of the Pentagon to a faction of Greens in Slovakia. She was telling the truth throughout. She was handling data correctly. She was getting her work done, like Rice and Powell. Only in the fever dreams of some Republicans is any of this remotely problematic.

Continue with another ginned-up scandal, Clinton’s speaking fees. Hello? why shouldn’t she get paid speaking fees, same as every other rock star politician out there? Or is she only supposed to get 75% of what male politicians get?

If she was then a mole for Goldman Sachs in the Senate, that would be bad. But she was not. On the contrary.

There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

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And that’s Jill Abrahamson talking. As executive editor at the NYTimes it was her business to study politicians’ lies. As she says, “As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland.” Her conclusion after so much investigation of actual facts?

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

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(Interestingly, when news critters have to acknowledge that Clinton speaks truly, their next point is not how good that is. It’s how boring she is. No narrative, y’know?)

Meanwhile, Bernie in the first election he won did it with NRA support. Okay. Fine. But then he went his own way and did what was right, yes? No. Not at all. He’s voted for the NRAs horrid positions right up to recently. At the same time he slags off Hillary for receiving contributions without working for the donors. One rule for me, another for thee?

It goes on and on and on and on and on like that. He’s been on the keep-them-out side of immigration, he was against stem cell research when that was the easy position to take, he was for dumping New England’s nuclear waste on a poor community in Texas, he seems to think control over reproduction for women is not important. (Reiterated on Maddow’s show recently.) That’s far from all of it. A bit more here.

Hillary, meanwhile, has worked her whole political life to improve the lot of women and children. She’s worked since the early 1990s to make health care accessible to all. She’s stood on the side of rights for every deprived community including blacks, latinos, LBGT, and immigrants. Certainly, she represented Wall St. among other New Yorkers when she was Senator. They’re her constituents. She also understands the industry. She’s come up with detailed policy proposals to regulate mortgages as well as abstruse financial instruments in ways that will not blow up the economy we all depend on. The attacks against her are not only false, they’re coming from someone who has zero moral standing to make them.

Attacks, in the sense of pointing out where the other candidates are wrong, are part of the point of the election process. But throwing mud at the competition just to make them seem dirty isn’t even politics. That’s marketing.

A smart man I know — and men should really be thinking about this since it affects them all — pointed out a significant danger coming down the pike.

1. Drumpf has hideous hair.
2. Drumpf wants to be a dictator.
3. We have recent evidence of what happens when a pie-faced dictator wants his peculiar hair style validated: North Korean men required to get Kim Jong-Un haircuts.

All I’m sayin is don’t pretend you weren’t warned.

There’s much moaning about how the uncool uninteresting unrevolutionary candidate Clinton has only stodgy middle-aged (or even old!) women behind her. All the Cool Kids and men and thoughtful discussers of other people’s discussions prefer somebody else, anybody else. That is, Sanders. Some examples out of dozens: NYTimes, Salon, The Atlantic, LATimes, LATimes, LATimes. (The LATimes apparently really wants to be sure that none of those girl cooties stick to them.)

My mind reels at this stuff. I’m with Jill Filipovic. “Do ppl really not think that the first female pres would be a BIG DEAL?” And don’t try to tell me that it’s no different from first black or first Jew or first socialist or first candidate with curly hair. If they are male such people have been made leaders of countries dozens of times over. Women, on the other hand, not so much, and in the US of A, never. Never. N.E.V.E.R. Never.

Are so many people really that incapable of drawing the obvious conclusions from the obvious evidence? Somehow, I doubt it. That level of ignorance requires lots of work.

There’s a name for this situation:

1) We have a candidate with a list of accomplishments longer than a basketball player’s arms (both of them).

2) People say “Oh, that doesn’t count,” “Oh, those aren’t accomplishments,” “Oh, those aren’t her accomplishments.” ” She looks like somebody’s mom.” She is somebody’s mom. How uncool is that? Not like being a disheveled grandpa with big ideas.

Natasha Chart said it clearly. “This is a pressure that goes one way only. Men are cool, women aren’t — both are pushed to conform to stereotypical masculine norms. You know, if they want to be cool.”

