+- Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory (http://generational-theory.com/forum)
+-- Forum: Fourth Turning Forums (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-1.html)
+--- Forum: Current Events (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-34.html)
+---- Forum: General Political Discussion (http://generational-theory.com/forum/forum-15.html)
+---- Thread: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy (/thread-102.html)
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-14-2016
The choice in this election may come down to this: Do you want to be entertained, or do you want to see some progress made? Take your choice.
Now playing. The "Trump Horror Picture Show." Admission price? Lots of sand in your hair from holding your head under it. Free glitter available.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-14-2016
(09-30-2016, 02:08 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(09-30-2016, 01:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: What was that about the Clinton Foundation, again?
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=16680
Score
(out of 100) Rating ****
Overall Score & Rating 94.74 ****
Financial 97.50 ****
Accountability & Transparency 93.00 ****
First and foremost, unlike the Trump "Non-profit" they are not a criminal enterprise that is most likely linked with international organized crime, and possibly the Red Mafiya.
Not to mention the basic fact that it violates the law, is not legit according to the NY Attorney General, and uses its charity funds to defend Donald's lawsuits and other personal and political benefits.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - The Wonkette - 10-15-2016
(10-14-2016, 09:24 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The choice in this election may come down to this: Do you want to be entertained, or do you want to see some progress made? Take your choice.
You are more optimistic than me. I an concerned that the choice is between catastrophe and continued gridlock. However, I hope you're right and not me.
Regardless, in about an hour, I'm voting for HRC.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-15-2016
This article claims that "Hillary appears to have committed serious crimes" according to the headline on the conservative Real Clear Politics page.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441105/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-jail-prosecutor-debate-fbi-emails
And yet all that this article in the right-wing National Review can say about these so-called crimes is
"Mrs. Clinton appears to have committed serious crimes that undermined both national security and recordkeeping rules designed to promote accountability in government."
In other words, the article conveys no new information at all about these supposed "serious crimes;" just their same old opinions.
No, Hillary DID NOT commit any "crimes." Using a private email server was not a crime. Nor was failing to see a c meaning "confidential" on a few emails she received. She did not commit any crime by circulating emails among the State Dept. staff.
To claim she did, when the FBI did not find any evidence of a crime, is indeed persecution of political opponents, and is reprehensible. Comey said the decision not to prosecute was unanimous, in spite of Republican rumors otherwise. We don't need a president or a political party in charge of our executive branch or our congress that commits this outrage against democracy and human rights.
It is Trump who has committed crimes. Not Hillary.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-23-2016
An Important & Disturbing Article that You Must Take Seriously. Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.
LD Womack 09/28/2016
http://www.voices4hillary.com/an-important-disturbing-article-that-you-must-take-seriously-stop-pret-2020517805.html
"Why Is Clinton disliked?"
"Why the hate for Hillary?"
"Why do people hate Hillary Clinton so much?"
Is it because of partisanship?
Or a hard-fought primary?
Maybe, NBC once suggested, it's because "she's not a train wreck."
Funny how the answers seem to be everything but the obvious.
We go on endlessly about how "untrustworthy" she is, while fact checkers rank her as the second-most honest prominent politician in the country. (And her opponent as by far the least.)
We say that she has trouble with transparency, while her opponent refuses to release his taxes and the current administration sets records for secrecy.
We decry her ties to corporations and the financial industry, while supporting a walking tax shelter or mourning the exit of a president whose re-election was funded by a record-shattering Wall Street haul.
We list so very many explanations, all of them complete bullshit.
In truth, the Hillary haters seem to resent her more than disagree with her. They demand to be humored and catered to. They hold her to wildly different standards than her male counterparts. They regard her with an unprecedented degree of suspicion. Above all, they really, really want to see her punished. And an aggressive male presence—even if dangerously incompetent—seems to comfort a great many of them.
Everyone but them knows damn well why.
Bad news for the haters: History is decidedly unafraid of "the woman card." It doesn't care how many people will stand on tables today and swear they'd feel the same if she were a man. It will see us for what we are—a sick society, driven by misogyny and pathetically struggling to come to terms with the fact that women do not exist solely to nurture.
If that answer isn't as nuanced as the average thinkpiece, that's because we, as a people, are not. No matter how many branches have formed, they all emerged from the same seed, planted way back when Bill Clinton first ran for governor. She wouldn't be so suspicious of the press, or so measured in her presentation, or so any one of a thousand other things, if she had been born a man.
The lengths we go to in order to rationalize this all will be seen, in retrospect, as extraordinary.
When the Bush administration was discovered to have erased millions of emails illegally sent by 22 administration officials through private, RNC-owned accounts, in order to thwart an investigation into the politically motivated firing of eight US attorneys, just one talk show covered it that Sunday.
When Mitt Romney wiped servers, sold government hard drives to his closest aides and spent $100,000 in taxpayer money to destroy his administration's emails, it was barely an issue.
When Hillary Clinton asked Colin Powell how he managed to use a Blackberry while serving as Secretary of State, he replied by detailing his method of intentionally bypassing federal record-keeping laws:
I didn't have a Blackberry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels.
... There is a real danger. If it is public that you have a BlackBerry and it it [sic] government and you are using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law.
Yet the fact that Hillary Clinton emailed through a private server and didn't use it to cover anything up is somehow the defining issue of her campaign. "My God," people cry, "anyone else would be in jail!"
Or is the real scandal that her family runs but does not profit from a charitable foundation awarded an A grade by Charity Watch, a four out of four star rating by Charity Navigator and responsible for helping 435 million people in 180 countries get things like clean drinking water and HIV medication? Because the AP seems super concerned that she encountered people who donated to it—specifically Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus—in her official capacity as Secretary of State.
It should at this point be observed that her opponent is a shameless con artist who has built an empire bilking people with fake businesses, fake universities, fake charities and, now, a fake campaign. Last week, he told a lie every three minutes and fifteen seconds. Oh, and did we mention that he, (like so many of his online "supporters,") is a goddamn Russian stooge? I tried to list all of the dumb, awful stuff that he does every day and I cannot come close to keeping up.
Voters, it seems, are his easiest marks yet.
And it isn't just Republicans. The double standards are even more transparent on the left.
Back in the mid-90s, Clinton's persistent unwillingness to hide the fact that she was a thinking human female really freaked the center-left establishment out. Michael Moore observed that, "[Maureen Dowd] is fixated on trashing Hillary Rodham in the way liberals love to do, to prove they're not really liberal." The bashing slowly morphed into a creepy, extraordinary sort of policing.
Since then, Clinton racked up a Senate voting record more liberal than any nominee since Mondale. Her 2008 platform was slightly to Obama's left on domestic issues. Her 2016 platform was barely to the right of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders.
