I’m a Bernie guy, but I try to be rational and realistic. There are some Bernie folks out there, otherwise reasonable people, who believe that Bernie will get the nomination when Hillary is indicted because of her email server. Not only is that not going to happen, it shouldn’t happen, because she didn’t do anything seriously wrong. It’s depressing to see people buy into Republican memes when it serves their purposes. And as I’ll develop, unless she does get indicted, which I repeat won’t happen, the “scandal” will come to nothing.
Here’s a more superficially realistic concern, yet one that we can easily dismiss:
The other day I was listening to a political show on the radio, and a guy called into say that, although he was “Cruz guy”, he believed that Trump could beat Hillary because of Hillary’s sordid past, as detailed in a book by Roger Stone.
That’s when it hit me: if Trump is the nominee, it will be five months of Vince Foster, the Mena drug operation, the Clinton body count, and so on. I hope the Hillary campaign wishes a motherfucker would, but they’d best be prepared for a media that says “some say the Clinton personally murdered upwards of 50 people, some say they do not, the truth lies in the middle.”
As crazy as the last eight years of anti-Obama have been, I don’t think it quite touches the insanity of the anti-Clinton stuff in the mid-to -late ’90s, at least within mainstream political discourse. The Republicans never even got around to impeaching Obama the way I thought they would.
via Balloon Juice
The Cruz guy who thinks Trump could beat Hillary is the very model of the person who would never vote for Hillary (or any Democrat) in the first place, so the fact that he buys into these smears means Hillary has a net loss of exactly 0 votes. The question is, how many people, who might otherwise vote for her, will choose to vote for Trump instead because of any of these smears that Roger Stone fabricated? The fact of the matter is that Hillary is well-nigh scandal proof. Why did the Republicans get no traction with Benghazi? For that matter, why are they getting no traction with the email issue? On issues like that, they have essentially immunized her. She has been the victim of so many specious attacks that people’s eyes glaze over when they hear another attack of that ilk.
True, people don’t trust her, but it’s not because of her emails or even Benghazi. People distrust her because of stuff like Iraq, speeches to Goldman Sachs, equivocation on the TPP, her reflexive warmongering, etc. You know, issues. Note that on the issues that cause that mistrust, she is in lock step with the Republicans, making it difficult for them to attack her where she’s weakest. That sort of distrust is mostly on the left, and we’re going to be stuck with her. Bear in mind too that the Dems have been doing their oppo research on Trump, and there’s a mother lode there. Anyone who is actually going to compare candidates based on their involvement with Trumped up scandals will find more reason to vote against Trump than Hillary. In addition, Hillary will not sit passively by while she’s attacked. She will not be swift boated.
In truth and in fact, Bernie is more at risk from the swift boaters than is Hillary. He’s a relatively unknown quantity, and no one really knows how much damage attacks on an avowed socialist atheist would do in this land of the ignorant. He may be polling better than Hillary at the moment, but that is quite likely because he has not yet been subjected to the types of attacks that simply no longer work when directed at Hillary. I still think he’d be a better president, and I think we may be losing our last chance to put down the oligarchs, but I don’t believe that Hillary will lose to Trump or any other Republican because Roger Stone says she killed Vince Foster.
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