Hillary Clinton is Awful
Bernie Sanders isn't the only problematic candidate on the Democratic side.
Hillary Clinton is an awful candidate. She ended up winning last night's Democratic Iowa caucus by .3 percent, and is projected to earn one delegate more than Bernie Sanders did in the contest. The race was so close many of the precinct contests were resolved by coin tosses.
But while Sanders is crushing Clinton in polls in New Hampshire, site of the next presidential contest, things look a little easier for Clinton after that. She's beating Sanders by an almost two-to-one margin in South Carolina. Same in Nevada, where there are fewer available polls. Clinton also still leads nationally.
Sanders' surge started in the summer, and by the time Joe Biden finally announced he wouldn't be running for president, Sanders appeared to be the only anti-Clinton choice. Most of Sanders' success can be attributed to his offer of "free stuff" for everyone. Healthcare is a right, Sanders insisted in his Iowa speech last night. Starting with that premise, why would you means-test?
Sanders won 83 percent of the vote of Democrats who said a candidate who was honest and trustworthy was important to them. Yet Sanders' proposals are not honest. He continues to insist a tax on "Wall Street speculation" will pay for most of his programs, while claiming that higher taxes that "middle class families" would have to pay would be more than offset by lower healthcare premiums. That construction conveniently leaves out the higher overall burden on single people, many of whom are among Sanders' most ardent supporters.
Yet Sanders' brand of "democratic socialism" (that's been repudiated by the same Scandinavian countries Sanders points to as examples) and the novelty of a Democrat actually owning his socialist tendencies should not detract from how awful a candidate Hillary Clinton is, and how awful it is that Democrats produced a race with just two deeply-flawed options.
There is, of course, the e-mail scandal that won't go away. Clinton has tried to paint the investigations surrounding her use of a private server for government communications as a Republican ploy. Yet the investigation is being run by the FBI, out of President Obama's Department of Justice. Most recently, more than 20 of the emails were identified as being classified TOP SECRET, and now one government source told Fox News that information included "operational intelligence," the kind of stuff the intelligence community claims puts lives at risk.
Clinton, then, is being accused of much the same thing Snowden was accused of, though from a different direction. Snowden disclosed information about U.S. surveillance practices to the American public. Clinton kept classified information on an unsecure server, making it easier for foreign agents and hackers to access. The Obama administration has prosecuted more people for mishandling classified information (including whistleblowers) than every previous administration combined. While Clinton now says the entire controversy is based on competing ideas about what ought to be classified, this concern about over-classification is a newfound religion for Clinton. It wasn't on her agenda when she was actually in office and could have done something about it.
Then there's Libya. Many of the Republican candidates supported the U.S. war in Libya and support similar, even more full-throttled interventions elsewhere, and the Republicans ultimately failed in 2011 to stand up to the president and stop the illegal war. For that reason, Clinton largely gets a free pass on the disaster in Libya and how her policy preferences and policy decisions contributed to the destabilization there and in the wider region. Instead, Republicans focus on Benghazi, a smaller subset of the Libya issue, largely surrounding Clinton's lack of transparency and accountability and not how the instability at the root of the Benghazi attacks was a result of Obama-Clinton policies. Clinton's participation in the anti-speech jihad, where she tried to pin the cause of anti-U.S. protests across the Muslim world in 2011 (including what became the Benghazi attack) on a YouTube video and the filmmaker who created it, has gone largely down the memory hole during the campaign. But it reveals a lot about Clinton's moral and political character that she would sacrifice the principle of free speech to avoid taking responsibility for how her foreign policy approach in the Obama administration might have contributed to anti-U.S. sentiment.
Then there's the 1994 crime bill, which President Clinton signed into law and did not repudiate until last year, when the veneer of inevitability around his wife was starting to fade. Hillary Clinton continues to insist the intentions of the 1994 crime bill, which massively grew the U.S. prison population, were positive, that harsher corrective measures were meant to improve people and communities.
