The Anti-Hillary Hate Machine

The latest wave of attacks on Hillary are about the Clinton Foundation, which, contrary to the right wing claims, is one of the highest rated organizations in terms of its high percentage of donations that go directly to the charitable objectives. It does good work that needs doing, which wouldn’t be done without their efforts and capable direction.

Of course the news media feels itself in a bind: if they report fully on Donald Trump’s lies, bigotry, extremism, and borderline insanity without devoting an equal amount of ink and airtime to Hillary’s small or nonexistent flaws they feel biased. For my money I’d be comfortable if the news media were biased in favor of honesty, competence, moderation and sanity. I wish they would stick to that.

Politifact rates GOP chair Priebus's latest lies about Hillary.

SLATE analyzes the multiple falsehoods in the smear campaign against the Clinton Foundation.

Newsweek looks at the hypocrisy of the unending Hillary Email Smear.

Pensitor Review takes a look back at how the news media gave W and Karl Rove a pass regarding hidden and destroyed emails. The Bush White House was trying to cover up wrongdoing in its purge of insufficiently partisan US Attorneys.

The Hillary health scare nonsense:

SNOPES (the best lie debunker on the internet) debunks the GOP's rumormongering about Hillary's health.

CNN calls this obsession out for what it is, a nonsense conspiracy theory.

The doctor who certifies Trump’s supremely robust health is a nutcase who specializes in colonoscopies. Here are his Trump accolades ranked by degree of ridiculousness: DeadSpin gives a quick rundown of the ludicrous Trump "bill of health" from Trump's personal gastroenterologist. His photo alone is priceless. It's noted that Trump's doctor once tried to copyright the phrase "compassionate colonoscopy." Would Trump appoint this fruitcake Surgeon General?

On Buzzfeed, one of the right wing rate***ers behind the Trump juggernaut speaks his mind. Interesting how the Donald Segrettis and Lee Atwaters and Roger Stones and Roger Aileses, the diehard dirty trick artists, all seem to find a home in the Republican Party.

The sad fact is this wild eyed radical hate mongering right wing fringe is no longer a fringe. It's the heart and soul of the Republican Party. What does that mean going forward? POLITICO weighs in.

They swore to shut Obama down from Day One. They will do the same to Hillary. That is the central idea of modern Republicanism: make democracy fail, make it grind to a halt, make it dysfunctional, make people frustrated and angry at it, make people hate it, then replace it with a dictatorship.

The Alt Right is gung ho on this idea. They hate our democracy because it gives stuff to people with darker skin who live differently than they do. They hate democracy because FoxNews tells them to, tells them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year how democracy is an inefficient mess which should be replace with a sleek modern efficient corporate model called fascism.

What the alt right faithful believe is a con. They think a dictator would take dictation from them. They think the new totalitarian efficiency would serve their needs. Baloney. They are angry people who want someone to kick ass on people and make people hurt the way they are hurting, assuming a bully dictator would prey on people other than them.

Republicans Resort to Pettifogging to Undo ObamaCare

Nobel prize economist Paul Krugman uses his column to ridicule the latest Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately the Republicans are immune to ridicule. (Also shame, reason and irony.)

There is a rumor circulating around Republican circles that the leadership is considering making a successful completion of the drinking game Cardinal Puff a requirement for all citizens applying for healthcare through any of the ACA’s marketplaces.

Several Republican states have already been using Cardinal Puff to screen people applying for the right to vote.

Lincoln Was Hated Too

...Until they killed him.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican leaders met in private and swore to oppose everything, EVERYTHING, the new president tried to accomplish. This article in Tikkun summarizes it well. So do these articles: Washington Post, the Guardian, and DailyKos.

In at least one press interview these Republican conspirators compared their opposition to the Taliban. An interesting choice, considering they spent a lot of the first year screaming that Obama wasn’t killing enough Taliban in Afghanistan.

For two years the blockade leaked. Democrats got bills passed. The economy began to recover. The Affordable Care Act passed against a fierce fire from Republicans, never mind that the plan was designed around mandates and a healthcare marketplace first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. When Democrats found Republican points they could agree on Republicans hated them for it. They didn’t want compromise. They wanted dysfunction. They wanted war.

In 2010, corporations (whom the Supreme Court had reclassified as people) poured hundreds of millions of dollars (which the Supreme Court had reclassified as protected speech) to Republican candidates. Most of these candidates didn’t hide their anarchist fervor on the stump, and the wave of Republicans who retook the House of Representatives were the most radical the institution had ever seen. Radicals who scorned the rules and traditions of the House itself. They were anarchists. Their sole wish was to make the Congress cease to function. Their goal being to make Obama’s presidency a failure.

Now the opposition was total because they had the numbers. They refused to compromise on anything and could block everything. They used procedural maneuvers to prevent majority measures from passing. They used procedure to slow up ordinary congressional business. Routine stuff like departmental appointments which the opposition party generally allowed because departments needed people doing the work.

Not this time. No judges. No heads of various departments. Bush appointees were therefore left in place, which pleased the Republicans. Understaffed government agencies began to function less efficiently. Brilliant! This was exactly what the Republicans wanted. They wanted the government that did things to cease doing things like helping the unemployed, like treating veterans, like helping veterans of their wars find jobs. Maximum pain was the goal.