Yet, we have all heard and seen countless liberal posers passionately decrying her "far right voting record," untrustworthy promises or ever-changing policy positions. Jon Stewart recently called Clinton, "A bright woman without the courage of her convictions, because I don't know what they even are." Because if he doesn't know, she must not have any, right?
In fact, there is a very lengthy trail of public records all pointing in the same direction. If you can't figure out which, maybe the problem is you.
Yet, many on the left who gladly voted for John Kerry, two years after he voted to authorize the Iraq war, now say they couldn't possibly vote for Clinton, because she did, too.
And view her with contempt for opposing same-sex marriage in 2008, while fawning over men like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, who held the same position at the same time.
It's time to stop pretending that this is about substance. This is about an eagerness to believe that a woman who seeks power will say or do anything to get it. This is about a Lady MacBeth stereotype that, frankly, should never have existed in the first place. This is about the one thing no one wants to admit it's about.
Consider, for a moment, two people. One, as a young woman at the beginning of a promising legal career, went door to door searching for ways to guarantee an education to the countless disabled and disadvantaged children who had fallen through the cracks. The other, as a young millionaire, exacted revenge on his recently deceased brother's family by cutting off the medical insurance desperately needed by his nephew's newborn son, who at eighteen months of age was suffering from violent seizures brought on by a rare neurological disorder.
What kind of a society treats these two people as equal in any way? What kind of society even considers the latter over the former for its highest office?
Generations from now, people will shake their heads at this moment in time, when the first female major party presidential nominee—competent, qualified and more thoroughly vetted than any non-incumbent candidate in history—endured the humiliation of being likened to such an obvious grifter, ignoramus and hate monger.
We deserve the shame that we will bear.
Reprinted from the Huffington Post. September 26, 2016.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Bronsin - 10-23-2016
(10-23-2016, 12:35 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: An Important & Disturbing Article that You Must Take Seriously. Stop Pretending You Don’t Know Why People Hate Hillary Clinton.
This is about an eagerness to believe that a woman who seeks power will say or do anything to get it.
That line basically covers it.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Bob Butler 54 - 10-23-2016
(10-23-2016, 12:35 AM)Huntington Post via Eric Wrote: It's time to stop pretending that this is about substance. This is about an eagerness to believe that a woman who seeks power will say or do anything to get it.
Not quite... I do believe many a man with power greed will say or do anything to get it. Politics is to a great degree about the power hungry seeking and getting power. If anything, women tend to be less power hungry than men. This might be a good thing, except the tendency of the less power hungry to allow the power hungry to grab power is an unfortunate dynamic.
It's about the myths, traditions and prejudices that the males will use against any woman who might want to compete.
Since the awakening, through the unravelling, it has been politically incorrect to be blatant about one's racism and / or sexism. Trump is blatant in both. One of the conjectured reasons for his success among the Republican base is that he is willing to open doors and bring back into the open blatant sexism and racism. The deplorables have a long resentment that they aren't able to be openly and blatantly deplorable. Trump has been making America deplorable again, which many think is a good thing.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-24-2016
This may not be a neutral source, but it has been a pretty good antidote to the lies.
Hillary Clinton Is One of the Most Ethical (and Most Lied About) Political Leaders in America
By Peter Daou
August 12, 2016
http://bluenationreview.com/hillary-clinton-is-one-of-the-most-ethical-and-most-lied-about-political-leaders-in-america/
Democrats are sick and tired of the endless lies about Hillary, the character attacks, the distortions of her record, the contorted caricature portrayed in the media. They want an unfiltered connection to Hillary without the prism of GOP-style talking points and false frames.
If the headline of this piece blows some minds, you can thank three decades of relentless lies and smears by the conservative attack machine and its mainstream media enablers, who have labored to create an aura of corruption around Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s detractors on the right, left and center reel off a laundry list of unsupported accusations with an air of absolute authority, as though it is simply a given that she is a terrible, horrible, no-good human being.
And that is precisely the intention: Taint her through innuendo and guilt-by-association, throw enough dirt at her that voters develop an instant negative association with her name. Accuse, accuse, accuse until the accusation becomes the reality, and may the truth be damned.
Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, and billionaire conservative moneymen like Paul Singer have spent inordinate sums to paint a malignant picture of Hillary, using sophisticated propaganda techniques to render her toxic to the American electorate.
Sadly, many on the left imbibe and regurgitate these fabricated narratives, spewing falsehoods and filth at Hillary with gleeful abandon. They are joined by mainstream media operatives with personal vendettas like Maureen Dowd and the Morning Joe crew, whose venomous words reveal more about their own failings than about Hillary.
But the fact is this: no one has ever produced an iota of evidence that Hillary has behaved improperly because of a campaign contribution. No one has produced a scintilla of proof that there is a quid pro quo when it comes to her speaking fees. From Whitewater to Benghazi to her emails, nobody can point to a single instance of corruption or purposeful wrongdoing on Hillary Clinton’s part.
None. Zero. Ever.
The most they have are votes or positions they disagree with. And even there, the false frames are tossed around with no regard for facts. Hillary’s voting record is as liberal as Elizabeth Warren’s, yet somehow Hillary is the one portrayed by some critics on the left as a sell-out, a closet Republican, a traitor to progressives.
During the Democratic primaries, Hillary’s critics portrayed Bernie Sanders as pure good and Hillary as pure evil. That’s hogwash. They are both politicians who make judgments and adopt positions, some of which we agree with, others we don’t.
Hillary’s Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has spent a year hurling insults at people who disagree with him. He has embraced intolerance as a platform. He has a shameful history of demeaning women. He lashes out at reporters in personal terms whenever he is questioned. He lacks even the most rudimentary preparedness for the office he seeks. He has a self-admittedly vindictive temperament which is profoundly ill-suited for the presidency. He has called our sitting president a terrorist and threatened Hillary’s life. Yet astonishingly, he receives less (yes, less) negative coverage than Hillary, according to two independent studies.
No matter how shocking this may sound to Hillary’s professional critics – those who spend their time condescendingly mocking anyone who says a good word about her – Hillary is an upstanding, principled leader who has survived the most intrusive, invasive, aggressive and unending vetting process in political history.
Time and again, she has emerged with her integrity intact. In the words of the Des Moines Register, which endorsed her in January, “Clinton has demonstrated that she is a thoughtful, hardworking public servant who has earned the respect of leaders at home and abroad. She stands ready to take on the most demanding job in the world.”
Having worked with Hillary for three years as an adviser and seen her approach to life and politics, having watched her as a mom and daughter, as a friend to so many people, I know that the rightwing caricature of her is an offensive distortion and I feel personally compelled to speak the truth and to fight the slander.
