Misogyny Among White Married Women Helped Elect Trump

Married white women in large numbers went along with their men and rejected Hillary Clinton. The why of this has been hard to determine because it’s difficult to look inside people’s minds. Most of the white women who voted for the Russian backed serial bankrupt assaulter of women and insulter of all races and ethnicities said they did so because they admired him and honestly believed she was a crook and a liar and unpatriotic. (Hillary has often remained seated on the sofa while the national anthem played during the TV broadcast of NFL games.)

My own belief, based on nothing, and roundly rejected by everyone I spoke with, was that women whose husbands or partners loved Trump and hated Hillary simply didn’t want to spend four or eight years being subjected to abuse and ridicule and blame if the first woman president ever did anything wrong. And women are likelier than men to understand that leaders sometimes make mistakes. Maybe some of them or a lot of them trusted the polls and believed Hillary would win anyway, and if bad stuff happened their partners would abuse Hillary but wouldn’t abuse them. Possible? It would be hard to get a woman to admit it.

It was very hard on white male egos to have eight years of embarrassment under a white male Republican president followed by eight non-catastrophic years under a black male president who didn’t blow the budget with a trillion dollar unnecessary and disastrous war and trigger a massive economic crisis. (It was extra humiliating that the black guy rescued the economy from what the white guy fucked up.) But to follow the very competent and cool black guy with a woman was simply too too humiliating for white men. They couldn’t bear it. I am sure their spouses and partners could tell that it would set them off in unpleasant directions for the next four, possibly eight, years. Violence against people of color rose dramatically during the Obama presidency. Would violence against women skyrocket during the first female presidency? And you can bet, just as Republicans swore to block everything Obama tried to accomplish, and the faithful in thousands of white superchristian churches prayed fervently for him to fail, that all the Republicans would do their damnedest to make sure Hillary failed. Because she made every Republican man and lots of Democratic men feel like a failure. Not only had a black man jumped the queue but now a woman had. The natural order of things was being upset. It upset people, especially white people, especially white people with dicks, but also the women who were married to them. So white women joined the Dickish Party. (It didn't hurt Trump's electability that thousands of Russian trolls and bots were pushing this same misogyny and race-worry at white voters in swing states.)

This new study doesn’t make this point but it does explain the pressure, both economic and political, that shaped the Trump vote among white married women. Deference is an old-fashioned idea some women still subscribe to. Maybe it's out of self-defense. Self interest is pretty human; people vote their pocket book. This study combines the two because it says deference to the man’s income shaped the vote of married white women; they voted against women’s economic interests to support their subservience to the man’s economic interests.

The study is reported on in the Guardian.

It’s worth looking at the unfairness at the root of all this. There is a double standard. Women are required to be perfect and at the same time deferential to their male counterparts even if those males are far less perfect than the women. Because failing to be deferential makes the males feel diminished. Some probably feel a greater need for male enhancement products if they are compared unfavorably with a woman, and that male dysfunction is contagious: when one man experiences it all men start to go flaccid and angry. Women may love their men in spite of their faults but men tend to feel uncomfortable around women who outperform them. A ultra competent woman is less attractive than a man who fucks up.

But her emails!

Last fall Newsweek published a story about how many emails George W Bush and Dick Cheney managed to lose to avoid having their Iraq War motives scrutinized. W lost 22 million emails, but nobody minded.

"According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.”

W and his boss Cheney spent trillions on an unnecessary war based on phony reasoning and what we would today call “fake news” and they covered up their machinations by “losing” 22 million emails. That’s million with an M, almost a thousand times more emails than Hillary allegedly lost. (Full disclosure: I delete emails every month, which I suppose makes me a suspicious character.)

The FBI Did Their Best NOT To Protect The DNC From The Russians

Hillary Clinton's campaign head is angry about how the FBI didn't protect them from the Russians. He wrote about it in the Washington Post. Here's an article about it from Daily Beast.

If I were Podesta I’d be mad too. I’d feel betrayed. I feel betrayed as it is. The FBI let all of us down.

For years I have gotten numerous phone calls a week from helpful experts saying I have a problem with this or that, usually with my credit card or my bank accounts. You get them too.

The most laughable ones come routinely, once a week sometimes, from “Windows Technical Support”. “Hello this is Windows Technical Support and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security.” They sound kind of nerdy and nerdy often means trustworthy, especially in technical areas, but I know they are bogus. I have fun with them, asking for their office address so I can bring my computer in. I sometimes send the information to my local FBI office. They are obviously criminals trying to gain access to my computer. I have never owned a Windows computer.

