Joe Sopel of the BBC in a rather silly piece about Rolling Thunder bikers over the Memorial Day weekend asked why Americans have the choice between two candidates with huge negative polling numbers. A better question to ask is the non-question of how Hillary Clinton became so hated and despised. It's a non-question because Hillary Clinton has been the focus of one of the longest hate campaigns, mounted by the Republican Party, billionaire and millionaire fascists, hate-talk radio and cabloid media,.... even the psudo-liberal New York Times which has regularly carried the Hillary hatred of such envious nonentities as Maureen Dowd and fabricated stories from Matt Apuzzo, Michael Schmidt and encouraged by editors such as Matt Purdy.
The great uncovered story of Hillary Clinton isn't that a lot of people bought the decades of lies and slanders and libels, it's that such an effort has been made, largely with the tacit permission of most of the free press. The fact is that the New York Times, other publications, right and alleged left, all of the networks have been in on it at one time or anther. The techniques used to go after the Kennedy family were focused on Hillary Clinton like they seldom were on Ted Kennedy, and with Hillary Clinton giving them far less to work with. It's not that the sources of the lies, even those who fund the liars is unknown, it has been a blatant campaign of character assassination WITH THE APPROVAL AND EVEN PARTICIPATION OF THE GREAT AMERICAN MEDIA.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president there will have to be a huge amount of anger that enough people saw through that decades long effort and elected the most vetted candidate in the history of the United States, vetted by decades of the most expensive and elaborate campaign of character assassination in the history of the country. I have to wonder if journalists don't feel some rage that so many people will vote for her without the permission of the so-called news media.
If she manages to have a successful administration she will have endured what will, no doubt, be a regime of attack that makes that mounted against the Kennedy's look like a joke. Which would, actually, be good news about the American People, though nothing much to congratulate ourselves on. Such narrow misses aren't something we can count on, and it might not happen this time. That the media is in the hands of people who will, at the high end, publish lies about liberal politicians on behalf of what has devolved into a blatantly fascist party and the fascist billionaires who fund and own it is the other side of that.
And that's just what she's gotten from the right and the pseudo-liberal corporate media.
If Bernie Sanders, personally, hasn't gone the same route, his surrogates and supporters both among the crowds, the comment thread babblers, the bloggers and practically the entire lefty media, from Cenk Uygur to the magazines have sounded pretty much like Republican hate-talk radio on the topic of Hillary Clinton. I haven't seen Sanders do anything substantial about getting them to reign it in, even now when it's clear she won the nomination.
I can't help but think a lot of it comes from the fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman who stands a chance to hold one of the most powerful offices in the world. Another story is that that upsets a lot of alleged lefties about as much as it does the Republican-fascists. And I do accuse them of misogyny, they have held Hillary Clinton up to a standard they have never held a male politician up to. The real scandal is that it's clear that a woman who aspires to the presidency, at least when she is a Democrat must be infinitely more prepared, infinitely more tested than a man. Bernie Sanders has never been held to the same standards as Hillary Clinton by any of the media, far right to allegedly far left.
Those of us in the South know yet another reason Hillary has been pilloried by the NYTimes and the media in general: she and her husband came onto the national scene from the South.
ReplyDeleteGene Lyons wrote lucidly about how Jeff Gerth and the NYT were bamboozled by people from Arkansas who fed them lies about Clinton the way you feed fish in a fish farm. Arkansas being "exotic," and the NYT having no idea how politics is done in a Southern state, they took it all as gospel, and from that sheer ignorance Whitewater blossomed.
There has never been any substance to any attack on the Clintons (remember the impeachment came down to whether or not Clinton admitted to oral sex with a woman he wasn't married to in sworn testimony), and yet the suspicion has persisted because, basically, they were from the South and therefore NOK and probably rubes and yokels.
Jimmy Carter got the same treatment, especially after Reagan took office and restored pomp and ceremony to the White House. Carter brought Willie Nelson, who smoked a joint there. Willie is neither pompous nor ceremonious. Clinton brought the South, and Southerners are second only to African Americans as the great "other" in American culture.
Especially in American politics, especially (and ironically) in D.C., a Southern city. Self-hatred runs deep.
So Hillary is "other" because she's female and she made her reputation in the South, not the Midwest or the Northeast or even California. Worse, she made it in Arkansas, a place known only for Orville Faubus and Johnny Cash (and most people forget that's where Johnny Cash came from).
Absolutely, the Ivy League, North-Eastern establishment hated Johnson for pretty much the same ignorance mixed with an enormous amount of class-regional sense of entitlement to rule. And he was smarter than any of them were. That attitude permeates the media, even among those who are from other regions, even some from the South and Mid-West who want to make it there.
DeleteThe condescension of the lefties comes in different flavors, depending on who they are condescending to. We get it here in my state, if people could hear my accent that's all they would hear and they would discount anything I said. I doubt a Vermonter who didn't sound like he came from NYC and who spoke with an accent would ever have been anything but laughed out of the race a long time ago. But no one gets it like the South does. It's a curious thing about that, as the Sanders campaign has shown, for such people, the large non-white populations in those states just aren't there, they aren't Southerners. Neither are Southern liberals.
It's regionalism, ultimately, and "the South" is still the ultimate region because of the Civil War.
DeleteThe real distinction is between the coasts, with all the rest (beyond D.C.) being "flyover country." Nothing good comes from the rest of the country unless it is approved by the coasts (NYC or El "A"). And if I used my Texas accent (I have more than one, depending on who I'm talking to; it's a reflex), no doubt many would consider me a hick or a bumpkin.
But then I remember Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," and how those Ivy Leaguers screwed LBJ over, and the disasters they created but never really acknowledged.