In case you've been wondering all summer how a smart, accomplished candidate like Hillary Clinton could possibly lose against a comic-book villain with a mystery pelt stitched to the top of his head, this is how it happens. Coupled with the fact that the polls continue to get more and more worrisome, maybe it's time to get crackin' a little harder on this thing.
Look, we all get that nothing in this is fair. It's unfair that HFC is running neck-and-neck against this certifiable moron in the first place. It's unfair that the media refs hold them to completely different standards on everything. He's allowed to talk shit about anything and anyone with no consequences, she's forced to quickly apologize for supposedly insulting a group of people who richly deserve much worse. She has to contend with cheap rumor-mongering about her health, while he -- a fat, jowly seventy-year-old man -- gets away with a doctor's note that could have been forged by your average fifth-grader. Oh, but he's going on "Doctor" Oz this week to sift through his stool, so there's that.
(Extra points for the "oh, I've had fainting spells in the past" anecdotes. Great, but you're not running for president into the headwinds of conspiracy theorists and media spin. I'd vote for HFC over Gump if she were literally stone dead, lying on a slab in the morgue. But that's me, that's you, that's the political junkie who knows the "choice" is between a corrupt but competent technocrat and an utterly corrupt and incompetent fake tycoon. The average rube is just going to see CNN going over the video like the fuckin' Zapruder film.)
So none of this is "fair," but we all knew that going in. Jill Stein turned into a clown months ago, and Gary Johnson short-circuited on Aleppo the other day (though I'd bet you twenty bucks that Gump has no clue where the fuck Aleppo is either), so it's hard to blame this on a handful of purists and butt-hurt Bernie Bros, especially when the differences between HFC and Gump are so stark. Hell, Obama had all the same forces and more arrayed against him, and won. Twice.
There should be no question, and yet there are questions. Again, in a rational world, politics would be about policy and logic and competent decision-making. But the realists know that it's also about emotion, reaction, perception, repetition. There's a lot of lizard-brain thinking in play, especially with Gump's lowbrow crowd, but also with the idjit "independents," and the candidates are almost perfect reverses of each other -- Gump is immune to logic and reason and the consequences of the stupid things he says, and HFC is incapable of knowing how to convince people who are receptive to Gump's sixth-grade vocabulary.
There's no excuse for this shit; any competent campaigner should have built up a twenty-point lead over this self-destructive asshole by now. Although I supported Sanders in the primaries, I'm not one of those that were utterly convinced that he would have easily won; much of his lead in the poll matchups could be attributed to lack of name recognition.
But seriously, does anyone think Sanders would be flailing like this? How about Joe Biden? He'd be mopping the floor with this fuckin' clown right now, and jamming Gump's face in the mop bucket for good measure. The entire dynamic for months has been this: Gump steps on his dick every third day and pretends he meant to do it. You almost have to try to find a way to fuck that up in responding to that. And yet, here we are. This is the sort of thing I would have expected out of, say, Lincoln Chafee or Martin O'Malley. But this is someone who's been to this game before, several times, on the verge of blowing it to easily the most ridiculous, unqualified nominee of our collective lifetimes.
It's fuck-or-walk time, people. After all this, I still think the math is slightly in her favor, and she squeaks this one out. But the last couple weeks have seen a steady erosion of what wasn't nearly as much of a lead as it should have been in the first place. Drip. Drip. Drip. There can be no more of this shit -- no more fainting spells, no more needing help up steps, no more coughing fits. The debates need to be crushing, like rip that motherfucker's dick off and super-glue it to his forehead. Because we know that how he's gonna roll.
What can we do as spectators? I dunno. Not everyone can canvass and knock doors and waste time trying to convince strangers. I get that. But take the media bias for example. What if enough of us, say, wrote NBC about Matt Lauer's skull-fucking ineptitude at "interviewing" the presidential candidates about NATIONAL SECURITY, and said that we were boycotting until he's gone? Seriously. Maybe it's time enough of us showed the media conglomerates that it's not just the perturbed god-botherers that can organize and mobilize and affect their bottom line.
I mean, it wouldn't literally work for me, since I haven't watched anything on NBC since 30 Rock went off the air anyway, but I'm not above lying about it. If they get worried that enough people will stop watching Jimmy Fallon or The Voice or Gold Case or whatever polished turd is cluttering the public's broadcast waves these days, maybe it makes a difference for once. It doesn't hurt to try. They're not going to cut bait on Lauer, but they might think twice about what they've been doing.
