No wonder they're so angry
by Tom Sullivan
Watching last night's Hillary Clinton interview with Rachel Maddow this morning. Particularly interested with her concern for regaining Democratic control in the states ahead of the 2020 census. Asked what she did after eleven straight hours of testimony before "Tea Party Trey" Gowdy's Benghazi committee, she replied, "I had my whole team come over to my house, and we sat around eating Indian food and drinking wine and beer." And talking about sports and TV. Unwinding. Behaving in private as if they were real people. Diabolical.
But of course, painting Clinton as unfeeling and Other was the point of the hearings, wasn't it?
Matt Taibbi had some juicy comments on that at Rolling Stone. Never a fan of the kind of Clintonian "transactional politics" that triangulates on policy in service to "keeping Republicans out of office," Taibbi nonetheless conceded that Trey Gowdy made a pretty good case for that strategy on Thursday. "It's hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn't be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power."
Asked last night about civil rights compromises enacted during her husband's presidency, policies the Obama administration had to undo, Clinton offered just that as an explanation. "It was a defensive action" to prevent conservatives from gaining further ground. "Sometimes as a leader in a democracy," Clinton went on, "you are confronted with two bad choices [and ask] what is the least bad choice and how do I try to cabin this off from having worse consequences?"
Taibbi notes that the doofuses on Gowdy's committee, try as they might to make Clinton the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, simply succeeded in making her more human (something her campaign has struggled to do) while pissing off the rest of us:
The Republicans at the Benghazi hearing made Hillary a proxy for an aspect of this phenomenon that virtually every blue-state American has seethed at in the last decade or so: being accused of treason.
We've been told that we hate veterans, that we sympathize with terrorists, that we long for a UN takeover or Soviet rule. It's said all the time that it makes us happy to see cops shot or soldiers killed in battle. Not only do we hear this on right-wing TV, we see the amazing spectacle of millions of conservatives believing it. To believe this stuff, you'd have to believe we aren't even people.
[snip]
On a deeper level the Republican committee members were accusing her of not caring about martyred American lives, because, well, "liberals" only care about the victims of torture or police brutality or other special interest groups they can exploit for political gain. In conservative legend, they don't care about "regular" Americans.
What's more, even deeper down they know their social and economic theories are as much bullshit as their patriotic preening, and that their own base has seen through it enough to begin viewing them as the Other. Enough to favor making Donald Trump or Ben Carson their pick for the party's nominee for president.
— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) October 24, 2015
Meanwhile, the GOP's decades-long efforts to destroy Hillary Clinton are so many waves breaking against a cliff. No wonder they're so angry.