It is gratifying to Hillary’s friends and supporters (and infinitely vexing to her detractors) that rank-and-file Democrats see through the spin and connect to Hillary on a personal level. These are the voters across America who are poised to carry her to the White House in November, sending a monumentally important and inspiring message to women and girls across the globe.
Update #4 (8/12/16): This piece has received more than 490,000 shares since it was first published in January, making it one of the most shared articles about Hillary Clinton of the 2016 cycle. It has been updated and edited to reflect developments in the race. Since its original publication, the FBI exonerated Hillary on her use of a private email server, confirming that there was no purposeful wrongdoing on her part; Bernie Sanders endorsed her; and she became the official nominee of the Democratic Party, smashing a 227 year barrier. The basic truth remains: Hillary is an ethical, principled and upstanding leader who has always had America’s best interests at heart.
Peter Daou is a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and a veteran of two presidential campaigns. He is the CEO and executive editor of True Blue
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 10-24-2016
THESE MILLENNIAL VOTERS HAVE NO IDEA who they are listening to... and the answer blows their minds!!
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 11-05-2016
In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.
Full story here:
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/4/13500018/clinton-email-scandal-bullshit
No matter how much they try, Republicans can't make Hillary Clinton guilty.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/opinions/hillary-clinton-victim-conspiracy-theories-kohn/index.html
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 11-16-2016
Well, when I think of Hillary now, a few tears come to my eye. Just what the Trumpies wanted. Has anyone ever come so close to winning, twice? She barely lost the primary in 2008, according to the total popular vote. She barely lost in 2016, since she won the popular vote by over 1%, but lost the electoral vote with narrow defeats in 2 or 3 states. She barely lost twice. And no-one has been hounded by so many worthless and fruitless investigations and false charges. She was roughed up and spit out.
I feel for her. Has any candidate been so mistreated, and lost twice elections she should have won, and came close to winning, as she has? Is her sex and feminism the reason why? In common with the vast right-wing conspiracy and fanatical opposition of free market fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists, both of whom we have way too many of in the USA?
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - David Horn - 11-26-2016
(11-16-2016, 08:11 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Well, when I think of Hillary now, a few tears come to my eye. Just what the Trumpies wanted. Has anyone ever come so close to winning, twice? She barely lost the primary in 2008, according to the total popular vote. She barely lost in 2016, since she won the popular vote by over 1%, but lost the electoral vote with narrow defeats in 2 or 3 states. She barely lost twice. And no-one has been hounded by so many worthless and fruitless investigations and false charges. She was roughed up and spit out.
I feel for her. Has any candidate been so mistreated, and lost twice elections she should have won, and came close to winning, as she has? Is her sex and feminism the reason why? In common with the vast right-wing conspiracy and fanatical opposition of free market fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists, both of whom we have way too many of in the USA?
None of the excesses would have worked if the basic character of Hillary, and Bill too for that matter, wasn't more than a bit smarmy. Never mind that Trump was, is and shows no signs of not continuing to be much worse. She was a bridge too far for a third four years by a single party. She was the wrong candidate ... period.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 12-13-2016
Why Hillary Lost: The Great American Lie
12/11/2016 08:46 pm ET | Updated 12 minutes ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-hillary-lost-the-great-american-lie_us_584da08ce4b0151082221ca2
Alex Mohajer
Political Writer and Commentator
“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.” ― Ian McEwan, Atonement
A Prelude to a Tragedy
A month has passed since American voters took to the polls to elect our next commander in chief, with a general consensus having pervaded public discourse that, love her or hate her, Hillary Clinton would become president. Her erstwhile opponent, Donald Trump, a reality television star viewed as crass and inept, having boasted about possibly sexually assaulting women in a now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, had all but forfeited the race.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Clinton exhibited dominance over her Republican challenger that lead some to speculate that she was running up the score as her campaign expanded into typically red states like Texas and Arizona. Following resounding victories in the election season’s presidential debates, Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein proclaimed to the world that “Hillary Clinton’s 3 debate performances left the Trump campaign in ruins.” Her polling numbers indicated a landslide was imminent. Pundits speculated that Donald Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes was slim to non-existent.
On Election Day, news outlets blasted footage of Donald Trump, morose, defeated, slumping across the finish line in his hometown of New York, knowingly awaiting his fate. The night before, Clinton seemed to shake the earth with massive, unified rallies in Philadelphia and North Carolina, first with the Obamas and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, and the second with Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, and mass crowds of college students chanting “I believe that she will win!” well into the early hours of the morning. At 3:40 am, Clinton landed back home in Westchester, New York, where hordes of fans were lined up yet to wish her well and show their support.
The mood was electric.
On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, an exuberant group of Democratic power players celebrates following a massive rally in Philadelphia. From left to right: Michelle and Barack Obama; Hillary, Chelsea, and Bill Clinton
Fast forward 24 hours. Stunned supporters, myself included, made their way home from the official Hillary for America election night party at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, where Clinton did not make an appearance, leaving many to wonder if she planned to wait out the counts. It wasn’t until around 3:00 am, as my Bros4Hillary colleagues Rance Collins, Jason Murray, and I sat silently in the cab ride back to our apartment in Brooklyn, that the news alert flashed across my iPhone.
“Fuck,” I muttered. “She conceded.”
As the three of us burst into tears of grief and rage, our bewildered cab driver, quiet and stone-faced till that moment, shook his head and pondered just under his breath, “how could this happen?”
The Blame Game
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appears on CBS This Morning and offers his prescriptions for what went wrong for Democrats in the 2016 presidential race.
Just hours after the stunning upset that proclaimed Donald Trump president-elect, the vultures began to circle around the scene of Secretary Clinton’s political death, the body, so to speak, not even cold yet. Senator Bernie Sanders, her democratic rival in the primary, who spent the tail-end of that campaign impugning Clinton’s integrity and questioning her qualifications to lead, hit the talk show circuit immediately. Despite having begrudgingly supported Clinton following his primary defeat, both at the Democratic National Convention and on the campaign trail through November, he seemed to almost gloat with a “told-ya-so” self-righteousness, openly implying that he should have been the nominee and offering prescriptions to the Democratic party.
“I’m deeply humiliated that the Democratic party cannot talk to [white working class people],” Sanders professed dramatically on CBS This Morning less than a week following the election. “I think that there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite.”
Sanders, a lifelong independent who changed his registration status to Democrat in order to run for the party’s nomination, reverted his status back to independent only days after the Democratic National Convention in July.
His online supporters reveled. “I think the DNC made a fatal mistake ganging up on him and being biased towards Hillary,” said one Facebook user. “Even now, after the Dems lost the election, he is still more popular in the news than Hillary is. As much as I’m nervous about Trump being president…I’m glad Hillary didn’t win only because her supporters made me want her to lose.”
