As a politician, Hillary Clinton got middling reviews. As a political analyst, there are few people better. In April 2016, she said,
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
It showed a tin ear - but she was completely right. And it was not the first time she had been correct about conservatives.
In 1998, while defending Bill in the Lewinski affair, she said the allegations that he had sex with a White House intern were part of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" working against him since he ran for the presidency.
Asked how she could be so calm, Mrs Clinton said:
"I guess I've just been through it so many times. Bill and I have been accused of almost everything, including murder, by some of the same people who are behind these allegations."
At the time people thought she was indulging in hyperbole. And they seemed justified when Bill admitted that he had been less than candid about the affair. But in the fullness of time we can see that her charges against the right-wing were accurate. And it wasn’t just attacks on her and Bill, but a war waged on the entire liberal community.
It is quaint now to think that the worst charge the right made against Hillary was that she was guilty of murder. Today they say she’s in charge of a global, pedophile, sex-trafficking ring of cannibals, headquartered in the basement of a pizzeria in DC.
And talking of QAnon, don’t get distracted by the supposed Civil War amongst the QAnon/MAGA fanatics — with tales of Flynn’s apostasy and the like ricocheting around Camp Paranoia. That is pure smoke. The big money behind the GOP doesn’t give a damn what the base believes, as long as the base is riled up and ready to believe anything.
What matters is today’s news that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court look likely to limit Roe or even strike it down. It is the culmination of the 50-year campaign against a woman’s right to choose. I suppose there are some on the religious right who are truly opposed to abortion on moral/philosophical grounds. But I suspect most of these anti-choice warriors don’t care much one way or the other. Their anti-choice rhetoric is merely a cynic’s tool to expand their power.
The ‘baby-killing hussey’ who uses abortion as birth control is just one of the cartoon villains in the right’s repertoire. Some of the others are Reagan’s ‘Welfare Queen’ - created in 1976. And un-American socialists and communists determined to tear down American society — an early 1950s fantasy from Joe McCarthy’s gin-soaked imagination.
Other threats causing bedwetting in rural white communities are Mexicans rapists and brown narcoterrorists. As well as Blacks, with their white social-justice warrior allies, promoting BLM rioters and CRT in schools.
There’s more. Beware the gays with agendas. And the sham trans who want to wear dresses to rape conservative women in public restrooms.
And there are the old classics. The gun-grabbers, who spit on the second amendment and want only criminals to have guns. And the radical atheists who want to destroy religious freedom by shredding the first.
Let’s not forget the feminazis, who dream of emasculating real American men - while seducing good Christian women to ignore their maternal/wifely duties by getting a job.
People like Trump, Greene, Gates, Boebert, and the rest of the loudmouth, look at me, say anything for attention, media-whores grab the headlines. But the right’s real Machiavellis are better symbolized by Mitch McConnell and politicians no one knows. The Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have done more to promote the conservative agenda than anyone who’s in the headlines.
The conservative base has proved more credulous and gullible than anyone could have supposed. They have become an indispensable tool for the small cadre of powerful and influential Americans, with their bought politicians, well-compensated media shills, and soulless lust for ‘more’.
Today women took a beating. In the future, the right to vote, sensible gun control, workers rights, the environment, civil rights and LGBTQ+ equality will suffer similar fates
Unless liberals can muster the same enthusiasm in their base to overcome the increasingly stacked electoral deck.
“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power” P.J. O’Rourke