In a much-derided Buzzfeed profile, Clinton insisted she wanted her entire political career to revolve around "love and kindness." This is the woman who insisted a "vast right wing conspiracy," and not differences of opinions and questions about character, animated healthy, democratic opposition to her husband's presidency. At a CNN debate last year, she said the enemy she was proudest of was Republicans, who might make up up to a third of the American population. This is a woman who insists she wanted to be about "love and kindness" but her political opponents refused to agree with her politics.
Add to all that the toxic strategy deployed by Clinton's supporters in the political and media class of identifying all dissent and opposition to Clinton as gendered, to the point of creating elaborate strawmen ("Bernie Bros") to impugn the supporters of her only Democratic rival. It could get worse. In the United Kingdom, anti-war activists who engaged female members of Parliament were also called misogynists and abusers. Yet the head of a government as massive as the U.S.'s will, by definition, be an abuser. America can't afford another president who masks their primary role in systemic oppression and government violence with the under the guise of identity politics.
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“will pay for most of his programs, while claiming that higher taxes “middle class families””
WHERE MUH PREPOSITIONS GONE? 😉
Guess I should’ve RTFS. We’ll call this a draw.
That’s what you get for being a Dodgers fan.
Cards rule this roost!
That’s some gall.
SPORTZWAR
Which round of the playoffs did the Cards get eliminated last year?
None. They won the World Series.
Poor Jimbo, you’re imagining things. You’ve been drinking too much, or too little, I forget how it works with you. Anyway, you haven’t drunk exactly the right amount.
I’ve been huffing that cat urine again.
Jimbo, you have to learn that cheesing just isn’t worth it.
Sure, you get to fight in the breastriary and swim in the fountains of varnoth with the ittytitty fairies of mammary mountain. And then you fight the boobgoblin in the gazangas cave. And then the girl may thank you for it, but she isn’t real. And you never really get a good look at her naked boobs anyway.
Take a ride, Hugh. Don Felder wants you to.
Hmm…
It’s hard to win the series when you are trying to steal from the Astros.
Great, another RAISIN writer in the bag for Hillary.
I mean, could they even be any more obvious?
I mean they wrote an article about her! They might as well join her fan club.
I rubbed one out thinking about her just now, and I actually contribute about half of all Reason articles under a variety of nom de plumes.
I thought about her soft, almost flaccid meat curtains, stinking of week-old bullion cubes, pale and pasty as cookie dough. Wedged right in between those two glorious nursing home thighs…
oh god, I just popped off again.
When NutraSweet finds out you’re trying to steal his thunder, don’t be surprised if he vomits on you. In the bad way, not the good way.
I am like a vengeful sea cucumber.
If you knew the first thing about writing, you would know it’s noms de plume, so your story about writing for Reason is airtight.
Airtight, like your granny.
I’d counter that the obvious amateurishness of not knowing proper writing terms and barely being able to string together a coherent sentence, let alone an overarching thesis, would in fact confirm that I contribute a great deal of Reason articles.
FEEL THAT “BERN”, MOTHERFUCKERS!
*projectile vomits all over desk*
That’s gonna be hard to explain to co-workers, who are crowding around to see what’s wrong.
*co-workers read comment, begin spewing all over floor, causing stench of puke to fill the office, other workers in nearby cubicles start to hurl uncontrollably*
Congratulations, you just single handedly shut down a major aerospace company’s commercial satellite division. I hope you’re happy.
And when they don’t write about her, it’s because they’re protecting her! See how it works?
They’ve only said she’s awful. That’s praise for Hillary.
Why is Reason donating precious blogspace to a discussion of the Evil Party? Shouldn’t they be talking about the last, best hope for stopping them, Trump?
Who? I’m gonna need to see some more articles about this “Trump” person.
He is a dealmaker who poses for classy photos with his daughter.
Paging Cr…
Oh, you posted it.