The morbid pile-on continued for weeks. “She didn’t campaign hard enough in swing states.” “The DNC rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders! Karma’s a bitch!” “She lost the white working class.””She just wasn’t likable enough.” “She had no plan for the economy.” “Voters just didn’t want her.”
The problem with these analyses is that they are painfully reductive, overly-narrow crimes of revisionist history. In fact, most of these arguments are just plain wrong. Entertaining them without looking at the broader systemic failure at play is contributing to a pattern of failure by the media to fulfill their journalistic responsibility as editorial gatekeepers and is an historic injustice against one of the most qualified and winningest candidates to run for the presidency ever. Most importantly, they allow a problematic narrative shift that holds us back from looking at, or solving, the real problem.
Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
Hillary Clinton Won More Votes. A Lot More.
Any and every discussion seeking to analyze the outcome of the 2016 presidential election MUST begin and end with the following as its central premise: “Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.7 million.” Or, put in another way, “Hillary Clinton won more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, second only to Obama.” (Note: Cook Political Report believes that she may surpass Obama’s 2012 total, for good measure.)
As of December 9, Hillary Clinton had won 65,746,544 votes nationwide for president, to Donald Trump’s 62,904,682 votes. Image by Alex Mohajer. Source: Cook Political Report. (http://www.cookpolitical.com)
Hillary Clinton, the first female major-party nominee for president in American history, won more votes than any white male to ever run for that office, ever, including her opponent, the man who would go on to become the president-elect.
The Sanders Effect
For posterity: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.7 million, but defeated Bernie Sanders in the 2016 democratic primary with an even broader margin of nearly 4 million votes, and by about 1,000 delegates, a veritable landslide. The Sanders tribe who now insist he would have fared better than Secretary Clinton in the general election still ignore the fact that Bernie Sanders was never even close to overcoming her in the primary.
As early as March, Clinton pulled ahead with such a commanding lead that political insiders knew he had virtually no chance of winning. She quietly began implementing a general election strategy while publicly supporting the process, never once speaking ill of her opponent for wanting to see the primary through to completion, something she herself had done in the 2008 democratic primary against then-Senator Barack Obama.
When she did it, however, she was at times within 100 delegates of overtaking Obama, and by some measures went on to win the popular vote. Still, in that primary, pundits said Clinton would never overcome Obama, despite a much smaller gap in delegates separating the two candidates.
Sanders knew this too, to be sure, but let his frustration, ambition, and contempt for his rival in the final months of the campaign get the better of him, lodging allegations against the Democratic National Committee of “rigging” and calling Clinton “unqualified,” knowing the harm that he could do to her with his impressionable and generally politically-inexperienced base. If Clinton were to even slightly suggest that she had won the primary, the response was a violent outcry.
“Arrogant!” Sanders proclaimed indignantly. Whether Sanders believed he could make a legitimate play for super-delegates or wishful thinking that Clinton would be indicted for the fictitious criminal conduct he knew did not exist, he knew she had won the primary. But he fed his base the red meat. And they ate it up.
Soon enough the liberal progressive voter base supporting Sanders began to regurgitate the same right wing talking points and lies used to impugn Clinton’s integrity for decades. Once maligned for being a liberal harpy and socialist, Clinton was now subjected to the cruel injustice of having fellow progressives label her “too conservative,” a “war hawk,” an “imperialist.”
This of course was the same lot who believed it an omen of their candidate’s rightful claim to the presidency when a bird landed on his podium at a campaign event in Portland.
Fun Facts, or Lack Thereof
Birdie Sanders! A cogent and even-tempered Bernie Sanders gesturing towards a bird at a campaign rally in Portland, Oregon on March 25, 2016.
The Birdie Sanders phenomenon was unsurprising in an election season that seemed to view facts as a nuisance, as merely an inconvenient afterthought. When Clinton supporters grimaced at the Birdie Sanders memes, the Sanders faithful were outraged.
“Paid shill!” They cried. “HILLBOT!”
I am among the numbered many that were accused numerous times across social media of being a paid subsidiary of the Clinton campaign or David Brock’s Correct the Record, something that is categorically false and easily discoverable in a 10-second Google search.
A week before the election, I was caught completely off-guard by a close friend and fellow liberal who revealed that she refused to vote for Clinton. “She’s just corrupt. There’s too much evidence if you look out for it,” she stated, sending me this photograph to support her reasoning:
Circa 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton from New York sharing an embrace with the late Robert Byrd, the renowned Senator and parliamentarian from West Virginia. Byrd passed away in 2010.
This photograph was used extensively throughout the duration of the 2016 presidential campaign, both in the dark corners of the fake internet and by the Republican nominee himself, to support claims that Clinton had ties to the KKK. But to hear this propaganda from an educated, liberal-minded, millennial-aged woman who lives in California? Nothing short of problematic.
The photo depicts then-Senator Hillary Clinton of New York sharing an embrace with her colleague Robert Byrd in 2004. Byrd, a democratic Senator from West Virginia, passed away in 2010 as the longest serving Congressman in history. Senator Byrd was well-respected and a master parliamentarian. He did join the KKK in the 1940s, but then proceeded to quit in 1952, spending the rest of his life repenting for his brief involvement and acknowledging it was wrong. The NAACP even MOURNED Byrd after he passed away. He had been out of the KKK for more than FIFTY YEARS when this photograph was taken.
This is just one of literally hundreds of examples of lies that have been propagated about Clinton over the years that have been packaged as news, or that legitimate news sources will falsely equivocate with the truth. and spread like wildfire through fake news channels. The time required to engage with and disprove each accusation point by point with each person who consumed it would be nearly impossible.
“Fake news” is a major problem that has had an out-sized effect on our politics and our presidential election. It is not a new phenomenon, but it has reached fever pitch. Until legislation is passed that addresses the problem and/or the heads of various social media companies implement policies to forbid them, the proliferation of fake news will continue to meddle with our elections.
MAN, I FEEL LIKE A WOMAN
Democratic faithful thought by November that the damage done by Sanders’ hail-Mary strategy would soften and fade. A week before the election, “Benghazi” and “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” were still ridiculous fodder being churned out by the mainstream media and consumed ravenously by the electorate. The media failed time and time again to call these stories for what they were. Outright lies.
Some argue, and I subscribe to the notion, that the media failed to report on false equivalencies during the general election campaign, and Clinton’s adversaries were able to malign and abuse her ad nauseum without any checks by the media, because of at least one obvious reason. No one wants to admit it, her adversaries scoff at it, and even women seem to downplay it’s significance throughout the 2016 presidential campaign: misogyny. The 2016 presidential election, much like in 2008, revealed staggering gender biases, mostly in the constant and baseless scrutiny of Clinton’s character.
