I found impeachment and the 2000 election more infuriating than anything since, though the run-up to the Iraq War was no picnic either.

How bad is it going to get if Hillary is Democratic nominee? (Mind you, this stuff may help politically, I mean bad in terms of annoying and ridiculous.) The Village reaction to Gennifer Flowers’ latest may provide a clue.

Personally, I think Benghazi happened because Hillary was off somewhere with Huma Abedin.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpg00Doug!https://www.balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/balloon_juice_header_logo_grey.jpgDoug!2013-09-19 13:05:462013-09-19 13:05:46Years ago I was an angry young man

Call me an optimist, but I think she’s pretty well inoculated against attacks by now. They’ve all been aired and aired to the point where people are just worn out listening to them. I’m not eager to see her as the nominee, but she might be more able than most to weather anything the Republicans tossed at her.

Given that the Villagers have been outed by Chuckles the Toad as nothing but stenographers (and grossly overpaid ones, at that), it’s clear that there should be no questioning of anything that Gennifer Flowers said in that Daily Mail interview. They’ll just take it at face value, as they would any pronouncement of say Donald Trump or Allan West.

They’ve been flicking shit at Hillary Clinton for decades now. She is the pre-disastered candidate par excellence.

She’s not my favorite Democrat. She’s not even my favorite blonde female Democrat. But she’s damn good. And I love how afraid of her they are.

Remember when Wal-Mart refused to carry the “political” T-shirt on which Dennis the Menace’s friend Margaret made the “controversial” statement “Someday a woman will be President!”? That’s how afraid of her they are.

I’m not often optimistic about American politics, but I do think that personal attacks on Hillary– this one is especially cartoonish, but “Golden Girls” shit, dredging up stuff from the impeachment days– will backfire on them, and they can’t help themselves.

@Villago Delenda Est: Don’t forget all the little MarkPenns. I saw a headline today that Howard Wolfson is digging in against DeBlaso (minor twitter war type stuff, I didn’t read the article). I suspect Wolfson will stick with Bloomberg, which I imagine is an extremely lucrative sphere to move in, but Tweety was barking a few weeks ago for HRC to put Ed Rendell in charge of her campaign. Wall Street and Fracking lobbyist, Simspson Bowles advocate, Fix-the-Debt member, and Pete Peterson employee, sorry, associate Ed Rendeall.

I was on a plane right after the Monica Lewinsky thing blew up and had the unfortunate experience of sitting next to this loon who told me his belief that Hilary was a lesbian. After all, how could she stay with someone who cheated on her repeatedly? Since it was an enclosed space and I couldn’t escape I just nodded my head like I didn’t know what he was talking about and stared out the window for four hours. Can’t wait for a repeat of that experience, but now with more Benghazi!

@John M. Burt: Remember when Wal-Mart refused to carry the “political” T-shirt on which Dennis the Menace’s friend Margaret made the “controversial” statement “Someday a woman will be President!”? That’s how afraid of her they are.

@Yatsuno: I don’t even know if HRC takes Rendell’s calls, but I’d be willing to bet Bubba does. It’s more a question of what the allegedly brilliant Clintons have learned in the last five years. I’ve always thought she was the smarter Clinton, but she seemed to have put a lot of faith in him up to know.

The overall environment is GOP support by their Must Have 65+ demographic has collapsed from +21 in 2010 to +5 now. Further, one can predict the overall White Vote will drop to ~71% of the total 2014 vote and ~69% in 2016. If these hold it’s an unmitigated disaster for the GOP in 2014 and looking ahead to 2016. They have to do something and their “something” is their standard Slime & Smear attacks. Which, at the moment, seem to be paying off.

Since I am not a fan of either Clinton, it is going to be annoying as hell to have to defend these morally bankrupt tools again. And you know Bill has been screwing around, so there is going to be at least 1 bimbo eruption coming during the general election. That mixed with the fact that they surround themselves with the scummiest of political operatives who are only marginally competent, it will be a long election season.