Now I am wondering if I was wise to contact the FBI. They appear to be ignorant of this kind of crime. Ignorant of their technique at least, because they use it themselves.

When the FBI learned of a Russian campaign to compromise the DNC, agents phoned the DNC's IT help desk and said "Hello this is the FBI and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security.”

The DNC is blocks away from FBI headquarters. They did not go to the DNC and show their FBI identification. They phoned in a rough imitation of a phone scammer. If someone called me and said “This is the FBI and we need to fix a problem you may be having with your computer security” I would have laughed and hung up. I might have said “Is this you, Phil?”

Was the FBI this clueless? Were they being intentionally unhelpful? Contacting a person when you know they aren’t at home or sending them a letter with the wrong address and postage are good ways of not contacting them and saying you did. (There must be a term for this kind of intentional failure.) Was this a way of crossing the Russian hack off the FBI's to-do list without doing anything about it?

Did they not want to help the DNC confront a serious violation of our democracy? Our national sovereignty was also being threatened. Did the FBI not care about our national sovereignty as long as the violation helped a Republican become president? However it was allowed, the threat was fulfilled. We now have a president-elect chosen by a foreign enemy.

FBI? Is this what you wanted?

Is the Electoral College a Set of Rules or an Escape Clause?

I posted the other day about the outside chance the Electoral College could decide against validating the Trump election. I’ve heard some rebuttal from very important voices, ones that I respect. Notably this article in the Atlantic. I disagree with them, understanding they know many facts I don't. It’s important to recognize what they are saying. It’s also very unlikely that Electors from those traditionally blue states that went for Trump, even the ones narrowly divided, would become “faithless electors” and defy the state total. But they could. And the reason they still can indicates the flexibility of this system, a flexibility that was put there by the Founders for reasons that resonate today.

Here is a new article in TIME addressing this new possibility that Trump might be kept from office.

There is a group calling themselves Hamilton Electors.

The Founders were afraid of mob rule. In the North the rural people were suspicious of the urban mobs, in the South the elites were afraid of the white peasantry and especially of the slaves who outnumbered them all, and the more settled East Coast thought the people west of the Appalachians were an unruly irresponsible mob––they had, after all, left because they couldn’t get along with anyone there (actually, they’d left because they would only succeed where they could find free land to own, land given them by the government back in Washington.) James Madison wanted the Electoral College as an instrument to push back against the numerical disadvantages the South had because it disenfranchised most of its population for being black. This interview at VOX does a good job of explaining Madison's ploy. A lot of the rationale for it was antidemocratic and downright bigoted, not just against the slave population but against the general population. The Founders were afraid of the ignorant mob deciding things. The Founders would be appalled by Donald Trump. While they were watching their democracy work itself out they were routinely appalled by each other, Jeffersonians vs. Hamiltonians, the whole unfolding story was a bitter argument.

But I don’t believe any of the Founders would approve of an Electoral College that would validate Donald Trump’s presidency. This invalidation of an ignorant, inexperienced, corrupt and dangerous unpredictable candidate was exactly what the Electoral College was supposed to prevent. Would Franklin approve of a president who thought science was a Chines hoax? Would Hamilton or Washington approve of a president who was a massive and lifelong tax evader? Those two Founders put on their old army uniforms and led a column of troops out into the frontier to put down a tax rebellion by the ancestors of this year’s Trump voters. The Founders knew the necessity of government. They also believed in checks and balances; Donald Trump believes in autocracy.

It’s unlikely that any of the Electors in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan will refuse to cast their vote for Trump. It shows their proper loyalty to their electorate. But it would also show their proper loyalty to their electorate if the Electors loyal to Philadelphia and Detroit and Columbus respected the fact that nearly half of the voters in their state voted for Hillary Clinton, and that Hillary Clinton won millions more of the popular vote nationally than Trump did. Would doing this violate the rules or simply defy the conventional way of doing things. Would it, in fact, correct an antidemocratic fluke? In the end, are we provincials or are we all Americans?

This defiance of dangerous convention might open the door for examining other conventions we haven’t examined, out of habit or laziness, for instance why small numbers of citizens in less populous states like Wyoming get to have two senators while many millions more citizens in New York or Texas have only the same two senators. Why do the citizens of Washington DC, who outnumber the citizens of Wyoming, have no Senators at all, and no Congressperson either. As preposterous a calculation, really, as the one that stated black people were worth 3/5 of a vote while not being able to vote. For over a century after Emancipation southern (and many northern) black citizens were denied the right to vote because of similar perfectly legal and ancient conventions.