This now-infamous photograph spurred the “Texts from Hillary” internet meme and demarcates a time when Clinton was beloved as Secretary of State, receiving high marks from the media and the public alike. In 2012 her approval ratings soared to 69%.
Women, after all, cannot seek power without being innately bad, evil, or corrupt. Gender studies experts have talked about this phenomenon at length, and yet we failed to highlight the way it was taking life in the campaign before our eyes. Sanders and Trump both made habits out of interrupting Clinton during their respective debates against her, wagging their fingers at her. Sanders accused Clinton of “shouting” during the democratic primaries. Trump famously called Clinton a “nasty woman” when she got under his skin at the third presidential debate. They both made campaign tactics out of implying or expressly stating that she was corrupt, she was bought out by the banks, she was a criminal, she was under indictment. Absolutely none of which was ever substantiated by fact.
By campaign’s end, people genuinely believed some of the propaganda leveraged against her, even having never seen a piece of factual evidence to support it.
Indeed, when a woman excels in a role we extol her virtues, but when she seeks to gain more power, whether through promotion, a raise, or even the presidency of the United States, we punish her and criticize her character. We simply cannot get comfortable with the idea of a woman calling the shots. The electorate seemed to forget that when Clinton left the State Department in 2013 following a four-year tenure as Secretary of State, she was widely celebrated as being the most traveled Secretary of State in American history, with approval ratings that soared well above normal for American politicians.
The Wall Street Journal commented that her 69% approval rating at the time was “eye-popping.” The New York Times in 2012 (by an unsurprisingly prescient Nate Silver) opined that she would make a formidable candidate for president, had notably high approval ratings, but that when seeking office, for some reason, her approval ratings take a hit.
Indeed, Hillary Clinton has been named the most admired woman in the world by Gallup a record-breaking twenty times. And yet, Clinton’s likability and trustworthiness were constantly called into question throughout both the 2008 and 2016 campaigns to the point of being farcical.
Despite centuries of patriarchal gender norms at play, she still won the democratic primary. She won by a landslide. And in the general election, she won nationally by around 2%. One can only imagine what these figures might look like had she been born with the benefit of being a man.
So if she won nationally, why didn’t she win the presidency? What happened? Of course, the popular vote doesn’t pick the president. So what does?
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE DEMANDS REFORM
Clinton’s massive popular vote victory is important in that not only does it dispel shameful myths that this superb, historic candidate FAILED us in some way, but serves to highlight one of the real problems: the electoral college system of apportioning votes is no longer fair or representative. This is not to say that the electoral college must necessarily be abolished. But at the very least, it must see reforms that address the country’s vastly shifting demographics.
Donald Trump won the electoral college with 306 votes. 270 are needed to win the presidency. The states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with their 10, 16, and 20 respective electoral votes, all went for Trump and gave him the edge he needed.
The chilling truth: Donald Trump won those three states with a total of 79,646 votes in an election where more than 136 million people cast their ballots. That’s less than a fraction of a percentage point.
How can this be possible? Let’s pretend for a minute that the very real possibility of foreign interventionism is not a factor, or the unaddressed fact that overwhelming evidence suggest Russia interfered, and ignore investigative journalist Greg Palast’s stunning revelation that more than 3 million absentee and provisional ballots were wrongfully disqualified and thrown away uncounted.
Even now as recounts surge ahead in these three crucial states, the outcome is not likely to change. Any honest assessment of this presidential election must look at the disproportionate power the Electoral College currently allocates to rural areas. Indeed, a vote in Wyoming has four times the power of a vote from New York, thanks to the way electoral college votes are apportioned in each state.
When the Constitution was written in 1787, the drafters conceived of it in an America that was 95 percent rural. Today, according to the most recent census (2010), less than 20 percent of America is rural. Yet in the hundreds of years since the Constitution was ratified, or since the 12th Amendment was passed defining the application of electoral college votes, there has been no reform to the process.
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU
Urban and Rural Classification from the 2010 United States Census.
Subsequently, the Electoral College has not been updated to reflect the massive population and demographic shifts in America, or update the strength or apportionment of the votes. There has not even been a solid legal challenge to the winner-take-all formula of allocating of electoral votes at the state-level, instead of a proportional model. Winner-takes-all is a practice that Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig says is violative of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections Clause, and the more proportional allocation would have rendered Hillary Clinton the victor in 2016.
This is without even eliminating the electoral college. These reforms are possible and should have been sought a long time ago.
HILLARY CLINTON WON THE WORKING CLASS
Hillary Clinton, accused of having lost the 2016 presidential election because she neglected to address the needs of the white working class, did in fact WIN the white working class. CNN exit polls out of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania showed that she fared better than her opponent on the economy throughout the rust belt and nationwide.
The truth is Hillary Clinton made the working class and middle class jobs a central tenet of her campaign. She talked about these issues, and she talked about them a lot. To claim otherwise is a troubling revision in history that overlooks 16 months of campaigning on this issue. From Derek Thompson’s piece in the Atlantic:
She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.
The truth is that white working-class voters did favor Clinton on the economy, but on issues of terrorism or immigration, defected to Donald Trump, indicating that his often-times xenophobic, anti-immigration, and racially charged message resonated with a certain portion of the electorate. Indeed, no one has been able to answer to which era Trump was referring when he campaigned on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” but it is clear that this was merely pretext for a message of white nativist protectionism.
These are the same voters who crave social democracy, just so long as it isn’t called socialism, a dirty word amongst the majority of the American populace, and a flaw that Sanders, untested on the national stage, would have seen exposed in a general election match up.
Moreover, the cumulative total of 79,646 votes by which she lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania cannot in good faith be conflated to represent the white working class as a whole, especially when she won a historic number of votes with around the same numbers as 2012 Obama. With a margin so narrow, isn’t it possible a variety of factors were at a play, any one of which might have shifted the outcome?
THE REST OF IT
There has been a real and demonstrable systemic failure to protect the integrity of our elections that Americans, and yes the Electoral College, must wholly reject. This isn’t conspiracy theory. This isn’t conjecture. This isn’t poor sportsmanship. This isn’t even about Hillary Clinton anymore. This is about protecting our democracy. Free and fair elections are one of the cornerstones of American democracy and we have now seen credible reports that our rights thereto have been impeded upon by:
1) Voter suppression in North Carolina* and Wisconsin; 2) Russian interventionism via hacking in Florida’s election systems*; 3) FBI Director Comey’s willful and intentional release of documents meant to suggest criminal wrongdoing by the Democratic nominee a week before the presidential election; 4) The use of Wikileaks as an agent for a hostile foreign power to meddle with our election; 5) A systemic failure by the news media to serve as editorial gatekeepers, differentiate false equivalencies, or to report on falsehoods propagated about the Democratic nominee.* 6) A voter-cross check system that allowed millions of valid absentee, provisional, and machine-error ballots to be wrongfully disqualified.
