Hard Choices Are Hard Only When They Exist in The First Place

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

And speaking of Hard Choices…. Even though I want to claw out my eyeballs when I even think about the 2016 Presidential election, let alone write about it, if not now, when? The cacophony already overwhelms. You know what I’m talking about:

‘Hard Choices’: A chapter-by-chapter breakdown of Clinton’s new book (“methodical”); “Hillary Clinton’s book-tour launch has campaign feel” (“thousands”); “Hillary Clinton’s book tour: What to look for” (“fine in the belly”); “Hillary Clinton Explains Why She Might Not Run” (“becoming a grandmother”); “Hillary Clinton clarifies ‘dead broke’ comment” (er, “clarifies”); “Hillary Clinton’s Impressive Legacy in Foggy Bottom” (URL says “mixed,” not “impressive”); “Hillary Clinton: ‘Sexism’ in 2008 Obama campaign” (true, grotesquely so); “Hillary Clinton Talks Monica Lewinsky”  (“really?”); “Hillary Clinton Opens Up: Could She Have Done More in Benghazi?” (“personally”); “Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Power of Style”  (“the whole hair brouhaha”).

And many more. This is only the beginning!

Be that as it may and will, I have two sets of reservations about a Clinton candidacy, one personal, and the other political.

My personal reservation has to do with Clinton’s health (and nothing, I hasten to add, to do with toad-like legacy party operative Karl Rove’s views on Clinton’s health, which he seems to have slithered away from). Clinton would be 69 in 2016, so it would be foolish not to think of her health. Here’s WaPo’s coverage:

Almost three weeks ago, Clinton, reportedly became severely dehydrated with an intestinal infection. She fainted, fell and hit her head, suffering a concussion. …

Clinton has had at least one previous blood clot, in her right leg in 1998. She was treated with blood-thinning drugs for several months. In her memoir she attributed the clot to “my nonstop flying around the country.” Airplane flights lasting longer than six hours appear to be a slight risk factor for developing leg clots, known as deep venous thromboses (DVTs).

Head trauma can cause blood in a venous sinus to clot, but it almost always has to be severe enough to cause a skull fracture, said Aaron S. Dumont, director of cerebrovascular surgery at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

“It’s probably a coincidence,” he said of Clinton’s fainting spell and the clot. He noted, however, that her history of a blood clot in the leg may indicate a predisposition to clotting.

But Gregory Piazza, a cardiologist and vascular medicine specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said he thinks a fall serious enough to cause a concussion could have caused the clot. It is also possible that a clot could have caused the fall. “Either could be a possibility in this case,” he said.The conventional treatment is an anticoagulant drug for at least six months. With Clinton’s history of a previous clot, however, it could be longer.

The usual drug is warfarin, which requires that the blood be tested periodically to make sure it is not excessively thinned. If it is, that problem can be reversed.

There are newer oral anticoagulants that don’t require monitoring, but they are not easily reversed.

Here’s why that story rings alarm bells for me: My mother’s first stroke happened because her warfarin dosage got out of whack. The second stroke, the big clot that killed her, happened after she fell and hit her head. Now, after her first stroke I came back to Maine for a few months, and did everything I could do to get her writing and playing music again, with success. And she lived another five years. But my mother wasn’t running for President! Now, valar morghulis, and perhaps the trade-off for the wisdom, if any, of age, is mortality; I said “reservations,” not “absolute barrier.” (“I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”)  Clinton says she’ll release her medical records, and that’s good. But will that be enough? 

Quite possibly not. Regardless of the actual state of Clinton’s health, will the press cover the story? Probably not. FDR supplies one precedent; although pictures of FDR in his wheelchair were published, by his political enemies Henry Luce and William Randolph Heart, among others, these were exceptions to the general and successful choreography of his public appearances. Closer to home, we have the onset of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimers, as (possibly) described by CBS White House Correspondent Leslie Stahl:

As she, her husband, and her eight-year-old daughter were about to enter the Oval Office, Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes, told Stahl, “No questions at all, about anything.” Stahl was angered by this, but she soon saw why Speakes had issued this instruction. When she and her family entered the office, the 75-year-old Reagan was standing by a Remington sculpture of a rearing horse, and Stahl immediately began to fret:

Reagan was as shriveled as a kumquat. He was so frail, his skin so paper-thin. I could almost see the sunlight through the back of his withered neck…His eyes were coated. Larry introduced us, but he had to shout. Had Reagan turned off his hearing aid?

…Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.

Stahl tried to fill the silence, telling Reagan that her daughter used to tell everyone that the president works for her mommy, but after Reagan took office, she started saying that her mother worked for the president.

I wasn’t above a little massaging. Was he so out of it that he couldn’t appreciate a sweet story that reflected well on him? Guess so. His pupils didn’t even dilate. Nothing. No reaction.

After Stahl mentioned that her husband, Aaron Latham, was a screenwriter, Reagan became animated, and pulled Latham to a couch to discuss a movie idea he had for a film in which he could star. Stahl recalls she was “too astonished to move.” A few minutes later, the session was over. Reagan was now beaming, and after Stahl and her family left the Oval Office, Reagan chased after them and told her daughter, “I worked for your mother, too.”

In her book, Stahl noted that she “had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile. I had every intention of telling the American people what I had observed in the Oval Office.”

But she didn’t. This week, I asked her why not. In an email, she replied,

Because Reagan seemed to “recover”—I decided I could not go out on the White House lawn and tell the public what his behavior meant. So I never did a report.

I was obviously not equipped to interpret what LOOKED like a lapse into semi-awareness. Was it what I had assumed at first: senility? Was it an “act”—a way to avoid answering my questions? Was it some form of dementia (maybe not Alzheimer’s)? I decided I couldn’t report on my observations at all that night.

Stahl added,

Later, when I would ask White House officials if they had ever seen him float away like that, they’d say yes, but that, as with me, he always pulled himself together. It was confusing for everyone.

Indeed, in her book—published 14 years after she left the White House beat—Stahl noted that after Reagan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she asked one of his chief advisers if Reagan had been senile when he was president. “Maybe there were symptoms,” this aide told her, “though I say that in hindsight. He would come to life for the cameras. He was on/off, on/off.” Several former Reaganites Stahl spoke to about Reagan’s mental conditions brushed aside any suggestion of mental deterioration. “People with Alzheimer’s don’t take down the Soviet Union,” speechwriter Peggy Noonan told Stahl. (Noonan also admitted that she had rarely seen Reagan while working for him.) But another unnamed aide said that the subsequent Alzheimer’s diagnosis “explains a lot.”

Yikes. I always thought Reagan was lying on  Iran-Contra when he said in 1987: “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”  But what if, sadly, Reagan was already becoming forgetful, and believed he was telling the truth? So, suppose President Hillary Clinton has a stroke. Will the press cover the story? Or will they keep it under wraps, as they did when President Wilson had a stroke?

My political reservations, which I can state more briefly, have to do with the question of whether Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are equal to the challenges of the times. (I should say that, in Brad DeLong’s “Class of” formulation, that I am a member of the Class of 2008; I left the Democratic party permanently in July, when Obama voted to give retroactive immunity to the telcos after promising to filibuster it, presaging today’s surveillance state just as surely as his support for TARP presaged his creature Geithner’s “foaming the runway” for the banksters.) In other words, I’m going to vote on policy, and not on personalities, and certainly not on identity politics (“Wow, We Nominated The Black Guy”).