I’d also like to ask how many of these blue states that flipped into the Trump column did so because the Voting Rights Act was suspended by John Roberts’ Supreme Court, enabling the suppression of 300,000 legal voters we know of in Wisconsin alone. A cynical legal convention enabled the Tea Party wave of 2010 to resegregate congressional districts nationwide into mostly safe Republican ones and fewer Democratic ones. This also suppresses votes. The biggest and most brazen vote suppressor is the requirement of state issued IDs and the simultaneous effort by officials to make those IDs difficult for some people to get, some people who tend to vote Democratic. The Voting Rights Act needs to be reapplied nationwide, not just in the South where it was first enacted.

This article from McClatchy describes the likelihood that voter suppression in 14 states tipped the scales toward Trump.

I recognize that the Electoral College is part of the system that both candidates signed on to. At least Hillary did. Trump repeatedly stated he wouldn’t abide by results he disliked. So Hillary could not try to undermine those rules. But Electors could. It is well within their range of traditional options to refuse to rubber stamp a second loser of the popular vote in recent years. They might see it as their duty. They might see it as the only responsible thing to do.

And it would result in a major upheaval.

There is already a major upheaval going on. As the final returns are tallied it appears likely that several millions more will have voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Trump. Millions of women are planning to march on Washington on inauguration day to protest that inauguration. Millions would march if he isn’t inaugurated, and many of those marchers would likely be armed. So we have a choice: which upheaval do we listen to? Do we back down because one of these upheavals is heavily armed? We’ve seen that kind of back down already. Heavily armed white revolutionaries in Oregon were let off the hook for what our Founding Fathers would have called treason. Think of George Washington facing down those yahoos in Oregon. He would have. Andrew Jackson, who Trump most closely resembles (although the comparison is an insult to Jackson) would have too.

I think that is one of the calculations going on right now, not to upset the white, heavily armed and understandably angry minority who voted for Trump by refusing to seat him. Maybe it would seem less dangerous if in the next month before the Electors meet it were more evident how unwise it would be to choose Trump for our president. Is he in Putin’s pocket? What about the massive fraud he will be defending himself against in court this month? The plaintiffs are not rich people, they are regular blue collar Americans. What if Trump continues to back away from his key promises? He changes his mind every five minutes. Will his own supporters tolerate this once he is in office? How do retirees feel about what Trump’s election is doing to the bond markets? And Paul Ryan’s promise to profitize Medicare? This is the moment for the Trump voters to be asking “What the hell have we done?” It’s important that they face the consequences of their vote. The Electoral College offers a moment for the nation to reconsider, and it should.

FYI... here's the list of the 2016 Electors.

If reform is the goal, here's an article from CSMonitor about that. Likelihood diminishes as this second right wing wave in six years entrenches itself in Congress and the courts.

The Email Flap About Nothing May Give Us Our First Fascist President

The emails in question, a mere handful, are not to or from Clinton.

Reported in the LATimes

"Comey wrote in a letter to Congress that the newly discovered messages could be relevant to questions of whether Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information while she was secretary of State. The emails were not to or from Clinton, and contained information that appeared to be more of what agents had already uncovered, the official said, but in an abundance of caution, they felt they needed to further scrutinize them.”

An abundance of caution designed to be quickly misinterpreted by the voting public is not cautious, it is cynical and manipulative, it is a corruption of the electoral process by a Republican in a key position to do so. It ranks with Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace process in 1968 which won him the presidency.

Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek

This article at SLATE explains why this latest flap is a nothing about nothing.

At this point will it matter what the truth is?

At the end of his term as a Republican appointed to a post of trust in a Democratic administration, Comey appears to have seized this crucial moment to score for his team. Partisan politics has no place in law enforcement. When it’s wrapped in pious phrases about principle and “abundance of caution” it’s especially sickening.

Jane Mayer reports on how Comey decided to violate all FBI and DOJ procedure to win one for the GOP team.

Comey gives every appearance of wanting to steer this election from his post at the FBI.

He seems to be signaling that he’d very much like to be the top policeman in President Trump’s new police state.

In case anyone has forgotten what a real email scandal looks like, there's the case of the 22 million emails the Bush/Cheney White House destroyed while under investigation for firing US Attorneys across the country.

Reported in Newsweek

That was not prosecuted or investigated by the Obama White House because that is against American tradition to prosecute political opponents.

Of course Trump has been promising for months that he will immediately imprison Hillary Clinton if he is elected. It’s what dictators do. And a lot of Americans like the idea.

If Americans are rational and intelligent this will backfire on Comey and the witch hunters in Congress.

Are Americans rational?

I’ve been hearing from Americans who are willing to accept a fascist president because Hillary Clinton is a moderate and not lefty enough.