That is classy as shit.
sugar daddy
Sanders is promising to grow government spending by 50 percent. Per year. And taxes to match. On his website.
Vote for the Socialist. It’s important.
Which one?
Any… except the one that’s also a nationalist.
The democracy has spoken!
… Like the first Democracy…
Feel the bern of middle class hemorrhoids!
Ed is Reason’s greatest headline writer.
Pretty decent alt-text too.
He really gets to he point, doesn’t he. A real no-nonsense kind of guy. He probably supports Trump.
You read me like a book.
Oh my God, I completely forgot “only misogynists don’t want to bomb Syria” was actually a thing.
And ENB is so dreamy:
“Elizabeth Nolan Brown|12.8.15 @ 3:01PM|#
I am pretty perpetually accused by people in my life of being unemotional and unempathetic. I’ll cop to the first, though I think my empathy level’s all right”
Blonde, blue-eyed, and white ENB is dreamy? Hmmm.
I do think it’s important to point out that Irish has a vicious, almost pathological hatred of black people.
Irish hates black people so much, he won’t look up at the night sky.
Irish refuses to acknowledge his own shadow.
I was angry when it turned out Darth Vader was white because if I’d known that I would have been cheering for him instead of the side that let Lando Calrissian join.
Darth Vader: the original Oreo.
Star Wars is all about how the white man wants to keep the brother man down, even in a galaxy far far away.
Irish is so white, he clutches his purse tighter when Wayne Brady walks by.
I thought all white people liked Wayne Brady. Because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X.
Not even in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that this would turn into a meme so quickly.
I’m so fucking hard right now.
How did it become a meme that some Mick hates black people? Micks hating black people is a given like Italians being stupid.
I was reading about the run-up to the New York Draft Riots during the Civil War, and it was hilarious to me that even freed slaves looked down on the Irish.
They had to look down on someone. They country didn’t have any Italians yet.
Hey, that’s-a unfair, capisce? You a-gonna give me agita with all this-a stunad a-stuff!
Micks hating black people is a given like Italians being stupid.
Italians… Oh, you mean WOPs….
Irish is so racist, he considers people with suntans to be genetically inferior
Irish can’t stand the neo-soul stylings of Adele because she sounds “too ethnic.”
Does ENB sorta look like Kristen Wiig? I cannot decide.
ENB or ESB?
would
John says that Reason only criticizes Republicans, so this article doesn’t exist.
FUCK YOU, sarc. That was the joke I was coming in here to make. By not letting me have it, you have, in fact, stolen it from me.
Ha ha! Jimbo can’t come up with original jokes!
You’re just figuring this out?
Ha Ha!
He couldn’t have stolen it from you; sarc’s not black.
(right?)
*tents fingers*
Excellent.
I feel like you joking about me being racist has actually made you all racist.
I’m like Typhoid Mary but for racism.
You know who else spread some racism around?
Was it Irish?
The Death Watch?
Death Eaters?
sarc’s not black.
(right?)
Only my cold, libertarian heart.
He lives in Maine. His own governor has said he couldn’t possibly be black.
+1 D-Money?
There are black folks in Maine, believe it or not, which mildly surprised me when I visited. IIRC, a good portion of the workers were at one of the best lobster pounds I’ve ever been to.
Fantastic lobster.
A lot of the businesses on Rt1 hire temporary help from Jamaica during the summer months. Why Jamaica? I have no idea. But I can say with confidence that those black workers were most likely Jamaicans, not Mainers.
Now that I think about it, they did have on shirts and other indicia—a rasta hat with Montego on it or something—that indicated they were fans of Jamaica. Never thought that they were temp workers from there, but it makes sense.
Neat, I had no idea. I was there in early fall for a friend’s wedding. Beautiful place, but Mainers really don’t do customer service at all, do they?
