Hypocrisy, and the Perils of a Landslide

Undoubtedly the happiest person in the country after this week has to be Hillary Clinton.  She's seen her poll numbers climb in pretty much every swing state she needs to win, and since Trump is going through his own Bill Cosby phase in the wake of his "Grab them by the pussy" video, no one is really paying attention to all the Wikileaks material that would've killed her campaign were she not against someone so virtuostically repulsive.

Remember how, back in the primaries, a big theme of Bernie's was that had been compromised because of all the Wall Street money she hoovered up? And how the Elizabeth Warren story charting Clinton's change of heart over a bankruptcy bill exemplified that point?  Well, Clinton made a very big point of going out on TV saying that "Oh no, it wasn't the money, it was for the women and children who came to me asking for help." Turns out, shockingly, that story isn't so much true as it is self-serving.  Here's a back-and-forth between Clinton staffers about her recollection:

"We have a problem,” Clinton senior policy advisor Ann O’Leary wrote to campaign staffers that afternoon. “HRC overstayed (sic) her case this morning in a pretty big way.”

“What did she say that was wrong?” spokeswoman Kristina Schake replied.

“She said women groups were all pressuring her to vote for it,” O’Leary wrote back. “Evidence does not support that statement.”

Oops.  Also, remember how when Clinton and Sanders were set to start debating each other, a lot of Bernie supporters started kicking up a fuss that the DNC was setting up the debate schedule (fewer debates than the Republicans were running, also scheduling them on the weekends out of prime-time) was to explicitly give Clinton the advantage by not risking Bernie getting further exposure and thus, more people willing to vote for him?  Also, shockingly, everyone who brought up this complaint was totally right, again. This is from an email sent by a DNC official to the heads of the Clinton campaign:

"Through internal discussions, we concluded that it was in our interest to: 1) limit the number of debates (and the number in each state); 2) start the debates as late as possible; 3) keep debates out of the busy window between February 1 and February 27, 2016 (Iowa to South Carolina); 4) create a schedule that would allow the later debates to be cancelled if the race is for practical purposes over; 5) encourage an emphasis on local issues and local media participants in the debate formats; and 6) ensure a format that provides equal time for all candidates and does not give the moderator any discretion to focus on one candidate."

The email also says that another important issue is to keep the debates multi-candidate to "eliminate the possibility of one on one debates," as if they knew that Hillary having to constantly defend her record against a single, pointed attack would be bad for her.  So, to recap, the DNC, who maintained it was a neutral party all throughout the primary, set up a debate schedule specifically to deny any exposure for anyone running against Hillary Clinton so its voters couldn't weigh their options, funneled money directly to the Clinton campaign under the guise of state-level fundraisers (and then tried to lie about it), and coordinated with the Clinton people to discuss strategy on how to beat Bernie Sanders and plant negative stories against him in the media.  And yet, even with all that elite and media backing, she still had to fight to the very end to put away a Senator that two years ago almost none of the public could've even named.

All of this information comes courtesy of Wikileaks, which published the hacked emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta on its website.  The Clinton response to the leaks have been to say that Wikileaks, and Julian Assange specifically, are acting as Russian agents under orders from Vladimir Putin to tar her with baseless propaganda so Donald Trump can become the next President; which the media and Clinton supporters have wholeheartedly embraced so they won't have to hold her responsible or question anything she's done to get to this point. Clinton's outrage that someone was using shady, behind-closed-doors strategies directing the media to falsely debase their political opponents shouldn't carry a lot of weight anyway considering that, you know, she had just done the exact same thing to win her own fucking primary.  At this point, the emails aren't really going to affect the election- especially not when there's a mountain of sexual harassment and assault allegations mounting against Trump by the day- but they do provide insight into how she is likely to govern, and depending on how much she wins by, that doesn't really bode well.

If Clinton wins in a landslide, she will, naturally, treat that as a mandate to do as she will. Since Congress is still going to be divided and useless, the only real arena Clinton will be able act unilaterally is in military actions, and Hillary has never met a war she didn't support.  She's been a long-time advocate for a no-fly zone in Syria, which she won't need Congress for since she'll likely cite the AUMF (the authorization of military force against al-Qaeda directly or countries who aided or harbored them) as her authorization like Obama did.  This is kinda crazy, since enforcing such a thing would require the Air Force to either escort Russian aircraft out of Syrian airspace, or, failing that, shoot them down.  Somehow, I don't really see the benefit in risking such a direct conflict with another military power who is literally attacking ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates, a.k.a the same people we're supposed to have this whole War on Terror thing against.

I bring this up because if Clinton is willing to construct a primary campaign based on media distortions around her record and planting stories in the media to discredit anything that ran counter to her narratives, there's no reason to think she won't pull the same move with regards to a war, especially if she's in a position where the country is turning against her and she needs something to show her strength.  For those who would doubt their upstanding candidate would ever pull such a blatant manipulation, just remember that Bush supporters told themselves the same thing about there was no way such a straight forward man was lying them into a war with Iraq.

Look, I get voting for Hillary over Trump; the man is easily the stupidest person to ever try to sit in the Oval Office, and all the white supremacists who have mainstreamed themselves under his banner would only grow bolder if he actually won.  That being said, we shouldn't pretend that voting for Hillary is the same thing as voting for a good President.  There's every reason to believe hat once she's in office, Hillary will use all these same gambits to push through whatever war she's jonesing for or trying to pass off continued kid gloves towards Wall Street abuses as an unfortunate cost of good-ole American Capitalism.  But, if there isn't any public support for Hillary to implement that bullshit, we may actually force into being a half-way decent President after all.