I’ve been hearing from Americans who are willing to elect a president who denies climate science because Hillary Clinton didn’t lie down in front of the pipeline bulldozers in North Dakota.

I hope we regain our reason.

The Case For And Against Hillary

LeBron James tells why he’s voting Hillary. (Let’s hope it tips Ohio.)

Via Business Insider

The Nation (America’s progressive magazine) states the strong progressive case for Hillary Clinton

And why failing to vote for her risks electing Trump. (The presidency cannot be ordered a la carte.)

Where did this Hillary hatred come from? It’s a thirty year-old industry. (I guess if she’s elected those are jobs that won’t be going away.)

The ugly history of hating the Clintons via the Daily Beast.

A former Hillary hater says she changed her mind after reading Hillary’s emails. There was no scandal there.

Via Blue Nation Review

Snopes, the leading debunker of lies and rumors, debunks one that the Right is throwing around about the Clinton Foundation.

One of the guys whose resumé was built upon his career as an anti-Hillary witch hunter in the 90s now says it would be dangerous NOT to vote for her.

Via Bloomberg.

The Politifact measure of truth gives Hillary a huge edge in honesty. Most of what Trump has said this year is untrue.

Columbia Journalism Review discusses the apparatus that sold us the birther lie

The LATimes endorsement of Hillary is worth reading. Most newspapers have endorsed her. Most have also condemned Trump as a danger to this country.

In a year when millions are hoping to elect a deranged con man to the White House, you can understand why this writer might feel a bit angry.

Via GQ

A quick summary of the VP debate via Twitter. Some viewers thought Tim Kaine was impolite to point out Trump’s lies. They thought Pence was very polite when he lied to cover them up.

The summary via Twitter.

The case against Hillary? I guess if you are determined to trade our democracy for a fascist state run by con men and brownshirts nothing is going to change your mind. Trump and Pence are the goons you want.

Trump's Big Lie––The Birther Myth

Trump began to work the Big Lie about the first black President of the United States in 2011 as the Republican field was assembling to run against the Democratic incumbent. Trump began the libel casually but cagily with “I wonder” and “maybe.” “I’m starting to think he wasn’t born here."

Which is the way FoxNews newsreaders and talking heads slide into their various falsehoods, with “People are saying.” It’s the way cons work. This vagueness smudges authorship but sounds authentic, like you’re not the only one saying this. It’s better than an anonymous source because it’s real people. Or so we’re meant to think. The liars aren’t owning the lie but fabricating some kind of magic consensus on the street where real people live and discuss what is true and right. For five years Trump has ridden the cred he gained with the alt right and the racists and the right wingers, cred based on this lie which he told over and over in various ways from various cagey angles.

Then yesterday he invited the networks to a Major Announcement on this topic.

Trump said he would renounce his birtherism on national TV. The networks, obedient as they’ve been to Trump whenever he whistles, were there, cameras rolling.

First they carried a rambling half hour ad lib Trump promo for his new Washington DC hotel. They stayed with him live because Trump had promised them this Big Something. Trump had never admitted error before and now he was promising to do it on national TV. The long Trump Hotel promo seemed weird though. Was this politics? Was this news?

At some point during a carnival like the Trump campaign when things get boring people get restless and distracted. They begin to notice the bad smell. Maybe it’s the circus animals’ manure or maybe it’s the sweat of the con man. I believe everyone began to smell it during Trump’s Big Broadcast. Even the journalists serving in attendance. (Trump has outfitted them with special brooms and dustpans for cleaning up the manure he spreads, and they are very helpful.)

People seemed puzzled and suspicious finally at the part where he couldn’t really drop the birther lie after all. He couldn’t apologize or admit he’d been wrong all along. Instead he smeared it on somebody new. He said somebody else had told it to him, meaning he’d been tricked too. (Trump the Victim!) He’d smeared our first black president for five years. His sniping attacks helped undermine and delegitimize Obamas presidency among his (Trump’s) white fan base, which is not small, and all across the FoxNews and talk radio universe, a crowd which was always hungry for ways to smear and undermine President Obama. Now Trump wanted to transfer that smear onto Hillary Clinton, his opponent.

So Trump said that it was Hillary who’d been the first one to question Obama’s birth in this country. He said the birther issue was invented by Hillary. (Which sounds sort of like how he said President Obama had invented ISIS.)

And, suddenly, after long months of playing along, the American news media rediscovered their integrity.

