Will Bunch expresses what I’ve been thinking since Trump was elected. American democracy is under attack from within. The fascists who yearn for an authoritarian government in the media are promoting it, and the media who supposedly don’t support it fail to recognize it. They are busy trying to follow the political playbook of the 20th century.

  • @CharlesDarwin
    link
    English
    201 year ago

    Yep. They did next to nothing to really vet him in any way. And so many had a vendetta against the Clintons that they just could not help but try to get their digs in on Hillary and Bill as much as possible, too.

    • @Hazdaz
      link
      91 year ago

      Yup. Republicans had been building a case against Hillary for some 2 decades. So much so, in fact, that even seasoned Democrats were falling for those attacks against her were ingrained into our pop culture.

      Such a shame because she would have made a perfect president. She was a pitbull that was willing to call Republicans on their shit.

      • astraeus
        link
        fedilink
        131 year ago

        The same seasoned Democrats that stacked the primaries in her favor? The 2016 election was the first time I had a real voice in an election and it felt like it was just vacuumed away. The candidate who seemed the most appropriate and the most qualified got swept under the rug in favor of the shit-throwers. She wasn’t perfect, she was a better terrible than Trump.

        In 2020 the Democrats scrambled for a viable candidate and somehow Joe Biden was the best they could give us, and it was an absolute gamble. His victory in the 2020 election was dangerously overstated and the danger of a repeat of 2016 in 2024 was ignored.

        • @SCB
          link
          -11 year ago

          Bernie Sanders lost the primary by 3 million votes.

        • @Hazdaz
          link
          -91 year ago

          Get your goddamn stories straight because I’m absolutely sick and tired of hearing Bernie bot dipshits who continue this myth that the primaries were somehow stolen from him… And yet he lost one primary after another after another after another. Somehow losing a primary equates to the DNC holding him back.

          He made the mistake of counting on the lazy youth and the apathetic Left of this country and he got exactly what he had coming to him. I was happy to vote for him in the primary and I wanted him to win, but I knew from the get-go that counting on the youth vote in the US is a fool’s game. As usual, that base never materialized, but somehow we still have dipshits who want to claim that the DNC somehow “stacked” the primaries against him. And of course that led to many of them conveniently staying home on election day for the general election in November.

          • Schadrach
            link
            fedilink
            51 year ago

            Get your goddamn stories straight because I’m absolutely sick and tired of hearing Bernie bot dipshits who continue this myth that the primaries were somehow stolen from him… And yet he lost one primary after another after another after another. Somehow losing a primary equates to the DNC holding him back.

            In my state, Hillary got 35% of the primary votes as opposed to Sanders getting around 52% (and a protest candidate getting most of the difference). As a consequence, she only got one more delegate from the state than Sanders (19 delegates vs Sanders 18), because all 8 unpledged delegates went to Clinton.

            Having unpledged delegates declaring support for Clinton before most of the primaries even happened also put a damper on any chance Sanders had because it established him as being in a losing position before votes were even cast, which demoralizes his voters and helps edge undecided voters towards not supporting the apparent loser.

          • astraeus
            link
            fedilink
            -81 year ago

            During the 2020 primaries there was an organization set up by former Obama and Clinton campaign staffers for the purpose of creating voting software to be used at polling stations during the primaries. It supposedly failed multiple times and led to victories that couldn’t be properly validated. However, anyone familiar with the primaries knows that the first few states are the most important because they determine the viability of candidates. Is it much of a surprise that Buttigieg who won Iowa, has a Cabinet position? You can call it a myth, but technically primary elections aren’t protected the same way general elections are since they decide a party’s candidate instead of the candidate who wins office.

            Funnily enough, I would have voted for Yang in the 2020 election, but it’s not about who is a reasonable candidate. It’s all about those connections baby. Our country is run not by the most reasonable, but the most corrupt. Our most important election process is a game of prisoner’s dilemma.

