I don’t think people who won’t vote for Clinton are morons. I do think that lots of people on both sides are frustrated. That’s about it.
A frustrated person who doesn’t accept 90% of what they want instead of 0% can be pretty fairly said to be doing something stupid.
What if you want a change to how politics is done? What if you’re tired of spin, handlers, fake political stances, and outright lying?
Meh. It’s a long time until the general election.
Then certainly, giving the run of the country, the SCOTUS nominations, the congress and the nuclear codes to a guy stupid and inept enough to think Obama was born in Kenya, and Mexico will build a border wall for us, is a great idea.
Incrementally forcing them into a non-viable business plan is…
You probably need to get untired of them. This is how humans have done politics forever. With the exception of absolute dictators who don’t bother to spin.
Other countries and other times have the same issues. Henry VIII had handlers, although his PR machine was rather old fashioned by modern standards. Chinese emperors had the same issues - although they didn’t have to make their will palatable to the people, the politics among the elite was literally cutthroat. The Jefferson hatchet job on Adams - he actually paid someone to print untrue dirt on one of his oldest friends and mentors - is an example from our own History. Italy, Britain, France - they’ve all had their share of spin, handlers, and lying - and scandals.
Its naive to think politics will ever be anything other than political. We can change the shape - i.e. we could get big money out, we could change the way primaries and caucuses work. But you aren’t going to change the core nature of politics or politicians. Add in a free press, freedom of speech, and the ability of ordinary citizens to communicate to thousands of people at a time - and all that’s going to do is amplify the perception of spin, lying, etc.
All I ask is for a little more maturity in the process. Whenever I see refusal to answer direct questions, attempting to get around laws rather than implement them faithfully, or using weird accounting tricks to make the numbers add up I see it less as corrupt behavior than the behavior of children.
People keep saying stuff like that. Where do you get this 90% figure?
Thinking about the issues that are important to me, and arbitrarily assigning them each a 25% share of importance:
On civil rights issues, Clinton is as good as Sanders, with the significant exception of issues related to drug prohibition. Call it 20%.
On economic and environmental issues, as far as I am aware Clinton has not proposed any major initiatives comparable to what Sanders has proposed: she doesn’t want to ban fracking, doesn’t want single-payer health care, doesn’t want a $15 minimum wage, etc. That’s 0 of a possible 50%.
Foreign policy is tough to judge, since we can’t know what decisions the President will have to face in the future. Clinton’s record of supporting the Iraq war doesn’t fill me with confidence, but she did seem to be a reasonably competent Secretary of State, so I’ll give her half credit. 12.5%.
So that’s a total of about 37.5% of what I want. Whoopee. This election feels like a choice between eating dog food and dog shit; one choice is clearly far superior, but don’t expect me to be enthusiastic about it.
Why are you comparing her to Sanders instead of to the person she will actually be facing in November? That’s your choice, you know. She already beat Sanders.
For now Sanders reminds me of the Japanese soldier who did not surrender until 1974. 
Does she not want these things, or is she not campaigning on these things because she does not believe they are plausible?
I didn’t want to even get into the details because the issue is how she stacks up against Trump so the whole post didn’t make any sense as a premise.
But since you brought it up, Hillary on Fracking:
Hillary on a $15 minimum wage:
So on these three issues, Hillary says fracking is fine (provided you meet a ton of regulations that make it incredibly difficult to actually happen), single payer simply won’t happen (and is there any evidence that she is wrong here?) and $15 an hour is great at local levels.
Let’s compare this to the person that Thing Fish should be comparing her to, Donald Trump. On Fracking:
So Hillary is in favor of regulating Fracking to death while Trump is all in favor of it. Hillary doesn’t think it’s feasible and Donald wants a “market solution.” Hillary wants $12 an hour at a minimum, Trump has been all over the place and has not used an actual number for raising it.
So either Thing Fish doesn’t actually know the candidates respective positions on these issues or was so broken up that Sanders will not be on the ballot in November that s/he forgot.
WTF? Try reading the post. I explicitly said she is far superior to Trump. I’m just annoyed that people try to minimize the real and significant differences between the candidates.
Does it matter? Most Americans want single payer. If it’s not plausible under our current corporate money dominated political system, I would say that’s a pretty damning indictment of the system.
The whole issue is Hillary vs. Trump. Seriously, that’s the topic of discussion.
Hillary vs. Sanders already happened and nobody that I know of blamed you for supporting Sanders over Clinton regarding policy (in fact I supported Sanders over Clinton over policy). So your whole post is confusing and irrelevant.
Most want universal background checks on guns too. That didn’t happen even when the president went all out in support of it. So merely having the President in favor of something, even something that a majority of Americans want, doesn’t guarantee it will happen.
If the public really wanted single payer as much as they claim, they would be voting for candidates in house and senate races that agree with them and are willing to take that fight to Washington. Merely having Bernie in the White House won’t help. He’s not a dictator.
Sorry, but you are being very naive.
I dearly hope this is the case.
And I dearly hope that Most Americans want it enough that they (we) will start refusing to return legislators to Washington who do not work toward making that a reality.
Sadly Americans Don’t Know What ‘Single Payer’ Means! But when they find out, they don’t like it…
If I were Politifact, I would label Thing Fish’s claim Mostly False.