News correspondents covering Trump’s Big Tell began calling Trump's new smearing of Hillary Clinton a lie. They stated it carefully, but clearly, much the way I heard in on NPR’s All Things Considered in their news summary: “Trump falsely stated that Hillary Clinton was the first to question Obama’s birth in this country."
And there seemed to be a consensus, not magical like FoxNews’s “some people are saying” but clear and distinct reporting of fact. Someone posted this reprise of the coverage and the push back. American broadcast journalists had gotten tired of playing along with so much dishonesty.

****
CNN -- John Berman: "Hillary Clinton and her campaign never, ever pushed the birther issue.”

... Kate Bolduan: "Donald Trump, from 2011, he made this his signature issue. No one has gone as far as Donald Trump on the birther issue.”

... John King: "[Trump] did the country a great disservice by becoming the chief cheerleader for a fraud, a birther movement trying to delegitimize the sitting United States President.”

... Jake Tapper: "Those are two factually false statements.... [Hillary Clinton] and her campaign never started the birther issue. ... Donald Trump did not end the birther issue."

FOX -- Jenna Lee (to Trump surrogate Boris Epshteyn, who claimed the birther issue "was born out of the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign"): "Ok, but it wasn't. It wasn't. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't. This is not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true. It's not true."

NYT -- Headline 1: "Unwinding a Lie: Trump's Long Embrace of Birtherism" ... Headline 2: "Trump Drops Claim but Falsely Accuses Clinton of Starting It" ... Headline 3: "Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic"

WaPo -- Breaking News Alert: "Trump admits Obama was born in U.S. but falsely blames Hillary Clinton for starting rumors"

CNN and MSNBC more than matched Trump's 20 minutes with hours of airtime for his critics, including CNN's live interview with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid; a live broadcast of the Congressional Black Caucus press conference; and a live broadcast of First Lady Michelle Obama's speech. All of them hammered Trump.

CNN and MSNBC spent the majority of the day revisiting Trump's history of fueling the birther conspiracy theory and drawing attention to his false claims.

****

At the New York Times the news analysis called out the birther story one more time for the lie it was. They explained in a more detailed way how carefully Trump had played it out and exploited the attention it gained him, and leveraged the harm it did to the president. But the Times analyst did not address Trump’s deliberate transfer of his libel directing at his opponent. That came in the broadcast coverage.

Here’s hoping the label of LIAR is pinned to Trump’s tail more thoroughly in the next few days, and the careful long form reporting makes it harder for him to dispute it. And maybe enough of the American public will stop laughing, will stop enjoying, the Trump carnival.

This wasn’t the first time Trump had blamed Hillary for starting the birther hoax. He did that almost exactly a year ago on Sep. 22, 2015.

Politifact quickly debunked this. Hillary never had anything to do with the birther myth. Politifact also fleshed out the life history of the rumor itself. Some accounts said that the first birther rumor may have been started by a Clinton supporter (not anyone associated with the campaign) who was angry that Obama was likely to be the nominee. This is the sort of thing no responsible campaign likes. And Hillary had quickly repudiated the notion. John McCain did his best to dissuade one of his own supporters who said Obama was a Muslim during a town meeting in 2008. Hillary didn’t begin the birther myth and immediately squashed it when she heard about it. But Trump liked it. It glittered. He didn’t think it up, even though he does concoct most of his free-form, subconscious ranting. (Who could script that stuff?) Trump does overhear stuff and repurpose it. If he found a handgun on the sidewalk he’d begin looking for someone to shoot.

Even if Trump didn’t invent the birther lie, he filed the trademark on it and made it his own property. Did he know it was a lie? Did he really believe it? Does Trump really believe anything? For more than a few minutes, probably not. His mind wanders, the way his talk wanders. An hour or a day after he says things he denies he’s said them. I suspect the dishonesty of it pleased him. The truth of what he says doesn’t matter to him; it’s the harm he can do by saying these things that matters.

And the attention it gains him. He seems unable to care when a false statement has harmed him or discredited him, all he cares about is the attention and the satisfaction that attention gives him. It’s like the immediate pleasure sought by people who commit mass shootings; they do it for the attention more than any hatred of the people they’ve killed. It’s the pleasure of doing harm, the pleasure of destroying someone else. Trump is a fast firing machine, fully automatic, with an endless supply of bullets fed to him from his subconscious. The bullets are real enough. They’re not phonies. The damage is real too. True or false doesn’t matter, it’s the destruction he likes.

It will be interesting to see whether a firmer consensus forms around Trump’s tendency to lie. And his tendency to lie Big. To promote the Big Lie, which is something we’ve not seen much of in American politics. The Big Lie being a lie that is so outrageous that it gains its own momentum. The thing about the Big Lie is the irresistible urge people feel to spread it and become part of it. A large part of Trump’s mob (I think we can call it a mob) is made up of people who have joined the Big Lie. It’s like a religion. Once you are part of it you belong to it. Hitler knew this. He coined the term The Big Lie in his book Mein Kampf.