Is it possible that any one of these may have contributed to the 79,646 votes across Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania that contributed to Donald Trump’s victory?
Is it possible that FBI Director Comey’s letter to Congress affected the election?
There's more evidence, too: Late-deciding voters broke strongly against Clinton in swing states, enough to cost her MI/WI/PA.
Is it possible that third party votes spoiled the election?
Stein votes/Trump margin:
MI: 51,463/10,704
PA: 49,678/46,765
WI: 31,006/22,177
11:29 AM - 1 Dec 2016
Is it possible that any number of these issues, none of which are the fault of the superb candidate who won record-breaking votes, lead to Donald Trump skipping past her with 79,646 votes?
And what of exit polls conducted by Edison Research, which show that “Clinton won four key battleground states (NC, PA, WI, and FL) in the 2016 Presidential Election that she went on to lose in the computerized vote counts.”*
Why does exit polling data show HRC won NC, PA, WI, & FL, states she lost in computerized vote counts? DEMAND AUDIT. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/810/285/388/ …
“Trump voters lied in the exit polls!” say Trump’s acolytes, the same core of online miscreants who are just now decrying fake news in opposition to very real reports of Russian hacking, but did not care to make the differentiation when lobbing accusations of being foreign-born against Barack Obama or murder and corruption against Hillary Clinton.
It’s true that exit polls are not necessarily reliable historically. But with the totality of the circumstances being as they are, and with some of these findings existing outside the margin of statistical error, enough doubt has been cast on the validity of the 2016 presidential election to keep at least 66 million American voters up at night.
Allowing revisionists to shape the narrative and lay fault at the feet of Hillary Clinton for losing, whether expressly or impliedly, is a historic injustice that, if allowed to continue, only hurts us as a nation and as a democracy. It allows a shift in conversation away from crucial global and sociopolitical issues facing our society, and towards petty partisan squabbles and the unproductive blame game. If we do not respond to threats to our democracy, the epidemic of fake news, the various interventionist forces in our election, and demand action be taken, we are more culpable than either of the candidates in this election. Indeed, we are complicit in the downfall of democracy itself.
The truth? Hillary Clinton did not lose the 2016 presidential election. We did.
Alex Mohajer is a contributing political writer to the Huffington Post. He currently serves as the political director of Bros4Hillary, a volunteer advocacy organization named to LGBTQ Nation’s Top 8 Political Organizations of 2016. Follow him on Twitter at: @alexmohajer
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 04-07-2017
The Destruction of Hillary Clinton, by Susan Bordo
Sanders’s branding of Hillary as establishment, however, seemed vastly unjust and corrosively divisive to me, especially when delivered to a generation that knew very little about her beyond what Bernie told them. Like progressive, establishment is a pretty meaningless term, particularly when lobbed at one Washington politician by another. Neither Sanders nor Clinton had been working outside the system.
Appearances to the contrary, Sanders was not a union organizer, but rather a longtime member of the Senate. And if Clinton had more support from the Democratic party, that was due in large part to the relationships she had cultivated over the years, working with others – something Sanders was not particularly good at. Nonetheless, for weeks during the early months of the primary, I listened to 19-year-olds and media pundits alike lavish praise on Bernie Sanders for his bold, revolutionary message, and scorn Hillary for being a part of the establishment.
They described him as “heart” and her as “head” – a bitter irony for those of us familiar with the long history of philosophical, religious, and medical diatribes disqualifying women from leadership positions on the basis of our less-disciplined emotions. He was seen as authentic in his progressivism while she was pushed to the left by political expediency – as though a lifetime of fighting for equality and children’s rights meant nothing. He was the champion of the working class (conveniently ignoring that black and white women were members, and that their issues were also working class issues), but her longstanding commitments to universal health care, child care, paid sick leave, racial justice, the repeal of the Hyde amendment, and narrowing the wage gap between working men and women apparently evaporated because she’d accepted well-paid invitations to speak at Goldman Sachs.
Later, the news media even let Sanders get away with describing Planned Parenthood and NARAL as “establishment” when he didn’t get their endorsement. They made little of it when he described abortion as a social issue (as though loss of control over one’s reproductive life has no impact on one’s economic survival). They accepted, without question, his descriptions of himself as an activist for feminist causes, when all he had done was vote the right way in the Senate. They posted pictures of him being arrested at a protest against the University of Chicago’s real estate investments, while making no mention of the work Hillary had done, when she was the same age, investigating racist housing practices with Marian Wright Edelman. Clinton’s emails and her “trust problems” were the only stories about her they were interested in reporting.
• This is an edited extract from The Destruction of Hillary Clinton by Susan Bordo, Text Publishing (Australia) and Melville House Books (USA and UK).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists?CMP=share_btn_tw
And now, after this mis-election, for this and many other reasons besides whatever Sanders and his supporters did or didn't do, we are stuck on a rapid trajectory toward banana republic dictatorship. A lot of damage is going to need to be reversed before our nation can ever go forward again, and the Democrats have a poor track record at reversing it so far.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 04-07-2017
(11-08-2016, 02:58 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(11-08-2016, 02:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Guess who endorsed Hillary Clinton!
Viewed more cynically and in light of humanity's worst tendencies, one of the reasons why Trump spoke well of Clinton in '08 and other points in the past was Obama-Derangement-Syndrome. He's the Arch Birther.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 05-26-2017
I still like Hillary.
Hillary Clinton’s remarkably aggressive anti-Trump speech, annotated
By Peter Holley and Amber Phillips May 26 at 2:30 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/26/hillary-clintons-remarkably-aggressive-anti-trump-speech-annotated/?utm_term=.0113a3029862
Play Video 31:45
Clinton speaks at Wellesley College commencement
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton delivered the commencement address at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. on May 26. (Reuters)
It's been 200 days, or 239,040 minutes, or 17,280,000 seconds since the presidential election. President Trump still talks a lot about it. And on Friday, Hillary Clinton may as well have been transported on a time machine back to Nov. 7, too.
Her 30-minute commencement speech Friday at Wellesley College was filled with direct burns at her 2016 opponent. Here's the whole speech, annotated with what we found eyebrow-raising. Click the highlighted words to see the annotations. After you click on an annotation, please click on the bar on the upper-right-hand corner of your page that says "Filter Annotations" and choose "All Annotations."