      • @DarthBueller
        link
        71 year ago

        I was convinced she’d be a neoliberal and would make grand bargains with the GOP like Bill did. Those grand bargains included “welfare reforms” like kicking grandmas out of public housing when their grandkids would deal drugs in their project (like grandmas have the power to control their grown-ass grandchildren). The impacts of Clinton’s actions reached FAR beyond his presidency - I was fighting such evictions at Legal Aid during the second term of Bush Jr., evictions that were the result of Clinton’s bargain with the devil.

        Though you’re right, most of the right’s anti-Bill Clinton bumper stickers during his 2 terms were actually shots at Hillary Clinton.

        • @Hazdaz
          link
          -51 year ago

          I’d bring back the Bill Clinton days in a heartbeat.

          ALL politics is about compromise. Anyone that thinks anything can get accomplished in Washington without compromise doesn’t understand how our government works. Bill made the right choices the majority of the time and our country and the economy was booming because of it.

          • @DarthBueller
            link
            101 year ago

            Compromises that make grandmas homeless are bad compromises. Clinton got away with it because nobody gives a shit about the projects, poor people don’t vote, and because black folk have been saying the system is rigged for far longer than literally anyone else. D’s don’t gain credibility with their ostensible base by stabbing them in the back.

              • @DarthBueller
                link
                61 year ago

                Okay buddy. Generational poverty doesn’t have any impact on subculture, it’s all about picking yourself up by your bootstraps even if you don’t know what fucking bootstraps are or where to find them. You’re right. Fuck them all, they should die for their moral failing of generational poverty and a worldview informed by the same. Everyone should experience poverty like the middle class does, a short term setback while getting an education.

                • @Hazdaz
                  link
                  11 year ago

                  Being poor doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. Not at all, actually, so stop using the excuse that because someone is poor that they will fall into a crowd that deals drugs. How convenient. Trashy people do that and they sure as fuck had no business being essentially funded by tax payer money. Fuck them and anyone who apologizes for those pieces of garbage.

                  • @dragonflyteaparty
                    link
                    11 year ago

                    That person didn’t say being poor makes you a bad person nor did they imply it. You, however, seem to believe there’s an “ideal way” to raise children to 100% ensure they’ll never do drugs. I somehow doubt that there is and drugs certainly aren’t a one way ticket to messing up.

              • @YoBuckStopsHere
                link
                English
                11 year ago

                Did you know that most illegal drugs sold occur in conservative majority white neighborhoods and not majority black neighborhoods? Meth and Fentanyl are sold to whites by an overwhelming share. As for the share of drugs, it’s damn near even across the board no matter the race. So perhaps you should check yourself before making such derogative statements.

      • Alex
        link
        11 year ago

        Probably right, it’s unfortunate the people that ran her campaign were idiots and she listened to them.

    • GodlessCommie
      link
      11 year ago

      It was Hillary Clinton that elevated trump as a pied piper, the media discovered an advertising and viewer gold mine. Had her hubris not gotten involved he may have never become president

      • @Hackerman_uwu
        link
        71 year ago

        It takes a special brand of caustic to lose an election to Donald Trump but fuck if the Dems didn’t find someone with just that.

        Her televised discussion with those millennials was an exercise in tone deafness (and cringe). Of course she was the better candidate but like it or not: politics is a popularity contest and although he is deplorable to any sane person Trump is loved by inbred Nazis. Hillary is just not likeable. By anyone.

        Pray for the day when these circumstances change and the most qualified candidate is always the clear winner but that day is not today.

        • GodlessCommie
          link
          21 year ago

          That day won’t be come if Dem it’s keep casting protest votes against something. They claim a 3rd party vote is a protest vote, but a vote cast in favor of something is not the protest. Voting against something is.

          It wasn’t just an issue of being unlikeable, we had seen time and time again where the rhetoric conflicts with the action. In the words of James Baldwin ‘I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.’