Trump is a more prolific liar. A gymnast among liars. A mass producer of falsehoods. A shape shifter who lies one way on Tuesday and the opposite way on Wednesday, then on Thursday denies he said either lie at all. Is this the “telling it like it is” his fans admire?

TruthOut places Trump's lying in the context of other authoritarian Big Lie strategies.

New York Magazine details the lineage of the birther myth and Trump's ownership of it.

That didn’t end Trump’s tomfoolery today.

After a few days of pretending to be within the spectrum of sane people, Trump darted back to a microphone and suggested disarming Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service detail and let her be gunned down.

Reported at VOX.

This isn’t the first time he’s fantasized about the death of Hillary Clinton.

Your Daily Trump––the health issue

The estimable Kurt Eichenwald discusses the hypocrisy of the Hillary-is-unwell smear when Trump is noticeably sick.

In Newsweek

The quack doctor behind the “Hillary is dying of some dread disease” meme.

From the Daily Beast

The most odious person in recent history is behind the rumor that Hillary has Parkinson’s.

Raw Story reports on Martin Shkreli's nasty work for Trump's campaign

Meanwhile, Hillary seems to understand that healthcare is something you help people with. You don’t use it as a profit opportunity or an opportunity to gain an advantage over them.

A heartwarming story reported in ELLE

What's All This About Hillary?

Hillary has been the object of constant scrutiny for the past 25 years, ever since she and Bill entered the public eye. Most of the scrutiny has been antagonistic. Politicians attract enemies when they try to do things. It's almost as bad as the resentment politicians get from not doing things exactly as each individual voter wanted.

The greatest danger to our nation in recent years is running for president at the top of the Republican ticket. And yet there are still people who feel uncomfortable voting for the only viable alternative. Casting a pure vote is an irrational and dangerous hobby. Voting is not a hobby, it needs to be an act of reason and compromise. Noam Chomsky is not a great fan of Hillary Clinton, but he explains why it's vitally important that reasonable and intelligent voters on the liberal side unite behind her.

This article is from DemocracyNow, which isn't a centrist or neoliberal news organization.

Hillary is being accused of dishonesty. Actually she is the most honest politician in the race this year.

Jill Abramson explains why this is so.

An interesting interview explaining what liberal communitarians stand for. Hillary is one.

It's weird some of the things Hillary is attacked for. Last week she was attacked for putting her hand over her heart...

This article from the Boston Globe is about how any woman running for president must be perfect in every way.

And Americans aren't too keen on people who are too perfect. Actually, if you are a woman and too perfect they really hate you.

This writer hated Hillary, until she sat down and read the emails Hillary is being hounded over.

This article is about the many sexist questions Hillary has had to answer (politely) for the past several decades.

Meanwhile, from the LATimes, we have Trump rallies where small children are applauded for screaming obscenities about Hillary Clinton.

So... what's all this about Benghazi?

What Hillary's values are.

From MEDIUM.

Hillary's convictions about social progress, from The Tablet.

What happened to the feminist excitement that surrounded Hillary in 2008? From SLATE.

Thinking about voting for Jill Stein?

Prominent ethicists are saying voting your conscience on a minor party candidate in an election like this one is actually immoral.

And by the way, in case you are still angry Bernie didn't win, NO the DNC email leaks do not contain evidence the system was rigged against Bernie. I was and am as big a Bernie supporter as anyone, and a Bernie fan of longer standing, and I am expressing that by putting all my support behind Hillary Clinton. As Bernie has done.

One Lawman's Idea of Due Process

The head of the FBI was on television the other day and he accomplished a remarkable thing. He made both political parties angry. He announced the FBI was not recommending the DOJ file criminal charges against Hillary Clinton because there was no evidence of a crime. But he expanded into a long dissertation on what he, as a lawman, saw as Hillary Clinton's misdeeds. Law officers are not supposed to announce that a person is not being prosecuted and then explain why they wish they could go ahead and hang the accused. How, if this were a properly run country, they'd be able to do just that.

The Washington Post published a pretty fair explanation of how FBI Director Comey's performance was unprofessional.

The FBI Director's press conference did not unfold in this way. But the message was a bit like this.