Mainers aren’t especially nice to people from Away (anywhere but Maine). Lived here for most of ten years before I felt accepted and no longer treated like an outsider. And while much of the economy depends on tourism, there’s a healthy amount of antipathy towards tourists at the same time. It’s weird.
If this is all you have against Treason then honestly they’re not that bad.
We all know what Ed really thinks about Hillary. He’ll pull the lever for her on election day.
You have to vote for *someone,* after all.
And he’ll vote, too.
I want you to know, Susan, that *I* appreciate this comment. In fact:
*narrows gaze*
LAUGH! IT’S FUNNY!!
As our butthurtest commenters are fond of reminding us, every single person who has ever come in contact with the Reason offices voted for Obama.
All of them.
Even when they SAY they abstained or voted L, we know they vote Dem every.single.time.
If you doubt, just look at their articles! It’s clear as day!
Lets go to the video and see who voted for whom.
Those Reason staffers who voted for Obama at least once
Bailey
Matthew Freeney
Steven Greenhunt
Ed Kreyeweski
Bayelin Linnikin
Terry Michael
Six out of the staff f 25 as it existed in 2012 were Obama voters.
https://reason.com/archives/201…..singlepage
So roughly 25%.
Yep, the entire organization is in the bag for the dems, obviously.
Look, I’m with you on stopping immigration, and I will continue to advocate vigorously that we must vote republican, because the alternative is worse. Hell, I plan on voting for Trump.
But Reason is not a dem-op org.
I never claimed it didn’t support his point. I just put it up there. Whether 25% voting Dem makes them a Dem Op is in the eye of the beholder. A good number of the most left leaning ones don’t vote at all. And none of them voted for McCain or Romney or McCain. So it is fair to say it leans Dem but it is certainly not a Dem operation by any reasonable definition.
“Look, I’m with you on stopping immigration, and I will continue to advocate vigorously that we must vote republican, because the alternative is worse. Hell, I plan on voting for Trump.”
I have no clue when you’re being sarcastic.
It’s not called Poe’s Suggestion…
Re: Ronald Bailey
“1. Who are you voting for in November? Obama. The Republicans must be punished and punished hard.
2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? George W. Bush and George W. Bush. I am disheartened and ashamed.”
Bailey is so in the tank for the Democrats that he voted for GWB twice.
Although Tim Cavanaugh can go fuck himself:
“1. Who are you voting for in November? Barack Obama. All my life I’ve been waiting for a black president; Obama’s not monumentally unqualified, and his solid-if-boring book at least had some unkind words for teachers unions. Also my kids like him.
2. Who did you vote for in 2004 and 2000? Michael Badnarik in 2004. Ralph Nader (IIRC) in 2000. And that should be “whom.””
Jesus. Point is, a lot of people who voted Obama did so in 2008 and explicitly said it was because they were disgusted by the Bush presidency. A mistake? Yeah, but the other choice was McCain so it’s not like libertarianism was riding high in 2008. The noble thing to do in 2008 was not vote.
Pretty sure that’s Tim Cavanaugh’s daily mantra too.
Say what you want about TC, haters, but Reason lost its best economic reporting when TC left. Haters.
There was absolutely nothing libertarian about Obama in 2008. It was well known. So, let’s see how Reason staffers, who are certainly disgusted with the Obama presidency, vote this November. Will they vote in substantial numbers for, say, Rubio to punish the Democrats?
Well that settles it. Just under a quarter of the Reason staff voted for Obama once, so Reason’s pro-Obama! Am I getting this right?
I just posted the link. You can make of it what you will. I figured as long as we were talking about who the reason staff voted for, we might as well actually talk about that rather than how we fantasized they voted.
So you’re JAQing off and don’t have an actual point?
Christ, John.
Yeah my point is to inject facts into the discussion. Sorry if anything other than invective shit people pull out of their asses offends you.