Just look at the mind-bogglingly petty policy proposals Democrats are making: On a living wage: How on earth did the demand at street level for a $15 an hour minimum wage — if you call that a living wage — get hacked back to $10.10? Couldn’t these clowns at least have rounded it up to the nearest quarter? On health care: Clinton took single payer off the table. So if you hear her described as a “policy wonk,” or “transformative,” remember that. On jobs and disemployment: “Economics Teacher: Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller?” On debt: Liz Warren is tinkering around the edges of how much interest to squeeze students for. In Quebec, students took to the streets over a tuition increase from a baseline of $2168 a year. Is the United States so poor that it can’t do as well by its students as Canada? Heck, why crap around? Why not free public education, K-16? On Social Security: The Democrats are tinkering with expanding Social Security for “certain groups,” like Lady Bountiful distributing food baskets to the deserving poor. Here’s an idea: Heave Simpson-Bowles and those weasels at the Peterson Institute over the side by stating openly what is true: That Social Security will be able to pay full benefits for 20 years at least. Once that’s done, why not lower the age of eligibility to 60, and get some of the old farts like me out of the work force to make way for young people? (Not that I’d want to; shuffleboard is a death sentence.) And once that’s done, why not make benefits “age neutral”? It’s unconscionable that retirement gets less secure the younger you are. On war and peace: Clinton owns Obama’s drones, and she owns whatever blowback comes from them, which it will; she should have gracefully resigned her position as Secretary of State in, say, 2011, and then she might not. On the State: Granted, Clinton voted against FISA reform in 2008, unlike President-elect Obama, but now she owns Obama’s Stasi-like NSA surveillance regime; and she owns Obama’s “disposition matrix,” and whacking US citizens without due process. The bottom line is that although the Democrats will tinker round the edges, they have no intention whatever of delivering concrete material benefits that will raise the baseline for most Americans’ lives; this in the face of the worst economy since the great Depression, a “recovery” whose benefits working Americans have yet to see, and which may well have run its course. Democratic loyalists tell you to vote for evil (putatively “lesser”), and people do. And then they’re surprised when evil results! What kind of choice is this?

NOTE I retain a lingering affection for a picture of the Democratic Party, and the President, that might have been, and did not come to be. This explains why:

The night before Haverford, I was fidgeting in a Pennsylvania school gymnasium while waiting for Hillary Clinton and weeping over a dog. Senator Clinton, of all the candidates, brought out the pet-mania in a supporter. Canine attendance at her events was a phenomenon of the trail, and I had begun to take photographs of the various dogs, all wearing Hillary regalia, many squeezed into little Hillary costumes. On the evening of Monday, April 14, however, I realized that this penchant signaled more than enthusiasm. It was a sign that here sat a room full of losers–their loss magnified by their obliviousness to the reality that their candidate also was a loser. By April, despite Clinton victories in Texas and Ohio and a likely upcoming win in Pennsylvania, no one in the press, except for those prone to Super Delegate conspiracy theories, believed that Clinton would get the Democratic nomination.

But this was the time when Hillary Clinton, nourished perhaps by the respect she had received in the poor Hispanic communities of Texas, began to get her voice and a receptive audience–always now in a town’s meaner streets and not, as only a season before, in the nation’s professional enclaves, which had begun to drift into the Obama camp. Here filling the gym risers at the Bristol Borough Junior-Senior High School, listening to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” and chanting Hillary-Hillary-Hillary! were the working class folk who would stick with her until the end in South Dakota because she, more than any other candidate in decades, was finding a way to speak to the many and varied losses in these Americans’ lives.

Oh well. 2008 was a long, long time ago.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

31 comments

  1. DakotabornKansan

    A political constituency that slavishly and unconditionally supports Clinton and the Democratic Party will inevitably be once again ignored by Clinton and the Democratic Party.

    “A particular kind of State does not appear out of nowhere. What engenders a particular regime is the material and ideological relations existing among a country’s citizens. It is to these material and ideological relations that we need to devote serious thought; the nature of these relations is what should appall us.” – Vasily Grossman

    Stephen Zunes wrote a summary of Hillary Clinton’s time as Secretary of State that is less than flattering:

    “Hillary Clinton leaves her position as Secretary of State with a legacy of supporting autocratic regimes and occupation armies, opposing enforcement of international humanitarian law, undermining arms control and defending military solutions to complex political problems. She was appointed to her position following eight years in the US Senate, during which she became an outspoken supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, lied about Iraq’s military capabilities to frighten the public into supporting the illegal war, unleashed repeated attacks against the United Nations, opposed restrictions on land mines and cluster bombs, defended war crimes by allied right-wing governments and largely embraced Bush’s unilateralist agenda.”

    http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14401-hillary-clintons-legacy-as-secretary-of-state

    Glenn Greenwald several years ago wrote about a NY Times article lamenting the extreme levels of corruption in Afghanistan’s ruling class, a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, that were impeding U.S. goals for post-withdrawal stability:

    “Within that article lurks one of my favorite passages I’ve read in that paper in quite some time:

    ‘The players include people tied to President Hamid Karzai’s inner circle, many of whom have profited from the crony capitalism that has come to define Afghanistan’s economic order, and nearly brought down Kabul Bank . . . Despite years of urging and oversight by American advisers, Mr. Karzai’s government has yet to prosecute a high-level corruption case.’
    “It’s simply shocking to find a country which would allow its political class to be dominated by those who ‘have profited from the crony capitalism that has come to define its economic order’ and who ‘nearly brought down’ its banking system. What must it be like to live in such a country? But even more bewildering still is that the Afghans simply refuse to prosecute their high-levels financial criminals, even though the U.S. is providing advice and oversight! Maybe it’s unsurprising to see a country treat its powerful criminals with impunity, but not when they have the United States of America providing guidance and wise counsel. What could possibly explain this? Are they simply ignoring the important lessons we’re teaching and the shining example we’ve set?” – Glenn Greenwald, “Unintended irony from the NYT,” http://www.salon.com/2012/03/08/unintended_irony_from_the_nyt/

    Hypocrilarious ! [Urban Dictionary: describing situations in which hypocrisy is so blatant and/or stupid that it is hilarious.]

    “I told my friends of the cloth that I did not believe Christ was meek and lowly but a real living, vital agitator who went into the temple with a lash and a krout and whipped the oppressors of the poor, routed them out of the doors and spilled their blood and got silver on the floor. He told the robbed and misruled and exploited and driven people to disobey their plunderers, he denounced the profiteers, and it was for this that they nailed his quivering body to the cross and spiked it to the gates of Jerusalem, not because he told them to love one another. That was harmless doctrine. But when he touched their profits and denounced them before their people he was marked for crucifixion.” – Eugene V. Debs, talking to a reporter from his prison cell, while serving time for making anti-war speeches, in 1919

  2. mellon

    If one reads the “Cautionary Tale” (basically page 9 of )”What’s the Matter with NAFTA” one sees that thanks to “free trade agreements” like Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and GATS any new enactment of affordable public, single payer, non profit healthcare in the US has been blocked for over 20 years due to so called “standstill clauses” in these trade agreements and additional backroom secret legislation. (Here is another must-read on this crucial issue.)

    However, Obama, the Congress and Senate, and evidently Hillary pretend that this is not the case, while finding other covert-aggressive ways to block any real affordable healthcare, while working to undercut healthcare affordability, raising prices globally in their trade policy Additionally, the real reason for growing unemployment is the exponential growth in technology which is leading us into a workless future, NOT the personal failings of millions of Americans. In order for America to be able to go back to work some substantial portion of the defense budget needs to be allocated to make education free for all Americans, not just college education but lifelong education. We need to look to companies like Google which are substantially less hirarchical than the US currently is. In fact, a complete reordering of society to encourage creativity by reducing hierarchy, starting with a junking of the healthcare caste system is what’s really called for. Anything else is inadequate. Lesser Evilism will not carry the day here. Lesser Evilism is how we got into the Obama mess.

    These are really key issues where honesty is demanded of the Democratic leadership. Instead they are actively lying about them. Barring some immediate and total change in that policy of denial, which I think signals a lack of trustworthiness, Ms. Clinton will NOT be getting my vote in 2016 and I suspect I am not alone on this.

    1. Ulysses

      Americans on both the right and left are more than ready to dump the two Grotesque Old Parties and start afresh. The demise of Eric Cantor reveals this with shocking clarity.

      I think our best hope to at least slow down the race to full spectrum dominance of the plutocrats is to continue to create new local realities– that show folks there is more to political life than team D and team R in the neoliberal league.

      The election to citywide office of an unapologetic socialist in Seattle, followed shortly thereafter by that city’s passage of a $15/hr. minimum wage, shows us that we are not completely powerless.

      While our “justice” system is nearly entirely devoted to serving the kleptocrats, yesterday’s settlement here, on our unlawful arrest claim, shows that it makes sense to keep slogging away in our Kafkaesque court system. We need to do this– if no other reason than to make more difficult the final imposition of the Stasi state:
      http://www.amny.com/news/ows-protesters-receive-580k-settlement-from-city-1.8404977

  3. Ed

    Stahl’s account of Reagan’s behavior in 1986 (!) is sort of buried here, but is a big deal.