It’s funny, everything after about mid-Lewinsky didn’t bother me that acutely. It was there, but in a somewhat distant, way-over-there-somewhere kind of way, right up to and including a lot of Bush’s first term. It wasn’t until Iraq that I started really paying attention again.

“The overall environment is GOP support by their Must Have 65+ demographic has collapsed from +21 in 2010 to +5 now. ”

I didn’t know that. But I guess it is possible. When my chronically ill (from extra double bad health habits) teabagger uncle finally realized what the GOP was going to do to his Medicare, he experienced some major attitude adjustment. The local Democrat was no longer automatically Satan himself looking to destroy America. The guy quit voting straight ticket GOP.

One thing that will be fun is that, as with Obama, the wingnut bubble teaches them that everyone hates her, which it really much more for them to come up with attacks that resonate with anyone outside the bubble. It’ll be “Benghazi!” over and over again.

Even then, it’s probably not enough, not for the White House, anyways.

IIRC McCain took the 65+ demo by something like ten points, and it wasn’t enough — Obama won the overall election without winning the 60+ vote, something which hadn’t happened for something like 40 years.

I kinda got bored with national politics because of the impeachment silliness. If I had bothered to look up before Dubya I would have noticed the shit that passed right before Bill left. But the 2000 election was so uninspiring I went back to tuning out. 9/11 sucked me back in, but that was because I was an Islamic studies major at the time (also Japan, and no I’m not reconciling that!) and I saw massive Charlie Foxtrot coming.

Kidding aside, I really missed some of the worst of the worst, US friends would come back to Paris after a visit home to the US in the immediate post 9/11 years and actually just say “You don’t want to know” and “Don’t go there. Really. I mean it” and so on.

O goody, a Hillary post. It’s like dragging red meat through a wolf convention. Now if only my snark decoder was working. Damn thing musta been made by Microsoft. If only Apple cared about that market.

@AxelFoley: My brain immediately went to “doing disgusting sexual acts while praising Satan with the same kind of ball-busting woman who drove her husband to seek sex outside the marriage and also, too, is an Amurika-hating Mooslim who wants to take away our FREEDUMS!”

@smintheus:”Call me an optimist, but I think she’s pretty well inoculated against attacks by now”
The problem with this line of thinking is that I know plenty of wingers of the Newsmax variety that still say “Hanoi Jane” without irony. Elephants never forget.

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.” – Stephen Colbert

@Bill E Pilgrim: I was living in Canuckistan at the time, and a French friend came back from a visit back home. He said to me, “I can’t take France anymore. It’s too French.” I laughed, and he smiled at me and said, “You know what I mean.” I did–it was probably truer for me.

In political terms, just the pope talking some sense could make a big difference. IIRC, Catholic doctrine is supposed to pay some attention to what Jesus actually did and said on earth. For reactionary evangelical Protestants, what Jesus said and did on earth makes no difference. That was in a previous dispensation.

The protestant fundies follow Jesus Christ Our Risen Lord, and everything is about getting to the Apocalypse, the Big Showdown on Christ’s side, and He is coming to separate the sheep from the goats and kick some butt, no more lovey dovey stuff for outsiders.

This little friction between conservative Catholics and Protestant fundies in the U.S. has been smoothed over with fear and hatred of women, gays, poors, brown people, kids, rootless cosmopolitans, Samaritans, and all the other bogeyperson on their long list of things they hate and fear.

Edit: i am rusty on the details, but I think the Pentacost ushered in the new dispensation. Jesus talking to the Jews on earth was the old dispensation. That didn’t work out so the Boss dealt out a new hand, The Christ, and we follow the Epistles and whatever smoosh of prophecy the preachermen cobbled together from Old and New testament.

@Citizen_X: Yeah I’ve heard that a lot, more from people from France who went to the US, but also Canada, when I spent some time in Montreal. And of course the other way around. For a long time I would have said that about the US, in fact I still would in many respects. You end up not quite fitting anywhere, which is strange but sort of liberating.

Wait I though Anthony Weiner converted to Islam because Huma is a Muslim according to the wing nuts. The same goes for Grover Norquist.