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for that warm welcome. I am so grateful to be here back at Wellesley, especially for President Johnson’s very first Commencement, and to thank her, the trustees, families and friends, faculty, staff, and guests for understanding and perpetuating the importance of this college: what it stands for, what it has meant, and what it will do in the years ahead. And most importantly, it’s wonderful to be here with another green class to say, congratulations to the class of 2017!
Now I have some of my dear friends here from my class, a green class of 1969. And I assume, or at least you can tell me later, unlike us, you actually have a class cheer. 1969 Wellesley. [shakes head] Yet another year with no class cheer. But it is such an honor to join with the College and all who have come to celebrate this day with you, and to recognize the amazing futures that await you.
You know, four years ago, maybe a little more or a little less for some of you— I told the trustees I was sitting with, after hearing Tala’s speech, I didn’t think I could get through it. So we’ll blame allergy instead of emotion. But you know, you arrived at this campus. You arrived from all over. You joined students from 49 states and 58 countries. Now maybe you felt like you belonged right away. I doubt it. But maybe some of you did and you never wavered.
[Hillary Clinton’s breakout moment at Wellesley College]
But maybe you changed your major three times and your hairstyle twice that many. Or maybe, after your first month of classes, you made a frantic collect call (ask your parents what that was) back to Illinois to tell your mother and father you weren’t smart enough to be here. My father said, “Okay, come home.” My mother said, “You have to stick it out.” That’s what happened to me.
But whatever your path, you dreamed big. You probably, in true Wellesley fashion, planned your academic and extracurricular schedule right down to the minute. So this day that you’ve been waiting for—and maybe dreading a little—is finally here.
As President Johnson said, I spoke at my Commencement 48 years ago. I came back 25 years ago to speak at another Commencement. I couldn’t think of any place I’d rather be this year than right here.
Now, you may have heard that things didn’t exactly go the way I planned. But you know what? I’m doing okay. I’ve gotten to spend time with my family, especially my amazing grandchildren. I was going to give the entire Commencement speech about them but was talked out of it. Long walks in the woods, organizing my closets, right? I won’t lie. Chardonnay helped a little, too.
But here’s what helped most of all: remembering who I am, where I come from, and what I believe. And that is what Wellesley means to me. This College gave me so much. It launched me on a life of service and provided friends that I still treasure. So wherever your life takes you, I hope that Wellesley serves as that kind of touchstone for you.
Now if any of you are nervous about what you’ll be walking into when you leave the campus, I know that feeling. I do remember my Commencement. I’d been asked by my classmates to speak. I stayed up all night with my friends, the third floor of Davis, writing and editing my speech. By the time we gathered in the Academic Quad, I was exhausted. My hair was a wreck. The mortarboard made it worse. But I was pretty oblivious to all of that, because what my friends had asked me to do was to talk about our worries, and about our ability and responsibility to do something about them.
We didn’t trust government, authority figures, or really anyone over 30, in large part thanks to years of heavy casualties and dishonest official statements about Vietnam, and deep differences over civil rights and poverty here at home. We were asking urgent questions about whether women, people of color, religious minorities, immigrants, would ever be treated with dignity and respect.
And by the way, we were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice after firing the person running the investigation into him at the Department of Justice.
But here’s what I want you to know. We got through that tumultuous time, and once again began to thrive as our society changed laws and opened the circle of opportunity and rights wider and wider for more Americans. We revved up the engines of innovation and imagination. We turned back a tide of intolerance and embraced inclusion. The “we” who did those things were more than those in power who wanted to change course. It was millions of ordinary citizens, especially young people, who voted, marched, and organized.
Now, of course today has some important differences. The advance of technology, the impact of the internet, our fragmented media landscape, make it easier than ever to splinter ourselves into echo chambers. We can shut out contrary voices, avoid ever questioning our basic assumptions. Extreme views are given powerful microphones. Leaders willing to exploit fear and skepticism have tools at their disposal that were unimaginable when I graduated.
And here’s what that means to you, the Class of 2017. You are graduating at a time when there is a full-fledged assault on truth and reason. Just log on to social media for ten seconds. It will hit you right in the face. People denying science, concocting elaborate, hurtful conspiracy theories about child-abuse rings operating out of pizza parlors, drumming up rampant fear about undocumented immigrants, Muslims, minorities, the poor, turning neighbor against neighbor and sowing division at a time when we desperately need unity. Some are even denying things we see with our own eyes, like the size of crowds, and then defending themselves by talking about quote-unquote “alternative facts.”
But this is serious business. Look at the budget that was just proposed in Washington. It is an attack of unimaginable cruelty on the most vulnerable among us, the youngest, the oldest, the poorest, and hard-working people who need a little help to gain or hang on to a decent middle class life. It grossly under-funds public education, mental health, and efforts even to combat the opioid epidemic. And in reversing our commitment to fight climate change, it puts the future of our nation and our world at risk. And to top it off, it is shrouded in a trillion-dollar mathematical lie. Let’s call it what it is. It’s a con. They don’t even try to hide it.
[On Leadership Opinion Hillary Clinton didn’t give her concession speech on election night. Now we see one reason why.]
Why does all this matter? It matters because if our leaders lie about the problems we face, we’ll never solve them. It matters because it undermines confidence in government as a whole, which in turn breeds more cynicism and anger. But it also matters because our country, like this College, was founded on the principles of the Enlightenment—in particular, the belief that people, you and I, possess the capacity for reason and critical thinking, and that free and open debate is the lifeblood of a democracy. Not only Wellesley, but the entire American university system—the envy of the world—was founded on those fundamental ideals. We should not abandon them; we should revere them. We should aspire to them every single day, in everything we do.
And there’s something else. As the history majors among you here today know all too well, when people in power invent their own facts, and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole. It is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality—not just our laws and rights and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs.
Right now, some of you might wonder, well why am I telling you all this? You don’t own a cable news network. You don’t control the Facebook algorithm. You aren’t a member of Congress—yet. Because I believe with all my heart that the future of America—indeed, the future of the world—depends on brave, thoughtful people like you insisting on truth and integrity, right now, every day. You didn’t create these circumstances, but you have the power to change them.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright, first President of the Czech Republic, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless.” And in it, he said: “The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’—when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game—everything suddenly appears in another light.”
What he’s telling us is if you feel powerless, don’t. Don’t let anyone tell you your voice doesn’t matter. In the years to come, there will be trolls galore—online and in person—eager to tell you that you don’t have anything worthwhile to say or anything meaningful to contribute. They may even call you a Nasty Woman. Some may take a slightly more sophisticated approach and say your elite education means you are out of touch with real people. In other words, “sit down and shut up.” Now, in my experience, that’s the last thing you should ever tell a Wellesley graduate.