    The 25th Amendment was designed to deal exactly with this sort of situation. Why didn’t Reagan turn things over to Bush, either by resigning outright or certifying Bush as the acting President. Given that Bush succeeded Reagan in the White House anyway, there was no reason not to do this.

    Another historical footnote is that Mondale came closer to winning than the 1984 election results indicate. If Reagan had not pulled himself together in the second debate, that race would have been thrown into chaos.

      1. OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL

        Back in the day I saw the best bumper sticker ever: “Give Hinckley a Second Chance”

  4. Steven Greenberg

    I was a Huffpo “Off The Bus” volunteer and did some data analysis for them. I quit the organization in disgust over the shenanigans of Mayhill Fowler. Not only was HuffPo not ashamed of what Mayhill Fowler did, they were actually proud of it. Later I found that Fowler was the wife of an influential editor at HuffPo.

    I have replace reading HuffPo with reading Google News instead. It is better for my blood pressure.

    1. Banger

      Good move! HuffPost was pretty fake from the start but I kind of liked it–but recently it has become really bad. It does offer space for some interesting columnists but it is mainly a tabloid.

  5. NotTimothyGeithner

    Age will destroy her campaign at some point. Voters in the early states expect attention, and Cantor’s loss last night demonstrates that phenomenon. In 1980, Reagan ran against Carter who suspended his campaign and 41, a completely unlikable man, and enjoyed the benefit of Night line’s daily thrashing of Carter. Reagan’s general stupidity was never exposed.

    Hillary’s disadvantage was she is not an outsider. Reagan beat 41 and his years of DC and GOP establishment support. Hillary can’t disassociate herself with Bill and Obama’s policies the way Reagan never was attached to Nixon. Reagan ran against Nixon’s pardoned after all.

    1. OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL

      The thing that makes me throw up a little in my mouth every time I think of a Hilary presidency is not whether she is too old or too corrupt, of course she is both. The revolting part is the seeming unstoppable inevitability of it all. A sleepwalking nation, unable to focus, to big to change, too medicated to care, too depressed to know, too disenfranchised to feel like they have any choice in the matter whatsoever.
      Cantor’s ouster may prove me wrong but in absolutely the wrong way. Maybe the next Dear Leader can just issue the citizen-soldiers their brown uniforms now and be done with it.

  6. Lune

    FDR supporter…
    Hollywood media elite…
    Union boss…
    Raised taxes…
    Signed treaties to reduce our nuclear arsenal…
    Granted amnesty to illegals…

    Forget about being a Republican. If Reagan were alive today, he’d be too liberal to be a Democrat…

  7. bluntobj

    Lambert,

    I guess that leaves you voting for the R candidate. Frankly there is not much difference, and given the choices made by Obama and his administration to give elites and corporate interests everything they want and more, you might be safer for a little while with the R alternative.

    This merely emphasizes the point that the stadium has two teams, throngs of screaming fans wearing red or blue, but the owners are in their box, counting gate receipts together, drinking champagne and laughing at all the idiots that make them fabulously rich through this staged conflict.

      1. bluntobj

        Lambert,

        Yes. That’s why I have consistently advocated opting out of the red-blue stadium. In many previous posts here I have mentioned this theme. Divorcing yourself from the “binary” thinking will result in your recognition that red or blue, you are being farmed like a steer for slaughter.

        Since you orient blue, May I suggest that you remove yourself from binary thinking and realize your former team is just as bad as their supposed “opponents”, and you’ve been taught (propagandized!) that D good (Which had been red, not blue, back in 2000-2001 before TPTB decided to conveniently leave the R’s red in 2008 to disassociate the democrats from communists and other negative connotations) and R bad.

  8. Banger

    Here is the sad truth about the Presidency–it doesn’t much matter who the President is the country can run itself and Reagan directly proves that fact. So who actually runs the government? It is obvious that we ought to be asking that question rather than focusing on various media “personalities.” If you’ve actually been around power you would know that power is exerted by teams not individuals though, in some cases, a powerful individual may exert a lot of influence.