Facts are fine if they mean something. You have this long-standing argument that Reason is in the tank for Team Blue and ignores their problems. Your evidence is that just under a quarter of the Reason staff that existed in 2008 voted for Obama one time. That’s not much in the way of dispositive evidence.
So what? Just because they don’t vote Dem doesn’t mean they are not in the aggregate more sympathetic to and support of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party.
Whatever you say, Red Tony.
The fact that none of them voted for McCain or Romney makes Reason Democrat-leaning. Yes.
I refused to vote for either of those fuckheads, and I certainly don’t lean towards the Democrats.
Pretty much the only politicians to get consistently positive notices from Reason are Rand Paul, Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, so I could just as easily argue they’re Republican leaning based on that.
If Rand Paul were the nominee, most of the magazine would vote for him for president.
OTOH, post L’Affaire Newsletter, the magazine couldn’t run fast enough away from Ron Paul.
Rather than Dem or Repub, I’d say they lean Cosmotarian, with a large dollop of Gallic sighing about the futility of it all, and especially the Libertarian Moment ever coming to pass.
It will be funny to see how many staffers decide they need to punish the Dems after eight years of Obama. OTOH, if Gary Johnson were running in 2008, I’d have voted for him too instead of McCain. Barr was just too much. I think I ended up writing in Ron Paul or something like that.
Bailey-also voted for Bush twice, did not vote for Obama a second time
Feeney-did not vote for Obama. RTFA. Says he was a liberal in 2008, before he wrote for Reason
Greenhunt-also voted for Bush twice, says he is ashamed of these votes, did not vote for O a second time
Krayewski-voted for Obama in 08, not in 12, and the very writer of this article
Linnekin-does have a straight Dem ticket, but abstained in 12; he also had a very limited focus at Reason
Michael-former Democrat, voted Obama in 08 for anti-war reasons
You really showed us!
Jesus Green are you stupid? I showed you how they voted. Where in that post did I claim it proved anything? Are you retarded? Do you listen to voices in your head?
Mmm, yes, indeed, you were just presenting some information for us. Indubitably.
And the voices line goes perfectly with your response below. Well done.
You are the one who said you voted for Kerry. I just agreed with your choice.
Disclosure: My first (and thus far only) vote was for John Kerry. My voting record is 100% Democrat. Keep that in mind when reading my posts in the future.
Good for you. I think you should vote Democrat. You generally agree with them on the issues that are most important to you.
Every once in awhile I wonder if McCain would’ve really been that much worse. Then there was of course Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root (ugh). Yeah I can’t blame anyone for their votes in 2008, that was just a bad year.
He’ll pull the lever for her
Is that what the kids are calling it now?
What the heck flavor of “socialist” is Sen. Bernie? Socialism used to mean government ownership of the means of production. I haven’t heard Sanders advocating that. I believe what he advocates is Fascism. But I guess one can’t use that because it has been thoroughly discredited…in that virtually all pols of both parties are fascists of one degree or another.
He’s a corporatist.
I do think there has to be a degree of hyper-nationalism and militarism to be properly fascist.
The wiki article admits there are several competing definitions.
Fascism is just corporatism with the nationalist and totalitarian tendencies thrown in.
Nazis are communists who embrace racism.
Fascism is after all a form of socialism. Unlike communism, it does not want to own the means of production, but does want to control and direct them. Think Oskar Schindler’s factories in Schindler’s List.
Probably market socialist, where you get to make $ but then have it redistributed.
I redistribute my own money. I redistribute it to whores, coke dealers, the liquor store. All kinds of places.
No, Sanders mostly wants government to control the results of production. There’s another word for that but you get glares and frowns from the Peanut gallery if you say it.
Hitler? Did I do it right?
“Sanders won 83 percent of the vote of Democrats who said a candidate who was honest and trustworthy was important to them. Yet Sanders’ proposals are not honest.”
To be fair, though, comparatively, who else is the “I value honesty but I refuse to consider anything but a Democrat” demographic going to vote for?? Clinton??
