jebmo’s posthaven

Hillary vs. the Hate Machine: How Clinton Became a Vessel for America’s Fury … Decades of right-wing attacks turned a crusader of women’s rights into a major target of hate  “The underlying thing about Clinton and her candidacy is it’s not normal. Normal is a male candidate, a male voice, a male tie.” –Rolling Stone

This recent article in Rolling Stone makes it clear that Hillary is a flawed candidate but that her flaws are not criminal and that she is far more desirable than Trump as president.

In doing so, this article attempts to justify a kind of fascism called “pay-for-play” by minimizing its impact. And it justifies Hillary’s other criminal and sociopathic behavior by virtually ignoring it.

Fascism, classically is associated with authoritarian (governmental) control over the private sector. And certainly pay-to-play comes close to that. The government makes it possible for a specific institution or individual to carry out a given task or service that others have no possibility of performing.

In Hillary’s case, pay-for-play was made possible by the Clinton Foundation. It seems that those who sought her influence or Bill’s influence with political issues could make a donation to the Foundation in return for receiving special treatment.

If true, as it appears it is, the corruption is on an unparalleled level, dwarfing other fedgov scandals. And as we pointed out just yesterday, by running these articles, the mainstream media is significantly devaluing its larger credibility, given the apparent significance of what’s going on.

Hillary is an extremely divisive candidate and her malfeasance is well documented. But still Rolling Stone wants to gloss over it.

More:

Following a whiff of corruption, however false, is addictive. There is, in fact, something impure, if not improper, about private e-mail servers and sky-high speaking fees and what’s known as “public-private partnerships,” an idea long touted by Bill Clinton and exemplified by institutions like the Clinton Foundation, whose annual Clinton Global Initiative conference tends to look a lot like Davos.

… Of course Muhammad Yunus, a world-renowned social entrepreneur who pioneered the idea of microcredit and microfinance, gets a private audience with the U.S. secretary of state, and so does the head of Dow Chemical, because why wouldn’t they?

During the DNC, in the park across from the Wells Fargo Center, where the convention was held, a few hundred people gathered every day … This group yearned for someone to root for who didn’t have political baggage, who was idealistic and inspiring and also a savvy packager, like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Mostly, they wanted a candidate who could feel their pain, which was deep and visceral and unfocused – kind of like their hatred of Hillary herself – and which they somehow felt that Clinton, despite her endless public humiliations, couldn’t understand.

In this short excerpt, we can see public-private partnerships coming of age. Not the legislative kind that are mandated by policy but the informal kind where powerful government officials meet with powerful private-sector individuals to carve various “deals.”

This is the most interesting part of the article because it seems to justify this sort of public/private behavior, or at least to minimize its impact. Yes, perhaps they are “impure” and include a “whiff of corruption” (however “false”). Such behavior is in a sense “bad” but not especially important when compared to the positives of the Clinton candidacy.

That comparison lingers throughout this article … and surrounds Clinton’s behavior generally like a miasma. In order to make a pro-Hillary argument, so much must be glossed over. Not just the emails or pay-for-play but also Hillary’s White House Travel Office abuses, the controversial death of Vince Foster, the reported decision to attack 80, including women and children, at Waco, the intimidation of the women that Clinton supposedly raped, even the apparent refusal to rescue state department officials under attack in Libya.

Hillary’s bad behaviors are to be minimized simply by ignoring them, or in the case of “pay-to-play,” by concluding that her historical mission to place a women in the White House trumps other issues.

We live in an era of dire straits and instant gratification, which is why a boorish billionaire was able to say, “Build a wall!” and millions cheered and nominated him for president. But long before all of that, in the pre-recession era, before 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, everything felt vastly different, with one crucial exception: the national discomfort with Hillary Clinton and everything she represents, which is strong and unequivocal female leadership.

The nativist politics represented by the candidacy of Donald Trump did not happen in a vacuum – nor did the ferocious attacks on Hillary Clinton. If she loses, says the Berkeley linguist Robin Lakoff, “The line will be, ‘A woman can’t win.'”

The majority of activists in both political parties, she notes, are men, “and an awful lot of them are not enthusiastic for a woman. Hillary Clinton pulled it off by God knows how many years of steely determination. She is not ‘inevitable.’ She has been running this race since 1992.”

You see? Nothing else is so important as the ascension of the female gender to the White House. It is all very cynical because Hillary is an exceptionally public figure and one who arouses enormous controversy. She simply is not “normal.” Her behavior over the years has been atrocious. And by ignoring the ample evidence or seeking to minimize it, the mainstream US media is taking a position it is impossible to recover from.

The ramifications of having mainstream media willingly cede credibility are enormous and potentially bloody, as we pointed out (here) yesterday. Societies cannot succeed without believable narratives. But the purveyors of these narratives must be seen as credible.

Conclusion: So why is the mainstream media continuing to forge ahead with this sort of article? We can only conclude that the chaos to come is being constructed on purpose. Someone, some group, is willing to reduce or remove mainstream media credibility and in doing so strip away the larger US narrative that has been in force at least since World War II. Whether Hillary wins or loses. worse is on the way.

See also: World’s Liquidity Trap Will Not Yield ‘Surprise’ Monetary Reversals