Here.
Another pitiful article from The Guardian. Why do British people think this is a leftwing magazine? What sort of Left is that? Tony Blair/Clintonite mushy invertebrate Centrism? If this is what passes for Left media in the UK, I truly feel sorry for you Brits.
I assume Hitlery has to move left because after all, that’s the only way she can move. She can’t really go any further to the Right. If she does, she might either fall off the edge of the Earth or be compelled to run as a Republican on the basis of truth in labeling regulations.
So Billary is already a conservative. And she is moving to the left from this rightwing starting point. I suppose that is heartening.
What I am wondering is if this is all a big scam. Democrats typically run to the left in the primaries and then from there run to right in the general election, where they spend most of the election yelling, “Hey vote for me! I’m a Republican too! But I am a better kind of Republican than this wingnut Neandertal!”
I completely hate it when candidates do this because I never know where they stand on anything.
They run left in the primaries, then they run right in the general election.
Republicans run as freakish rightwing throwbacks in the primaries, horrifying me. But my liberal Democrat friends always assure me that the Republican candidate “isn’t that conservative,” or “is sort of a Centrist” or “is kind of liberal.” I was told this by libdems about George Bush (!) when he was lying about being a “compassionate conservative” (It would have been nice if he was one, but he wasn’t.).
I was told this especially about the terrifying Mitt Romney – that he used to be a liberal, that he governed Massachusetts as a liberal – and that he really didn’t believe all this horrifying stuff he was saying in the primaries as he was running right to get the nomination. In other words, once you get past the fake wingnut chocolate on the outside, Mittens was really a creamy liberal at the center after all.
I don’t know about you, but I judge people based on what they say. When Mitt Romney gambols about in the primaries sounding like a fire-breathing Genghis Khan, I feel sheer terror about this man. Then I am assured that he didn’t really believe any of that stuff when he runs in the real election more towards the center (except for the 47% thing, but libdems told me “he didn’t really mean that”) .
I have no choice but to have to hold all of Mitt’s dittohead remarks against him and consider that he might be a very scary president. The guy acts like a damn weather-vane. He’s had his finger to the wind so long it’s getting chapped. How in God’s name am I supposed when Romney is lying, when he’s telling the truth, what his real positions are, what his fake positions are, or whether he’s a phony liberal or a phony conservative? How the Hell can I tell anything about this guy at all? The guy’s talking out probably five sides of his mouth. By the time he gets to the end of a speech, he’s probably already reversing whatever position he took at the beginning of the speech.
I don’t trust people who I cannot predict. I don’t trust people who say insane, frightening things but then say, “Oh, don’t listen to that. I’m just pretending to be a maniac. Put down the gun, please.” If you’ve taken every position on the political map, I simply don’t trust you. I have no idea how you will act once you get in office, but I will certainly hold your throwback views against you and I will consider very strongly that you might govern as feudal warlord.
I feel the same way about Hitlery. Who’s the real Killary? Supposedly the maniacally rightwing Machiavellian Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 is dead. That’s reassuring, but how do I know that is true? Even the wimpy DNC fake liberal centrist of 2008 is dead and gone. Nice to know, but says who? Hitlery has now transformed into a true progressive. Really? Prove it.
Remember how Obama campaigned on a fairly liberal platform, but then trashed it as soon as he got in and spent four years trying to go halves with the Republicans on everything? How do we know Billary won’t do the same thing?
Bottom line is I don’t trust Killary any more than I trust Romney. If candidates routinely don’t keep their campaign promises, why do they make them in the first place? If my friends keep promising me things that they don’t deliver, they don’t stay friends much longer. I tend to strangerzone those types. That’s one thing I really hate in people.
I have no idea how Billary will govern if she wins. I am a lot more relaxed about her than I am about Romney or fake centrist Jeb Bush, but I worry we will have a re-run of Obama’s first term when he pretended to be a Republican 50% of the time in the name of some noble goal called “bipartisanship.” It wasn’t catastrophic, but there were definitely some scary moments there.
For the last 6 months to year, Obama has been truly governing as a fairly liberal President, possibly because he is a lame duck. Of course he still has serious relapses – check out the TIPP fast track horror for one – but I think I am finally starting to see that Illinois Senator Barack Obama who was rated one of the most liberal people in the Senate time-traveling back at us to the now.