And as for how this kind of response bodes for a politician making Single Payer the law of the land, how many people believed that the ACA meant government death panels?
I loves me some Bernie and I would loves me some Single Payer healthcare but polls like the cited and how we handled the ACA tells me that Sanders would have even less of a chance of making it happen as President than Obama had with closing Guantanamo Bay.
It would also be an extremely difficult sell in America because one of the keys to making it work in most European countries has been to be able to squeeze doctors a lot more than they do hear.
Matthew Yglesias, who no one would consider a right-winger has wrote on that quite a bit and pointed out that it was the doctors who killed the “public option” during the debate over Obamacare and frankly anyone who thinks that when the doctors butt head with the politicians that the ordinary folks are going to decide the politicians are more trustworthy really hasn’t looked at who the public trusts more.
I see the majority of people believing that simply because a candidate has the most delegates that they are automatically the one everyone is going to side with, and that could not be farther from the truth.
Bernie mentioned several polls that show people favor him greatly over Trump that also show Hillary and Trump being neck and neck.
CNN has mentioned several times over that Bernie supporters are siding more with Trump than Hillary, so we can clearly expect Trump to win by a landslide should she steal the democratic nomination, which she has done.
To present the straight dope on the matter - Hillary has supported NAFTA for a very long time and was even caught lying to the American people saying she was suspicious of it while White House documents prove she was supporting it will Bill. I challenge everyone who doesn’t honestly know what NAFTA is, to watch a documentary called, Trading Democracy with Bill Moyers. If you vote for Hillary you are voting to give multi-national corporations more power of communities than the officials that we elect into office, and that is simply reprehensible.
Long in short - vote Bernie if you want democracy and equality, vote Hillary of you like extreme poverty and fascism and vote Trump of you want politically incorrect national security and a revamped economy.
The trend here is clearly changing. After Trump’s recent remarks, there’s been a clear treand, with Hillary gaining on him in the polls. He’s become so toxic nobody wants anything to do with him.
Not that it really matters at this point; Sanders will not be the democratic nominee barring a dead boy/live girl scenario for Clinton. Unless you think he’s going to go for a third-party run, which would be just about the dumbest thing he could do and would ensure that neither he nor Clinton stands a remote chance in ghe general election, then Hillary is the de facto democratic nominee.
“Steal”. Because, you know, she didn’t win it by millions of votes, wasn’t favored in the polls literally from day one until the end (no, seriously, there was literally no point during the race where Sanders was ahead in the national polls; a whole 6 polls taken during that period had him ahead at all, and those polls had margins of a tiny handful of points, whereas quite a few polls had Clinton beating him by 20+ points), and didn’t have every advantage anyways, she also needed to “steal” it. Which she didn’t do in the last primary election against a similarly upstart candidate who beat her.
Makes sense.
Has anyone watched or fact-checked this documentary? I can’t watch it right now, but when the cite for an argument is an hour-long video, my baloney detector starts going off.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. Like it or not, Sanders is not a viable candidate any more.
You must be new here. The interesting thing is that on this forum, when you make statements, you’re typically expected to back them up. Even assuming that NAFTA was a Bad Thing™, the Clinton years were pretty great, economy-wise, and it certainly hasn’t killed our economy in the intervening years. So I don’t know why you think “extreme poverty” is going to be the result of a Clinton presidency. Fascism? Where the hell does that even come from? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
And here things fly completely off the rails. “Politically incorrect national security”? What does that even mean? What, you think Trump’s going to have a net positive effect on our national security? Because, you know, he has such an expansive foreign policy experience, and such well-thought-out proposals (such as blowing up NATO, cozying up to Russia, and torture)? Or is it just the stupid psychopath argument again, i.e. “If only we had someone willing to be enough of an asshole, then that person would solve our problems”? Because that’s a really stupid argument.
As for the economy, what, exactly, does Trump bring to the table there. His business acumen? Businessmen typically give rotten economic advice. We’ve seen this from Trump himself - his comments on debt indicate that he’s willing to put the creditworthiness of the USA in question, as though the USA was one of his business ventures where he can get away with declaring bankruptcy (as opposed to, yanno, the safest investment on the planet and the bedrock upon which much of the global financial system rests). And that’s even assuming that he is a good businessman. His claimed wealth (we say “claimed” because he refuses to release his tax returns, for all we know his net worth could be far below the claimed billions) is lower than what he would get if he had just stuck his initial “small million-dollar loan” in an index fund, and seems to be built largely on bullying and refusing to pay people. Very presidential.
Seriously, where do people get this crap? Where does this idea come from that Trump has decent policy proposals on… Well, anything? It sure as hell doesn’t come from any actual analysis of his proposals, I’ll tell you that much.
The irony here is that Clinton actually has provided numerous expansive and well-thought-out policy proposals on subjects ranging from the economy to national security. She actually does have experience in politics, and a strong record to work off of. Yet somehow, you think that a random wahoo who thinks torture and colonialism (no, fucking really) is the answer to our terrorism problem is going to be better on national security than an active secretary of state known for her diplomacy.
Has the world gone mad? Is it really all just style over substance?