“We are not pressing charges,” the lawman said. “But that doesn’t mean this person isn’t a lowdown, dirty skunk who should be strung up by the nearest lamppost. We found no evidence of wrongdoing, but we’re pretty sure there was plenty. Just by looking at her we figure that she’s guilty as sin. She’s just lucky we didn’t find anything. This time. What I mean to say is she’s probably a serious criminal, or at the very least recklessly incompetent while being simultaneously devilishly cunning in the way she covers up her wrongdoing, which must be why we didn’t find any evidence of any crime. Still, since I still have a microphone, we’re pretty sure there was some sort of crime committed here and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we ignored Congressman Issa’s and Congressman Malfoy’s hunches and admitted there wasn’t. Just because we didn’t find any crime doesn’t mean there wasn’t one, and probably lots of ‘em. I suspect the defendant would probably have gone on a terrific crime spree if thousands of lawmen with reliably conservative hunches hadn’t spent the past 30 years investigating every part of her public and private life."

“Sometimes you got to be a little cute, a little smarter than they are, to catch these folks, especially when it’s a criminal thing other people do all the time without being arrested or “nailed” as we lawmen like to say. What we have to do in these gray areas,” said the lawman, “is to say it’s OK to talk about stuff, and then after certain people have talked about it to then go in and make it Top Secret at this point. Then we got ‘em. We've got them red handed for committing a crime but only because it wasn’t actually a crime when they did it. Again, I am a lawman and know how this works: it doesn’t matter that it happened before it was a crime. For all we know they were plotting to wait until it was criminal and then commit the crime. We kind of know which people are criminals, that’s why we’re professionals. But we have to be quick enough to catch them, which means jumping in before the thing is actually a crime. We did this by having the crime in our pocket, ready made, to fix them up with. For instance, that’s how we catch traitors. Because traitors are especially cunning about this, pretending to be just as patriotic as you or me. Sometimes if we can’t do it this way, it can work just as well to go in and stamp random shit Top Secret. The folks we want to nail are bound to say something or other and then we can tie them in to the stuff that’s been made Top Secret Ex Post Facto.”

Reporter: “Wouldn’t that make a lot of innocent people into criminals?”

“No, sir. Not everybody. Not people we like. Just the ones we got our eyes on. Regular folks don’t need to worry. That is unless they do something we don’t like, in which case they have only themselves to blame. What this method allows us to do is keep a huge log of crimes in our inventory that we can pull off the rack, so to speak, and fix on people if and when the need arises. So those of you out there who feel worried about being caught. Well, that’s good. You should be worried. Everybody should watch their step at all times because we’re always hunting for people to lock up. That’s called doing our job. How do we know someone is guilty? Here’s how you tell. You accuse them of a crime and if they look guilty they definitely are. We could probably lock up two thirds of the U.S. population if we wanted to. Actually we’d like to but we’re undermanned and underfunded, mostly because of Democrats who criminally refuse to raise our budgets the way we ask. Fortunately lawmen and prosecutors are given a great deal of discretion about who to go after and who to let alone. All you got to do is look at which political party they belong to.”

Which is apparently what goes on in some law enforcement circles. It was more egregious during the Bush years, when the Bush White House fired a number of federal prosecutors for not being team players, for being insufficiently zealous in going after Democrats.

Remember: FBI Director Comey is a Republican. He was appointed by a Democratic president to show that law enforcement in this administration would be impartial, would keep out of partisan witch hunting. (And in the grim aftermath of a disastrous Republican eight years there were a lot of witches to be hunted.) Comey's performance rubbishing Clinton must have been done to save his Republican reputation for team play, which, on that side of the aisle, means his highest priority is scoring points for the Republican team. Justice is a low priority. Due process is not a priority at all, more of an inconvenience, an embarrassment.

Various political analysts have done their work and explained why this firestorm about Hillary Clinton's emails is bullshit because the guidelines she followed were the guidelines followed by her Republican predecessors.

Most notably in Newsweek.

And the New York Times.

It's also been pointed out that the Bush administration deleted many thousands of emails. No uproar over that. Deleting emails only became a sin on the inauguration of Barack Obama.

And isn't it ironic: the thousands of Bush White House emails were deleted during their coverup of the political firings of U.S. Attorneys...

Also, there's evidence that the classified labels stamped on Secretary Clinton's cellphone and email utterances were done so in error.