[Update 9/11/16 4:20 PM PDT: Oh, good, turns out she just has pneumonia. No fucking problem. The only thing worse than a stupid conspiracy theory is when it turns out to be at least partially true. All the "I've seen healthy 20-year-old military recruits faint in 80-degree heat" and "She's on a schedule that would knock most of us over" excuses ring kinda hollow when you consider that Drumpf has been on a pretty rigorous schedule himself, and was at the very same event (you can see him in the WaPo video chatting with gaping assholes Peter King and Hunchback Giuliani).
Get. Your. Fucking. Shit. Together. Now. Or, you know, don't. Whatever. Just know that after this is all over, if we're all sitting under a Fuckface Von Clownstick administration, hoping that our passports come through before it's our turn in the redneck thunderdome, that this can no longer be blamed on Naderistas or Steiniacs or Berniebros or whoever the Dems' imaginary heretics are. Sanders could have beaten Drumpf, if not by as much as polls indicated. Fucking Marty O'Malley probably could have beaten Drumpf.
The media certainly share some blame in all this, but the fact is that the DNC basically held the door for her and greased the skids. No effort was made to look down the bench and see if there was someone available who had (let's say) less baggage. This was pre-ordained, and Sanders' insurgent effort in the primaries only enraged the folks who felt that it was Her Turn, regardless of how, you know, Democratic voters felt. Well, she's had three months with Sanders' full support, out there campaigning for her. How's that working out? Drip. Drip. Drip.
Once again, I agree that it's unfair. I agree that a different standard has been applied to HFC because of her gender. But you think it might also just be possible that people wear on you after a while, that after a quarter of a century, for better or worse, that people just want something different? (If only that theory applied to Drumpf, who has been humping America's collective leg for far longer, and is much more off-putting.) Again, NOT FAIR. But it is reality all the same. And everyone was aware of it well before the campaign season began.
The talk all summer has been how the Republicans are imploding, how after Drumpf's Goldwater blowout the shards of the GOP will walk in the desert for forty years, blah blah blah. Okay, now what? Seriously, what becomes of the Democratic Party if they manage to royally fuck up an election that they should have dominated like the Harlem Globetrotters? HFC will be done, just like Drumpf would have been on the other side, leaving behind the mourners and the excuse-makers, desperately trying to piece together viable party coalitions under extraordinarily hostile circumstances.
Strap in. The next sixty days are going to make us all drink heavily.]
Look, we all get that nothing in this is fair. It's unfair that HFC is running neck-and-neck against this certifiable moron in the first place. It's unfair that the media refs hold them to completely different standards on everything. He's allowed to talk shit about anything and anyone with no consequences, she's forced to quickly apologize for supposedly insulting a group of people who richly deserve much worse. She has to contend with cheap rumor-mongering about her health, while he -- a fat, jowly seventy-year-old man -- gets away with a doctor's note that could have been forged by your average fifth-grader. Oh, but he's going on "Doctor" Oz this week to sift through his stool, so there's that.
(Extra points for the "oh, I've had fainting spells in the past" anecdotes. Great, but you're not running for president into the headwinds of conspiracy theorists and media spin. I'd vote for HFC over Gump if she were literally stone dead, lying on a slab in the morgue. But that's me, that's you, that's the political junkie who knows the "choice" is between a corrupt but competent technocrat and an utterly corrupt and incompetent fake tycoon. The average rube is just going to see CNN going over the video like the fuckin' Zapruder film.)
So none of this is "fair," but we all knew that going in. Jill Stein turned into a clown months ago, and Gary Johnson short-circuited on Aleppo the other day (though I'd bet you twenty bucks that Gump has no clue where the fuck Aleppo is either), so it's hard to blame this on a handful of purists and butt-hurt Bernie Bros, especially when the differences between HFC and Gump are so stark. Hell, Obama had all the same forces and more arrayed against him, and won. Twice.
There should be no question, and yet there are questions. Again, in a rational world, politics would be about policy and logic and competent decision-making. But the realists know that it's also about emotion, reaction, perception, repetition. There's a lot of lizard-brain thinking in play, especially with Gump's lowbrow crowd, but also with the idjit "independents," and the candidates are almost perfect reverses of each other -- Gump is immune to logic and reason and the consequences of the stupid things he says, and HFC is incapable of knowing how to convince people who are receptive to Gump's sixth-grade vocabulary.