But on a more serious note. Hillary is polling very well in Appalachian states like West Virginia, Kentucky. She is competitive in Arkansas and Louisiana, and dominating in the Obama states. If Hillary follows the Obama playbook when it comes to elections and hires solid people she should be able to win in 2016. Only Hillary can defeat herself.

@Davis X. Machina: Time heals all wounds. It will even cure us of Republican obstructionism. But until then…those Olds that do get (and believe in) that ‘Hanoi’ Jane reference can do the Republic harm, especially at the state and local level.

Too many people where I live are still butthurt over how Obummer stole the 2012 election with the help of ACORN, Soros, and the New Black Panthers. By 2016 a bunch of them will probably be dead, so there’s a silver lining there. Those still living will be backing the FOX-approved Rafael Cruz.

Your experience with your uncle seems to have been replicated nationally.

IF this carries through to the 2014 elections any GOP incumbent with a 2010 vote margin less than +5% is vulnerable. However, voters tend to give their Representative higher marks than they do the national party. Counter this is the grotesque gerrymandering of House seats seemingly gives the GOP the edge but only if historic voting patterns hold … which might not be the case in 2014.

It’s really too soon to say how things will turn out but at the moment things are shaping nicely.

Looking at this (but gloss with this) the GOP dependence on the white vote is going to hurt in 2016 and I don’t see how demographically speaking they expect to be competitive in any election race outside the South in the 2020s. And I’m not (yet) convinced the GOP, as presently constituted, will hold their overwhelming advantage in the South in 2016 and other presidential elections going forward; should Texas switch, as seems likely, it becomes a mathematical impossibility for them to win.

None of this should cause anyone to sit on their butt. There’s a heckuva lot of work to make this happen.

Rare for him to speak in his own voice that clearly from what I”ve seen. Where’s that from?

I don’t know if it’s where that particular quote is from, but Colbert testified before a Congressional committee at some point in support of migrant farm workers. He was fucking AWESOME. And when someone asked him why he was doing it, he quoted the, you know, real deal JC: “As ye do unto the least of these….”

@Bill E Pilgrim: I believe this was a feature, not a bug, of the Republican focus on this non-issue – making the electorate feel like they didn’t need to pay attention to politics because it is pointless bullshit. I think this is still one of their main objectives.

@Scotius: If she runs there will be no Democratic primary to speak of. We hippies should expect to be beaten senseless.

If Clinton runs, she’ll win, and in the general in 2016 there will be a sane, competent Republican on the Democatic ticket, running against an insane, incompetent Republican on the R ticket. I’ll campaign for the sane Republican of course, and be happy to finally have our first female President.

Suffice to say, I’m not much of a fan of either Clinton. But there’s no fucking way I could tolerate the alternative, whatever thing it might be that crawls out from under that rock.

Years ago I remember being out to dinner with my wife and two other couples, when the conversation ventured into politics (I guess because the conversation would have died otherwise).

One of the wives noted that both myself and another one of the husbands were interested in politics. I remember telling everyone that it didn’t used to be such a big deal to me, until the Clinton impeachment and then the 2000 election/FL. One of the husbands goes, “Wow, me too”.

Tell me again why we should be pining for a Hillary presidency over that of another Democratic candidate? Why have Democrats sort of blanked out on all the BAD things that happened during the Clinton presidency that have had long term BAD repercussions like deregulation of the banking industry, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Welfare “Reform”. If she governs anything like her husband did expect a lot of incrementalist compromises that the next Democratic president will be vilified for not undoing fast enough.

I cannot recall anything she said about the way she would govern in 2008 that got me fired up about the possibility of her being president. And the last thing I want is the return of Clenis. I’m sick of political dynasties in this country. Nominating Hillary would be playing into the Republican’s hands, the party that has completely given themselves over to identity politics. It would all become chatter about personalities and nothing about policy. I’m so sick of that.

Give me Elizabeth Warren, someone the Republicans really fear. Give me Brian Schweitzer, some guy who’ll brand bad bills with his veto hot iron on the steps of the capital. Give me a break and let’s stop re-fighting the battles of the 1990s.

