The nothing burger 'scandal' over Hillary Clinton's emails is going to be piled on top of the nothing burger Benghazi scandal, hashed over by an idiot media and used for GOP fund raising. And this is before Clinton has officially declared she intends to run for the Presidency.
Ever since taking office, President Obama has faced nothing but obstruction from Republicans. On the one hand he's a scheming Muslim America-hater, with all kind of nefarious plans. On the other hand, he's a clueless, naive nit-wit, and/or a lawbreaking tyrant who is trashing the Constitution. Let's not forget the arch-fiends Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid either. Despite all this, Obama's wound us down from two wars, gotten the economy turned around, and brought health care to millions. And he's still hated by the GOP.
William Jefferson Clinton, who balanced the budget and generated a surplus, who ended the conflict in Bosnia, and warned of the imminent dangers of terrorism - was hounded throughout his entire presidency. Scandal after scandal was thrown at the Big Dog, until they finally caught him with his pants down. His impeachment was driven by a lot of people who turned out to be less than faithfully married themselves, but no matter. The economy did damned well under Clinton, and he did more than a little triangulating of GOP positions into neoliberal policies that are still screwing the country today - and yet they still did their best to destroy him, even as he was legitimizing some of their worst ideas.
Meanwhile the crimes committed under the Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2 administrations have been swept away as if they never were. Iran-Contra? CIA drug-running? 911? Katrina? Trillions in deficits? The Unitary Executive? Millions of White House emails going missing? No big deal. Meanwhile Republican policies have gotten the country into war after war, repeatedly wrecked the economy, destroyed the middle class, increased divisiveness in America along racial and religious lines, boosted inequality, and set us up for the rolling catastrophe of Climate Change.
How do they do it? Simple. They lie and cheat every chance they get. They constantly message their snake oil via wholly-owned media: repetition repetition repetition... They don't compete on the basis of ideas or track record - they compete with money and marketing. In their hearts they know they're wrong, but they lie to themselves and everyone else. Whatever great and wonderful things they may claim they are doing, at the end of the day it is all about power and money, all for them and no one else. It is selfishness on steroids - the underlying principle of conservatism.
We are faced with an unacknowledged fundamental conflict, a civil war waged by one side with character assassination (even against their own), demagoguery, and disinformation. Stolen elections, restricted voting, an apathetic citizenry in which only the scared and angry turn out to vote while too many others turn away in disgust, governments like those in Ferguson, MO deliberately preying on the powerless... Oligarchy is too nice a word - thugocracy is more like it.
Once upon a time there might have been something called the Republican party that could imagine a national interest larger than party politics. There might have been patriots who could disagree with Democrats, but still work together towards common goals. They might have strongly opposed Democratic policies, but they could live with the judgment of the voters and courts.
No more. The Republican Party of today considers no one but themselves legitimate rulers of the country. The popular will is not to be trusted; power is too important to share. The world is a zero sum game; there are no winner without losers and the GOP regards everything short of total victory as a loss. They will be satisfied with nothing less.
DLC Democrats, clueless centrists, pundits, media idiots still have not grasped the reality of what the GOP is today: a ruthless, amoral semi-organized criminal conspiracy seeking nothing but power and self-aggrandizement. It's as crazy as the so-called Islamic State in its righteousness; as delusional as Kim Jong-un; as cynical as Vladimir Putin. Digby reports
the White House is starting to get it, but does Hillary Clinton? Charles P. Pierce captured it as well as anyone during the 2013 government shut down, from which the party now in control of Congress learned nothing - and why should they have? They are now in control, aren't they? (
Pierce's writing here, since Esquire's archives seem to be messed up.)
...We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately....
Stupidity is a capital crime, but in the hands of Republicans, it's a weapon of mass destruction. Whoever ends up running on the Democratic line anywhere, at any level, needs to realize at the gut level what the GOP has become - and fight like America's existence depends on defeating them. Not reaching out to them, not accommodating them, not respecting them - defeating them and discrediting their ideas is what matters.
Because it truly does.
Wed Mar 11, 2015 at 6:25 AM PT: UPDATE nice summary of GOP record here in comments: http://www.dailykos.com/...