There's no excuse for this shit; any competent campaigner should have built up a twenty-point lead over this self-destructive asshole by now. Although I supported Sanders in the primaries, I'm not one of those that were utterly convinced that he would have easily won; much of his lead in the poll matchups could be attributed to lack of name recognition.
But seriously, does anyone think Sanders would be flailing like this? How about Joe Biden? He'd be mopping the floor with this fuckin' clown right now, and jamming Gump's face in the mop bucket for good measure. The entire dynamic for months has been this: Gump steps on his dick every third day and pretends he meant to do it. You almost have to try to find a way to fuck that up in responding to that. And yet, here we are. This is the sort of thing I would have expected out of, say, Lincoln Chafee or Martin O'Malley. But this is someone who's been to this game before, several times, on the verge of blowing it to easily the most ridiculous, unqualified nominee of our collective lifetimes.
It's fuck-or-walk time, people. After all this, I still think the math is slightly in her favor, and she squeaks this one out. But the last couple weeks have seen a steady erosion of what wasn't nearly as much of a lead as it should have been in the first place. Drip. Drip. Drip. There can be no more of this shit -- no more fainting spells, no more needing help up steps, no more coughing fits. The debates need to be crushing, like rip that motherfucker's dick off and super-glue it to his forehead. Because we know that how he's gonna roll.
What can we do as spectators? I dunno. Not everyone can canvass and knock doors and waste time trying to convince strangers. I get that. But take the media bias for example. What if enough of us, say, wrote NBC about Matt Lauer's skull-fucking ineptitude at "interviewing" the presidential candidates about NATIONAL SECURITY, and said that we were boycotting until he's gone? Seriously. Maybe it's time enough of us showed the media conglomerates that it's not just the perturbed god-botherers that can organize and mobilize and affect their bottom line.
I mean, it wouldn't literally work for me, since I haven't watched anything on NBC since 30 Rock went off the air anyway, but I'm not above lying about it. If they get worried that enough people will stop watching Jimmy Fallon or The Voice or Gold Case or whatever polished turd is cluttering the public's broadcast waves these days, maybe it makes a difference for once. It doesn't hurt to try. They're not going to cut bait on Lauer, but they might think twice about what they've been doing.
[Update 9/11/16 4:20 PM PDT: Oh, good, turns out she just has pneumonia. No fucking problem. The only thing worse than a stupid conspiracy theory is when it turns out to be at least partially true. All the "I've seen healthy 20-year-old military recruits faint in 80-degree heat" and "She's on a schedule that would knock most of us over" excuses ring kinda hollow when you consider that Drumpf has been on a pretty rigorous schedule himself, and was at the very same event (you can see him in the WaPo video chatting with gaping assholes Peter King and Hunchback Giuliani).
Get. Your. Fucking. Shit. Together. Now. Or, you know, don't. Whatever. Just know that after this is all over, if we're all sitting under a Fuckface Von Clownstick administration, hoping that our passports come through before it's our turn in the redneck thunderdome, that this can no longer be blamed on Naderistas or Steiniacs or Berniebros or whoever the Dems' imaginary heretics are. Sanders could have beaten Drumpf, if not by as much as polls indicated. Fucking Marty O'Malley probably could have beaten Drumpf.
The media certainly share some blame in all this, but the fact is that the DNC basically held the door for her and greased the skids. No effort was made to look down the bench and see if there was someone available who had (let's say) less baggage. This was pre-ordained, and Sanders' insurgent effort in the primaries only enraged the folks who felt that it was Her Turn, regardless of how, you know, Democratic voters felt. Well, she's had three months with Sanders' full support, out there campaigning for her. How's that working out? Drip. Drip. Drip.
Once again, I agree that it's unfair. I agree that a different standard has been applied to HFC because of her gender. But you think it might also just be possible that people wear on you after a while, that after a quarter of a century, for better or worse, that people just want something different? (If only that theory applied to Drumpf, who has been humping America's collective leg for far longer, and is much more off-putting.) Again, NOT FAIR. But it is reality all the same. And everyone was aware of it well before the campaign season began.
The talk all summer has been how the Republicans are imploding, how after Drumpf's Goldwater blowout the shards of the GOP will walk in the desert for forty years, blah blah blah. Okay, now what? Seriously, what becomes of the Democratic Party if they manage to royally fuck up an election that they should have dominated like the Harlem Globetrotters? HFC will be done, just like Drumpf would have been on the other side, leaving behind the mourners and the excuse-makers, desperately trying to piece together viable party coalitions under extraordinarily hostile circumstances.
Strap in. The next sixty days are going to make us all drink heavily.]
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