Then there was the debt limit. Bush had started two wars and kept their trillion dollar cost off the books. Obama put them back on the books, in a refreshing act of accounting honesty. But Republicans decided they didn't want to pay this debt. Just as they didn't want to pay unemployment benefits to vets. Or the upkeep of the nation's highways. Or relief to people suffering from the economic collapse. They didn't want to spend any money unless they could cut the taxes owed by their wealthy clients. International markets downgraded U.S. Treasury Bills, our sovereign debt. Republicans cheered. Something they wanted to happen couldn't possibly be their fault. It was the president's fault.

Republicans in the House voted more than 50 times to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They wanted to undo Obama’s signature achievement. Republicans who controlled red states refused to enact the ACA in their states, refusing federal money to assist their citizens who didn’t have healthcare coverage. A Scroogelike opposition.

Nice guys, these Republicans. Millions cheered them on. Why?

What was different? Was it because the president was….(black)? Perish the thought. Apparently it was because he was a foreign born Muslim, a silly falsehood Republicans raised again and again. Why did they raise it again and again? Because their constituents believed it. They believed it because their political masters told them to.

They hated Obama. They have hated him ever since he was elected. They hated him the moment he became black, which they prefer to believe was not in Hawaii.

People hated Lincoln too. People North and South, but mostly in the South. Until they killed him.

Lincoln had one advantage. He tried to solve serious problems that Americans had kicked down the road for generations, but he didn’t have to deal with a Confederacy that controlled the Congress and the Supreme Court. Today the Confederacy, the Lost Cause of sacred memory, lives in the Republican Party.

It didn’t die in 1865. The Confederacy lived on in Jim Crow all across the South where blacks could be lynched for registering to vote or for looking at a white person the wrong way, and there were a lot of wrong ways, whole etiquette books of them (the South was and is famously courteous.)

After LBJ passed civil rights and voting rights Southerners blamed the Democratic Party and became Republicans overnight. Nixon devised a whole program to welcome the racists and the anti-unionists and the male supremacists into the Republican fold. It was called the Southern Strategy. It was carefully written to enable white folks to hate and oppress black folks without calling them n*****s. So the Confederacy lives again. No white hoods required, just stubborn willingness to pour sand in the works of our democracy. Why? Racist spite seems extremely probable. You need to work very hard not to think so.

And it’s working brilliantly. Oppose everything, block everything Obama tries to do––even those proposals first made by Republicans––show willingness to make the nation default. The Republicans’ plan contained an explicit desire to make Americans suffer. They’ve laughingly admitted this. They know Americans will blame the president for all of their pain and frustration even if its caused by his enemies. Which is the purest, sickest, most unAmerican kind of cynicism. They've willed his exclusion from the public conversation, hogtied his economic recovery and carefully orchestrated hatred and blame from half of the country. They've gagged him and criticize him for not talking. When he does speak they damn him for poisoning the air––because they disagree. It is hard to be a black leader in a country with a history of racism. It's gotten so bad the news media feel compelled to minimize Obama's achievements. He has achieved a great deal, but who remembers? We've come a long way back since the previous president drove us into the ditch. How could a successful president be this unpopular? It is hard to explain.

So the harm is done. And we’ve let it be done. Our news media has hidden what has been done because to describe this kind of behavior honestly would appear partisan. So they soften it, disguise it, create phony balance. If the president’s opposition behaves in a racist fashion, well Obama must be a racist too.

It’s like that other case in Ferguson, Missouri, where the black man was wrongfully arrested, beaten, jailed and when the police discovered they’d arrested an innocent man from out of town they charged him with destruction of police property. While they’d been beating him up he’d bled on their uniforms.

The Do-Nothing Republican Congress

This current Congress is controlled by Republicans with the sole purpose of preventing the President and the Democratic Senate from doing anything constructive. Their only declared goal: to make sure Obama is a one-term president. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum are calling it one of the most dysfunctional, least constructive Congresses in American history. This NPR story draws its insights from, among others, Norm Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who has co-authored two books on the scorched earth brand of Republican governance.

Contrast this Republican/Tea Party Congress with the Congress from Obama's first two years. Democrats achieved more in two years than any Congress since the '60s, some say more than had been acccomplished since the '30s. Democrats do things for regular people. Republicans cater to the top 1%. The partisanship has come from one side, the Republican side. All the compromising, flexibility, practicality and patient toil has been on the Democratic side. It's as if Republicans want democracy to fail rather than inconvenience their corporate clients. This Bloomberg article lists the achievements of Obama's first two years. Have we all forgotten? (And Bloomberg is hardly a liberal biased publication)

This Christian Science Monitor cites the six very big achievements Obama had with a Democratic Congress, over the intense blockade by Republicans.

This Washington Post article calls them "forgotten accomplishments".

Why forgotten––and forgotten already at the close of 2010? Because of the intense and constant abuse from FoxNews. Not only do more Americans "get their news from FoxNews" but those who do know less––less than people who don't read or watch any news at all. Consider it a nationwide brainwashing.

The sole failing of the Democratic Congress of 2009 and 2010? They didn't brag enough. They just got things done.

Contrast that with the Republican juggernaut that swept in in late 2010. The Republican goal? Same as it had been for the previous two years, but bolder and stronger. Block a recovery that Americans needed. Block reforms. Block jobs bills. Block consumer and environmental protections. (What they couldn't block they watered down.) Block increased taxes on the top 1%, whose wealth had grown in the aftermath of the financial crisis while most Americans suffered. Their goal was to make Americans angry. Discontent and anger helped them regain the House in 2010, it could help them retake the White House in 2012.

The only medicine that can help the nation recover from eight years of Bush, and now two years of a Tea Party relapse is a more Democratic Congress.