@Anoniminous: Hope you’re right. Unfortunately, it feels that no matter how crazy Repubs get, there’s always enough people to vote them into Congress. With this threatened GOP shutdown over Obamacare, Repubs should be kicked out of office — and into outer space.

@fuckwit: I know the smart money would be betting on her getting the nomination, but 2016 is still a long way away and a lot can happen between now and then. I remember in 2008 that she also seemed to be the prohibitive favorite and that only John Edwards stood a chance. I myself was fairly well disposed to her at first. By the time the Pennsylvania rolled around I could barely stand looking at her race baiting, faux redneck hippie punching face.

The thing is, there are a lot of people who are still hurting in the aftermath of the Great Recession and there are a lot of people who are furious at what the bankers and plurocrats did to the country without so much as a slap on the wrist in return. A politician who runs a campaign against fat cats and de-regulation could still stand a chance in the Democratic primariesIMHO.

Having lived through the past 2.5 years of having ignorant lunatics in charge of the House, preventing anything remotely positive from happening while threatening to burn the country down for reasons they don’t even bother to understand themselves, I pretty much just want our 2016 candidate to have the strongest coattails possible. Right now that looks like Hillary, though there’s plenty of time for someone else to emerge or for her to fade.

I’ll take a center/left president I am not terribly excited about working with a sane congress over my ideal liberal president dealing with an obstructionist congress full of lollygaggers that has to spend most of its energy preventing a bunch of know-nothing domestic terrorists from tanking the economy on purpose. Some good shit will actually get done in the former scenario, even if it is inevitably far less than I might like. More years of endlessly ridiculous and dangerous bullshit will happen in the latter scenario.

@burnspbesq: Thank you ! Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders can’t win nationally. You have to be practical and realize that you need a candidate who can build a large coalition. Also Hillary is very popular with the base of the party which shows that the “purity” crowd is not the majority of the democratic base.

No worse than we’ve come to expect. For some reason people forget how absolutely crazy it was in the 90s. So if you’re young or simply have forgotten the batshit insanity of those days I guess, sure, it will get “bad” after Hillary is nominated.

The Clintons are both captives of big money, If Hillary becomes POTUS, she will continue to champion the policies of the one percent. The Democratic rank and file who work for her will be played for suckers.

If President Obama does not succeed in “reforming” (cutting) social security and medicare (and he is trying to do this), President Hillary Clinton will do her best to get the job done.

From the Washington Post:

Why Washington scandal-mania may save Medicare and Social Security

“…President Bill Clinton long entertained ambitions to dramatically reform Social Security, but those plans were shelved amid the Lewinsky crisis. While there is some argument over whether the crisis was the cause, it did make him more reluctant to alienate Democratic supporters. As John Harris put it in his book about the Clinton presidency: “Come 1998, when Clinton needed every Democratic vote possible in order to survive the Republican attack over Monica Lewinsky, the work of challenging his own ground to a halt. He had no political latitude to push for the reform of the entitlement programs for the aged.”

@burnspbesq: Is Elizabeth Warren really considered a unicorn candidate? I think she has an economic message that really resonates with a lot of people. She has a no nonsense, real Midwestern look and sound to her and Scott Brown threw the kitchen sink at her and wasn’t able to make a dent. I don’t see how she is suddenly unelectable just because the left wingers happen to love her.

I threw Schweitzer’s name in there as an example of straight talking manly man who also happens to be a liberal. Sort of the left’s version of Chris Christy, without all the a$$holeishness. He sort of skewers the notions that all liberal males are wusses.

Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War, for the patriot Act (TWICE) for TARP, for No Child left Behind, she supported NAFTA, China Trade and DOMA and DADT. She currently supports the XL Pipeline and said legalizing Marijuana would be a “mistake”.

Back in the 80s sometime, in the undergrad library of my student house at college, I happened along a 1973 Time magazine issue. In it, Nixon had just been reelected. It was discussing how obvious the frontrunners for 1976 were, and that the primaries were practically settled already – it was going to be Ted Kennedy versus Spiro Agnew.