The fact is, there is nothing Clinton can do that will be seen as right. She has boatloads of experience, so she’s part of the Establishment. If she had less experience, she’d be an airhead bimbo. If she’s ready for the cameras, she’s fake. If she has a hair out of place, she’s a wrinkled old fright. If she shows any military toughness, she’s a warmonger. If she didn’t, she’d be unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. If she makes money, she’s a shill. If she had no money, she’d be a loser. And on and on and on.

There’s a name for this, but nobody can say it out loud. It’s like that episode in Fawlty Towers where Basil Fawlty goosesteps around a party of Germans shouting “We won’t discuss the War!” Only in this case it’s a different war, which is ongoing and not funny yet. So it comes off more like pathetic climate change deniers sleepwalking their stupidity into disaster.

I saw a comment recently saying “When Hillary finds yet another way to lose,” and it went on from there. No, buster. When you’ve torn Hillary down enough to destroy her, you’ll land us all with the toxic two bit rabblerousers frontrunning on the other side. In a country with as much power as the USA, that will be bad.

Peter Daou said it best in an article on Hillary and the rage of straight white males.

You can’t stop a wild mob that wants to “burn the witch,” a mob that wants to dehumanize and degrade a woman, that wants to strip her of her dignity. It’s an impulse as old as humanity.

And it’s a monstrous thing to behold.

We will see if the inexorable transformation of the American populace will endure a dangerous setback with a President Trump or Cruz. Democrats must do everything in their power to prevent that outcome.

In that grave context, demolishing the public image of a leading Democratic candidate is unimaginably reckless.

But what about all this we hear how she has no support among the young, among young women? Surely, young women haven’t absorbed any messages about who’s cool and who’s old school? If they don’t support her it can’t be the bigotry-which-must-not-be-named. At least the media seem to desperately hope so.

So, what does explain the absence of the young? There certainly is a problem, but it’s not coming from Hillary. It’s coming from having fifty, sixty, seventy years of your life yet to live, from just starting out, from being incapable of seeing what you’re in for without being crushed. It’s a survival instinct. At the age of twenty five you may not yet have been kicked all the way to hell and back.

You’ve felt the crushing weight of sexism and misogyny, that starts before you can talk. You’ve dealt with the boys bullying, and the fathers putting a premium on pretty, and the street harassment, and all the instructions about how not to get raped even though you’re not at all in any way actually the perp, and you know the world isn’t for you and you better be invisible and hope some guy gives you shelter from the storm.

All that is already more than any human being can stand. Very few can face it squarely at any age. Most people cringe away from it, try to tell themselves that what it obviously means is not what it means. It’s just an accident. It’s isolated. It’s nothing to do with you.

But if you’re going to get excited about a female candidate for President, you have to acknowledge that there really have not been very many. You have to notice that there have been 44 of these people and not a single woman. That’s kind of high for just an accidental concatenation of circumstances. You’ll have to notice that the deck is stacked against you. What you’ve dealt with so far, all the stuff that’s so bad you can’t even look at it, is just the beginning. You’ll have to see that it doesn’t get better. It gets worse.

And people wonder why young women can’t bring themselves to celebrate Hillary Clinton.

But none of this can be mentioned. Instead let’s try to pretend that the pain of sexism, the damage it does to women, the amputations of humanity it causes in men, the crushed children, never have to be faced. We’re talking about people’s loves and families here. This hits everybody right in the heart. Unlike racism or homophobia or antisemitism, you can’t get some relief by living among your own kind. Nobody wants to do open heart surgery on their souls. Especially since there’s no anesthetic for it.

If you can’t even speak the name of the real problem, you’re reduced to coming up with cockamamie explanations such as that Clinton has some wrinkles, or she’s too reasonable, or too practical, or not exciting, or has too many pantsuits.

The problem isn’t pantsuits. The problem is the unbearable unmentionable burden which must be carried with an effortless smile. Once you see it, there’s no way to un-see it. Which is why it’s really really really important to look the other way.

The strange thing isn’t that young women are in denial. The strange thing is the unimaginably reckless refusal to face their own prejudices among all the people and pundits and thinkers and journalists and writers who are old enough to know better.

So here we are. The Democrats have a once-in-a-hundred years candidate, a genius at issues and policies and details, good at running things, proven ability to negotiate with anybody and often get the outcome she wants, a decades-long history of public service in the face of nearly no thanks.

The Republicans have handed them a gift of testerical, fatuous, fanatical candidates who even Karl Rove couldn’t spin into something electable.