…and how awful it is that Democrats produced a race with just two deeply-flawed options…
As opposed to the 15 or so deeply-flawed options on the GOP side? I kind of like what the Dems did because the mask came off a bit. They didn’t even pretend that the process was meant to find the best nominee among many, or the best set of ideas among many.
Nearly all of whom are not the pure evil of Clinton, or the unabashed Marxism of Sanders.
“Hillary Clinton is Awful”
She’s ugly, too
Somebody ask for a 2nd opinion?
She’s also lazy!
You so crazy!
Can she play the piano any more?
But she couldn’t before!
And fat. Fat with evilness.
Hey! Show some class.
HOW TO STOP TERRORISTS
i think there’s some merit to his Roller Derby idea
I have to watch with the sound off, when does that guy get up and start shaking his ass around?
So many choices, but you stayed loyal to the meme. I appreciate you. Bless up.
Democratic turnout in Iowa dropped 25% from 2012. Remember, 2012 was an uncontested primary. Hillary is awful and is unlikely to motivate the Obama coalition to show up to vote.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-g…..from-2008/
Link says turnout dropped 25% from 2008, not 2012. Don’t try to play this off as a John-level typo either. You didn’t even RTFA this time, did you?
From laboriously counting vote totals here, I came up with a turnout of ~25% for this Dem Caucus. That’s about what it was in 2004, 23.3% per this source. 2008 was a giant outlier, with 39.5% Dem turnout.
So my thought that it was historically low for the Dems in 2016, just wasn’t the case. They simply liked Sanders as much as they did Hillary.
Really? Hillary Clinton isn’t the best? i’m going to have to chew on this for a while, this is new and unfamiliar information.
This article intrigues me, and I think I shall further consider reading this Reason publication!
Doesn’t pass the laugh test. She was tossing around info that was clearly classified and it’s very existence revealed sources or capabilities. The SAP info is pretty alarming.
And all of this is what her crew overlooked or thought was not damaging when they scrubbed the server.
She could declassify things classified by her authority. She couldn’t declassify something classified under another authority. For example, if she received some classified info from the NSA/FBI/CIA they are the classification authority and they have the authority to lower the info’s classification.
“Clinton insisted she wanted her entire political career to revolve around “love and kindness“
I suppose thats what deposing Gaddafi was really all about.
I think we long passed the point where screaming “Sexism/Racism/X_phobia” means you’ve already lost the argument.
#VoteHillary #ResistCapitalism #FreeIpads4poors
Is that guy for real, or was that intended to be parody? Poe’s Law looms large…
Looks like a parody to me, but seriously, how can you tell these days?
Is it really true that Clinton won every six coin tosses? And the Clinton people are saying this with a straight face?
I just read that elsewhere, myself. Winning 6 out of 6 is a 1/64 probability, supposedly. I hope someone looks into it.
At least six caucuses were split between Clinton and Sanders, The Des Moines Register reports, and thanks to an old, obscure Democratic Party rule, the winner of the county delegates had to be decided by a coin flip. Those up-for-grabs delegates, while not the same as the statewide delegate equivalents that constitute the final results, were factored in to the equation that determined the final tally of 700.59 for Clinton and 696.82 for Sanders. Clinton won all six coin flips, according to the Register, apparently proving Sanders’s point about the influence of money on politics. (Update: 1:30 P.M. Tuesday: At least two coin-flips in Sanders’ favor were later reported Tuesday by NBC News’ Frank Thorp.)
http://www.vanityfair.com/news…..-flip-iowa
It’s all explained in a email.
Meh. 3% chance that one of the candidates would win all six coin tosses. Would it even have changed anything if Sanders had won all six? It was out of 1700 precincts.
Thought we looked at this in the AM links, and it would’ve given the win to Bern, had she not won all six. Going 6 for 8, as NBC News later reported she did, would have happened a little over 10% of the time. Still better odds than 1/64.