    Hilary, like Obama is a brand whether she has health problems or not there are people around her who are fully able to run things. Most of the bureaucracy is in place and no President will stray from the basic play book which is handed to them in gradual doses as they move from official candidate to President-Elect to POTUS and even then there are many important matters are never brought up unless the POTUS has his/her own networks within the darker areas of the state (I know Lambert doesn’t the term that has the initials “DS”). One of the reasons I preferred Hilary to Obama in 08 is because Hilary does have connections in all areas of the State and therefore has her own power-base and therefore would have more scope in her actions than Obama. I think I was right–Obama has proven to be a relatively weak POTUS who sometimes appears to be blowing in the wind having to compromise before he needed to compromise and have to go against most of his campaign promises–he has been subject to Washington far more than other Presidents.

    1. Demeter

      Fully able to run things into the ground, maybe.

      Regime change starts at the top, or at the bottom. I’d prefer it started at the top, under the direction of the 99%.

  9. kevinearick

    Glass Ceilings & Other Such Nonsense

    Money at work is an illusion, which the majority wants to believe, perpetuating crimes against itself. Legacy simply organizes the syndicates, in cities grown for the purpose, to feed itself.

    From a historical perspective, slavery is wealth, which is why the politician’s move is to cut you down first, employing another, and ask questions at the autopsy later, moving up in the ponzi in the misdirection. Labor market data is collected to normalize the process.

    From the perspective of labor, it doesn’t matter whether the magician controls the crowd or the crowd controls the magician. They short out their own mobility every time, if uninterrupted.

    How many $15/hr jobs does it take to support a million dollar vacant condo? 95ct/hr?

    The answer depends upon labor productivity surplus, which can only exist if labor accepts the debt as income mythology, which will only happen if it turns off its brain, which eliminates productive labor, which is why the propaganda of dependency begins at birth, in a hospital built for the purpose.

    A woman giving up childbirth to be President, as an example to others, is the dumbest possible move, because the future rests upon childbirth, and the past on the politics of materialism. History is littered with empires that have played the divide and conquer game.

    Ignoring the mythology of History for a moment, what political leader in your lifetime have you seen do anything that has withstood even that test of time? RE occupation built upon a demographic ponzi has never been sustained, and replacing the slaves with fixed cost robots is the dumbest move in this cycle so far.

    The morons can take your children, but they can’t do anything with them. The ‘homeowners’ are taxing themselves onto the street with public housing, price inflation and welfare proliferation. Public education can only teach the politics of money misdirection, more of the same. And law enforcement is only tasked with finding a scapegoat.

    The net result is critters on the street looking at empty buildings. China is by no means the only nation building lost cities. Is Phoenix any better off? Have you been inside those shiny buildings in San Francisco? Ever measure foot traffic?

    You don’t have to leave your community to see landlords inflating rents on vacant unit comparables, subsidized by the bank with debt on a relative credit gradient, and dropping like flies as they are taxed to death. How many times have you heard some peer pressure moron lamenting a neighbor’s potential negative effect on property values? Those D kids.

  10. Crazy Horse

    With he marvels of modern medicine there is no reason why a deceased Hillary cyborg couldn’t carry on as before, perhaps even winning a second term… That would give the plastic surgeon the opportunity to remove the bags under her eyes, and subtly make her younger just as special Opps did in the course of the Osama bin Laden video show.

    In case you haven’t noticed the Obomber puppet uses different phrases and actually seems to have a command of the American English language, but the policies it implements represent a complete continuum from those of the Shrub puppet that preceded it.

    Regardless, I still pray to god that he take Hillary back to her coven before the next circus begins.

  11. Crazy Horse

    Banger, you are reading the wrong column on HuffPost. The real content is on the soft porn side to the right.

  12. JM Hatch

    “Once you know you’re going to win a state, there’s no incentive to campaign more there and maximize your voter turnout, rather than campaign in closer states.”

    How damn true, and this is equally true for constituents. So it really pays to be a sweaky wheel, or better yet a disloyal one, or one who has a space to be disloyal. It was really uncomfortable watching the last DP convention. As the speeches & platform were being made public, I watched the face of front line union stewards who were used to fill the back row chairs with on-command cheer leaders… looks from shell shock to “how am I going to explain this screw over to the people back at the shop” to disgust spread while the cheers became more & more mechanical. That the Republicans no longer are offering a viable option to the unions and the poor has also cost them the support of the Democratic Party. Obama just put all his corporate nominee’s for the various political appointments, and the party base had to choked it down. It’s a one party state in all but name, and that party’s name is K-Street.

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