Hillary Clinton in 2008

(photog. unknown)

The Democrats can’t believe their luck, loudly and gleefully gloat about their candidate, and coast to victory waving red white and blue bunting.

Not.

They start tearing Clinton down. She outclasses any candidate they’ve had since just about FDR, but she takes money! From big business! Oh my God. Whoever heard of such a thing?

Has it affected her votes or her policies particularly? Is there any evidence she’s behaving like some bought and paid for politician? No. There isn’t. On the contrary. She’s been consistently on the side of the small folk through her whole career. If you look you can find a list even longer than this: CHIP health insurance for children, national immunization programs, cancer screening and making it covered under Medicare, investigation of Gulf War syndrome, pushed for attention to violence against women at the Department of Justice, worked to make adoption a less hit or miss thing, worked to help teenagers in foster care transition out of it. She hasn’t been as selfless as Bishop Tutu or Mother Teresa, but well up in the top ten percent of US polititicans. Above 90% is usually a grade of “A.” Is an A good enough for the Dems? Absolutely not. She’s not Bishop Tutu so she’s a corporate shill.

They ignore and tear down her international accomplishments. She helped end the Irish troubles. (But she didn’t do it singlehandedly! She shouldn’t get any credit for her work.) She laid the groundwork for the end of sanctions against Iran. (At the time, it was said she’d share in the blame if it all went wrong. Now the shout is she didn’t do it totally alone! She deserves no credit!). She worked hard to make visible and to halt current slavery. (But those are mostly women. Or even stupid girls! Didn’t she have any real problems to worry about?) She argued for intervention in Libya to prevent a longer war that would have cost more lives. That worked, but without resources for nation-building, they descended into a long war anyway. [Link added 2016-04-11] Obviously that’s her fault. She should be all-powerful and provide world peace. She’s failed. She’s a warmonger.

The amount of vile lies and slander slung at her is unthinkable. For me, at least. Every time I start reading about examples of it (toward the end), my whole mind shrinks away and I find something else to look at. It’s so revolting I can’t even hear about it. She lives it. She’s lived it for decades. And in the face of that she keeps carrying on, caring about people, and participating in public service work. Pretty amazing, right? No, of course not. She’s subjecting herself to it because it’s a plot to … to what? Own the world? It hasn’t gone anywhere near that goal in 25 years, but this supernaturally intelligent conniving witch keeps at it, cracking her knuckles perhaps, because it’ll pay off any minute now.

Or, maybe, she actually gets some satisfaction from helping people. She has actually done that. Maybe she notices even when the screaming meemies can’t.

Now we’ve reached the point where the Democrats and the leftists and the Very Progressive Men have poisoned the thought of her so much that even if her party is forced to nominate her as their candidate, more than half her voters will be feeling put upon at having to elect such a warmongering shill.

We’re reduced to depending on the most fatuous, the most testerical of the self-serving goons on the other side to ragequit when things don’t go his way. We have to hope he splits the I’m-even-dumber-than-the-Democrats vote by running in his own I Blow My Own Trump(et) Party.

Because unlike the election that swept in FDR to rescue us from the equivalent decades of greed, there’s a big difference in the current situation. Hillary Clinton is a woman.

This post was triggered by a title I saw on Ars Technica. The 100 is the bleak sci-fi dystopia you should be watching.

You’ve probably noticed. All the entertainment worth reviewing is “bleak,” “edgy,” “gritty,” or some such nobody’s-foolin-me-I-know-the-score adjective. At least it is here in the USA. It’s a flag for not being some wishful thinking pansy who can’t face facts.

But, let’s face it, facts are a many-splendored thing. It’s impossible to face all of them, and the ones someone chooses to focus on reflect the person as well as the importance of the facts themselves.

So what does the insistence on bleakness by some of the world’s most comfortable people mean?

Approaching Port Charles, NZ

(MMolvray)

I’m thinking it’s the easy answer. If stories told us that people could treat each other right and because of that triumph in the end, well, we’d step away from the screen feeling like we sort of had to try to do that, maybe a bit.

But if stories say that our current lives are as good as it gets, and imagined realities are all worse, then, what the hell, no need to try to be generous or kind and run the risk of disappointment. You can just go ahead and be gritty yourself. It’s not selfish. It’s “realistic.”

I’m also thinking we ought to be way more careful of the stories we tell ourselves. They’re what the road to wherever is paved with.