The lawman finished up his candid off-the-record remarks by saying it’s been a very tough eight years. He came close to tears enumerating the difficulties law officers have had to deal with. "Having to follow the letter of the law has caused law officers a great deal of unnecessary stress. They’ve felt inhibited in the exercise of their duties. Having to always be worrying about this guy’s rights and that guy’s rights has taken their eye off the ball and tied their hands. That will change, hopefully, after this year’s election, if we get a president who’s serious about good old fashioned law and order. A guy who'll let the police and the FBI off the leash so they can do their jobs. So they can bust heads the way they like to. So they can shoot first and ask questions later. So they can cook up good persuasive evidence when they really want a conviction. So they can fit people up and jail them and throw away the key, without the Bill of Rights getting in their way. We’d like a president who restores our God-given right to use thumbscrews and water torture and old fashioned beatings when guilty parties lie and tell us they’re innocent. We’d like a president who’ll give us back the death penalty, because the only thing that makes our convictions safe is when a convicted man is dead and gone. Then you’d start seeing a 100% conviction rate like you used to see in the former East Germany and Iraq, and you still see in well-run countries like Russia and Kazakstan and North Korea and Syria.”

The lawman's wish list for Dear Leader of this country has one name on it right now. Donald Trump.

Of course when the lawman assumes the role of judge and prosecutor, this happens.

And America becomes a police state. It already feels like a police state to some people.

Inside Vs. Outside in the Democratic Party

An article in the Guardian is saying the insiders might be able to install Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee whether she wins the popular vote in the primaries or not.

If true, if this is really happening, it is dead wrong and defeatist. A recipe for disaster. A big opportunity thrown away.

If it's just a perception it is a perception that needs to be debunked by the DNC.

The party machinery must be there to empower the voters not dictate to them or to tip the scales.

If Hillary wins the nomination legitimately, by getting the votes, she will need the Bernie voters behind her in November, just as Bernie will need the Hillary voters if he is the nominee.

Hillary stepped gracefully aside in 2008 and joined the Obama administration in 2009. She respected the voters. I admire that. She has a great resumé. She has incredible political gifts. Women all over the country feel a woman president is long overdue, as do I. But it isn't cynical or anti-feminist to feel that Bernie might be a better candidate, that he represents a larger slice of the electorate, reaching outside the core of the party, perhaps reaching people in other parts of the country who have never voted for a Democrat. We don't know who has the stronger chance at winning. Voting in primaries is how these things are sorted out.

But Bernie is the real deal. He's shown that. An authentic champion of the interests of Americans who work for a living against the entrenched power of the much smaller group of Americans who own for a living. He has tapped into something powerful by speaking honestly and bravely without worrying about big donors or powerful people. He represents the outsider, which is most of us, against the insider, which Hillary Clinton most definitely is. Her inside game could mean she'd achieve more. Bernie's outside game could mean he'd be able to remake our politics, strengthen the progressive side by sheer force of numbers. He might set up an off-year wave of upsets to retake the Congress and statehouses.

I think the Bernie Sanders phenomenon represents an even stronger version of the wave that brought Obama into office: the sudden and enthusiastic involvement of millions of previously disengaged voters is something we’d be fools to throw away.

We have gotten into the habit in this country of engineering our politics, of prearranging the winners or (as in 2000) anointing someone who hasn’t won the popular vote, of the elders deciding what the children should have for dinner. The children have grown up and won’t have that.

It is true that the popular vote can be dangerous, as we see on the GOP side where it has been so divorced from our better angels and become pure ID, chasing a reality TV racist and sociopath, a billionaire who plays to our hatreds and our fears.

It is unfair and untrue to create a false equivalency between Bernie and Trump. They are both populists but Bernie is not one to rev up fascist emotions in the voting public. Trump is.

It's the GOP that divides us up by class and race and gender in order to control us.

The DNC should be the opposite of that.

I think it's time for both candidates to sit with the DNC and establish a process that will see fair play and a true expression of the will of the voters, an open nomination process without cronies, without the insider machinery, without resorting to the ill-named SuperDelegates.

I seem to remember this idea of Super Delegates emerged as a tool to prevent coups similar to the Lyndon LaRouche phenomenon which messed up our process in the 1980s. Bernie is not Lyndon LaRouche. He is tapping into decades of very legitimate anger and grievance but he is not exploiting these emotions to force the 12-tone scale onto classical orchestras or to create a right wing monster out of far flung parts of the Democratic Party. The Super Delegate is a relic. It echoes the Orwellian phrase about some pigs being more equal than others. It gives the party sages a feeling of involvement but the party is not about them, it is about the voters.

If the DNC is setting up a pre-ordained nomination they, and we, are throwing away an enormous wave of energy. New voters, fresh blood, fresh enthusiasm, a chance to build on what Barack Obama began in 2009, which the Republicans did their damnedest to block at every turn. The GOP seeks to divide us up and suppress the will of the voters. That is the sort of thing that makes voters cynical and disengaged. That is the GOP’s strategy. We shouldn’t be playing that hand too.

I will vote for whoever wins. Gladly. Hillary is a strong candidate. Bernie is a strong candidate. But if we split, we lose. We can't afford to lose this one.