And here’s the good news. What you’ve learned these four years is precisely what you need to face the challenges of this moment. First, you learned critical thinking. I can still remember the professors who challenged me to make decisions with good information, rigorous reasoning, real deliberation. I know we didn’t have much of that in this past election, but we have to get back to it. After all, in the words of my predecessor in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
And your education gives you more than knowledge. It gives you the power to keep learning and apply what you know to improve your life and the lives of others. Because you are beginning your careers with one of the best educations in the world, I think you do have a special responsibility to give others the chance to learn and think for themselves, and to learn from them, so that we can have the kind of open, fact-based debate necessary for our democracy to survive and flourish. And along the way, you may be convinced to change your mind from time to time. You know what? That’s okay. Take it from me, the former president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.
Second, you learned the value of an open mind and an open society. At their best, our colleges and universities are free market places of ideas, embracing a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. That’s our country at our best, too. An open, inclusive, diverse society is the opposite of and antidote to a closed society, where there is only one right way to think, believe, and act. Here at Wellesley, you’ve worked hard to turn this ideal into a reality. You’ve spoken out against racism and sexism and xenophobia and discrimination of all kinds. And you’ve shared your own stories. And at times that’s taken courage. But the only way our society will ever become a place where everyone truly belongs is if all of us speak openly and honestly about who we are, what we’re going through. So keep doing that.
And let me add that your learning, listening, and serving should include people who don’t agree with you politically. A lot of our fellow Americans have lost faith in the existing economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of our country.
Many feel left behind, left out, looked down on. Their anger and alienation has proved a fertile ground for false promises and false information. Their economic problems and cultural anxiety must be addressed, or they will continue to sign up to be foot-soldiers in the ongoing conflict between “us” and “them.”
The opportunity is here. Millions of people will be hurt by the policies, including this budget that is being considered. And many of these same people don’t want DREAMers deported their health care taken away. Many don’t want to retreat on civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights. So if your outreach is rebuffed, keep trying. Do the right thing anyway. We’re going to share this future. Better to do so with open hearts and outstretched hands than closed minds and clenched fists.
And third, here at Wellesley, you learned the power of service. Because while free and fierce conversations in classrooms, dorm rooms, dining halls are vital, they only get us so far. You have to turn those ideas and those values into action. This College has always understood that. The motto which you’ve heard twice already, “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister” is as true today as it ever was. If you think about it, it’s kind of an old-fashioned rendering of President Kennedy’s great statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
Not long ago, I got a note from a group of Wellesley alums and students who had supported me in the campaign. They worked their hearts out. And, like a lot of people, they’re wondering: What do we do now?
Well I think there's only one answer, to keep going. Don’t be afraid of your ambition, of your dreams, or even your anger – those are powerful forces. But harness them to make a difference in the world. Stand up for truth and reason. Do it in private – in conversations with your family, your friends, your workplace, your neighborhoods. And do it in public—in Medium posts, on social media, or grab a sign and head to a protest. Make defending truth and a free society a core value of your life every single day.
So wherever you wind up next, the minute you get there, register to vote, and while you’re at it, encourage others to do so. And then vote in every election, not just the presidential ones. Bring others to vote. Fight every effort to restrict the right of law-abiding citizens to be able to vote as well. Get involved in a cause that matters to you. Pick one, start somewhere. You don’t have to do everything, but don’t sit on the sidelines. And you know what? Get to know your elected officials. If you disagree with them, ask questions. Challenge them. Better yet, run for office yourself some day. Now that’s not for everybody, I know. And it’s certainly not for the faint of heart. But it’s worth it. As they say in one of my favorite movies, A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great.”
As Tala said, the day after the election, I did want to speak particularly to women and girls everywhere, especially young women, because you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world. Not just your future, but our future depends on you believing that. We need your smarts, of course, but we also need your compassion, your curiosity, your stubbornness. And remember, you are even more powerful because you have so many people supporting you, cheering you on, standing with you through good times and bad.
Our culture often celebrates people who appear to go it alone. But the truth is, that’s not how life works. Anything worth doing takes a village. And you build that village by investing love and time into your relationships. And in those moments for whatever reason when it might feel bleak, think back to this place where women have the freedom to take risks, make mistakes, even fail in front of each other. Channel the strength of your Wellesley classmates and experiences. I guarantee you it’ll help you stand up a little straighter, feel a little braver, knowing that the things you joked about and even took for granted can be your secret weapons for your future.
One of the things that gave me the most hope and joy after the election, when I really needed it, was meeting so many young people who told me that my defeat had not defeated them. And I’m going to devote a lot of my future to helping you make your mark in the world. I created a new organization called Onward Together to help recruit and train future leaders, and organize for real and lasting change. The work never ends.
When I graduated and made that speech, I did say, and some of you might have pictures from that day with this on it, “The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” That was true then. It’s truer today. I never could have imagined where I would have been 48 years later—certainly never that I would have run for the Presidency of the United States or seen progress for women in all walks of life over the course of my lifetime. And yes, put millions of more cracks in that highest and hardest glass ceiling.
Because just in those years, doors that once seemed sealed to women are now opened. They’re ready for you to walk through or charge through, to advance the struggle for equality, justice, and freedom.
So whatever your dreams are today, dream even bigger. Wherever you have set your sights, raise them even higher. And above all, keep going. Don’t do it because I asked you so. Do it for yourselves. Do it for truth and reason. Do it because the history of Wellesley and this country tells us it’s often during the darkest times when you can do the most good. Double down on your passions. Be bold. Try, fail, try again, and lean on each other. Hold on to your values. Never give up on those dreams.
I’m very optimistic about the future, because I think, after we’ve tried a lot of other things, we get back to the business of America. I believe in you. With all my heart, I want you to believe in yourselves. So go forth, be great. But first, graduate.
Congratulations!
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - David Horn - 05-31-2017
Hillary is done, and the sooner she starts acting like she is, the sooner her party has a shot at a constructive rebuilding.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - Eric the Green - 05-31-2017
She'll be around, speaking and getting coverage, but I seriously doubt she is going to run for anything again, and I think the Party knows this. The buzz is elsewhere. I wouldn't worry about it.
RE: Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy - David Horn - 05-31-2017
(05-31-2017, 10:40 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: She'll be around, speaking and getting coverage, but I seriously doubt she is going to run for anything again, and I think the Party knows this. The buzz is elsewhere. I wouldn't worry about it.
Yes, but she is, frankly, toxic. There is a large minority in the country who literally hate her. If she's active in the party, those people are lost assets. Since most of them live in Red or Swing states, she might be enough of an impediment to keep the Dems out of a governing majority. Given the Trump phenomenon and the spinelessness of Republican office holders, that would be a lost opportunity of monumental proportions. Then again, the Clintons are vain-glorious. I don't see them melting into the woodwork ... unfortunately.