In a post about which I’m generally indifferent that opens with the Kentucky county clerk before veering into Hillary Clinton and finally lighting on Donald Trump, Heather Wilhelm latches onto a good point:
How can Clinton be sorry for something that didn’t occur, doesn’t matter, is overinflated in the public imagination, and that she had nothing to do with? Well, first of all, come on. We all know she’s not really sorry. We also know, thanks to news reports released on Wednesday, why she’s pretending that she is: focus groups, which are the go-to resource of every spontaneous, principled, and backboned individual since never in the history of the world.
I think that Sec. Clinton is receiving bad advice from her campaign staff. It does not help her to swing from carefully-worded denials to stern rejection to contrition over a 24 hour period.
She should just say, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” I mean, if that worked for a disaster like having a US ambassador get killed by the savages we were allied with in Libya, it ought to work for a goddamned email server in a toilet.
I agree. On the day she opened herself up to Andrea Mitchell, she said “At the end of the day, I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions, but there are answers to all these questions.” The news coverage was that Clinton had said “sorry,” with irony quotes. The real issue has been that she doesn’t answer questions that are asked and the media doesn’t know how to ask questions.
Andrea Mitchell was the person asking if Clinton thought she should apologize. To whom? Stupid question.
I wonder if it is possible she is not a decent, honest, principled woman. And I wonder if at this point, THAT even maters
Being principled is old-fashioned and apparently has no value these days. HRC’s private server, her emails, her dishonesty, the suspicious commingling of her SOS duties and the Clinton Foundation are fluffed off because she is a democrat. Even today the Obama Justice Dept ruled that HRC was “within her legal rights to use her own email account, to take the messages with her when she left office and to be the one deciding which of those messages are government records that should be returned.” End of story. Having a private server will probably be given the same “no implication of wrongdoing” ruling too!
The above is just another example of the left’s seemingly immunity from transgressions that is more often than not denied the right. There’s also an accepted rationale by the press to ignore public opinion over what this government wants to force down peoples’ throats. This was blatantly exemplified by Obama’s first term unilateral passage of the ACA, with an assurance “you have to pass it to see what’s in it,” excusing elected representatives from even reading the bill before they passed it. A majority of the public did not support this bill. But such a negative consensus had no influence in stopping it.
Now we have a similar scenario with the Iran Deal that, according to the latest Pew Poll, indicated public support to be a mere 21%. Nonetheless, this deal was molded into an executive order, rather than a treaty, in order to grease the skids to pass with little input or oversight from the pesky R Congress. There is even more executive arm twisting to circumvent a congressional vote, applying the filibuster, conveniently avoiding democratic accountability publicly denoting who voted for and who voted against it (all with an eye on the next election, of course).
The big headline, though, is not emphasizing such an unpopular, unilateral push to pass important legislation, but rather how the R’s are attempting to slow down the bill’s passage, giving Congress an opportunity for any last minute second thought reconsiderations. But the MSM and left-sided blogs view this as shameful for the republicans to not passively submit, without dissent, to what most view as a “bad deal.”
I think that’s part of a broader trend, jan. I believe that the United States as a country is making a painful transition from a guilt culture to a shame culture. That has major implications. The members of a society regulated by internalized guilt need less watching than those in a society regulated by externalized shame.
“applying the filibuster”
The irony of a conservative complaining about the filibuster is….bizarre.
“By Julian Hattem – 09/01/15 07:01 AM EDT
A new survey shows a majority of Americans wants Congress to uphold the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.
According to the survey from the University of Maryland, 55 percent of respondents said Congress should get behind the agreement, despite some concerns.
Twenty-three percent, meanwhile, said lawmakers should instead ratchet up sanctions, and 14 percent wanted U.S. officials to go back to the negotiating table.
In a key stat for Democratic backers of the agreement, 61 percent of independents recommended that Congress approve the deal, along with 72 percent of Democrats.
Just 33 percent of Republicans expressed support, highlighting the partisan divide that has formed over the agreement, which sets limits on Iran’s nuclear ability in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
The poll was conducted online, and the participants went through an in-depth process of listening to arguments from both sides. People were subjected to a detailed list of critiques of the agreement, followed by rebuttals to those arguments with reasons to get behind the deal.”
On another blog a poster recalled that the Dems used filibusters, like they did today, as a weapon when Republicans last took the Senate from them in 2002. Yes, I’m aware that republicans have also generously applied the filibuster mechanism as well. However, it was noted that voters rewarded Dems for their perennial obstruction by paring back the Dem minority further in the 2004 elections. Tom Daschle–chief architect of the strategy–even lost his seat in the latter year. I wonder if today’s maneuver will have any consequences in 2016.
In the meantime, Obama calls the highly manipulated and strategized senate vote “victory for diplomacy†Where was any diplomacy practiced in that vote?
BTW, on-line polling is considered an inaccurate method of gauging public sentiment on candidates, issues etc.
I wonder if it is possible she is not a decent, honest, principled woman. And I wonder if at this point, THAT even maters
If she were decent, honest and principled, she’d definitively be UNFIT for office.
The woman part doesn’t play either way, though, unless she’s a man saying she’s a woman, then it is the ONLY thing that matters. If Biden REALLY wants to be President, he needs to admit that he’s really been Josephine all these years and is only now feeling comfortable admitting it to the public at large. He’d be a shoe-in then, as well she should be.
It is good to know the real numbers. Filibusters in the 2000s were at roughly the same rate as in the 90s. When Obama took office, they nearly doubled.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/15/how-we-count-senate-filibusters-and-why-it-matters/
Steve
After days like yesterday the phrase of “government of the people and by the people” drifts by like an untethered mission statement, because it no longer exists.
Government is ruled blatantly by gamesmanship, not by principled objectives. And, being a “bean counter” for how many filibusters have been tallied by each party does not take into account the seriousness and consequences of each politically disruptive procedural fling. In the case of the Iran Agreement it far outstripped, IMO, past hubris committed by the opposition team in detouring around honest debate, votes and accountability for those votes regarding something so controversial and significant as this so-called “agreement with Iran” — something that should have been processed as a treaty. The “people” are concerned by this agreement, as most polls indicate. But, their tentativeness and fears apparently do not matter much, as the democrats waltz by them to the music of their own ideological goals, and in Obama’s case, the making of a legacy birthed out of shrewd political machinations, secrecy and intimidation.
Consequently, I find such a governmental disconnect from the people disconcerting. But, it’s just another layer of progressivism that applies ear plugs to everyone but it’s own groomed constituencies.
So you would trade all of those past filibusters for a straight up or down vote on the Iran deal? Done. The rest of the world has already approved it. What we do doesn’t actually matter that much in most ways. It will make it more difficult, I hope, for the new GOP POTUS to bomb Iran, but I must concede that the GOP has been quite happy to make up evidence in the recent past to justify war, so it could happen again. What you should be thinking about is why is it that throughout the whole world, the only people really opposing the Iran deal is the GOP.
Steve
:… but I must concede that the GOP has been quite happy to make up evidence in the recent past to justify war, so it could happen again.”
If that was a reference to Bush and the Iraq War, additional post-war analysis, comments and conclusions from others point to incorrect rather than “made up” evidence being the justification for going to war with Iraq. According to a recent Colin Powell interview he reminded people there was a consensus of 16 intelligence agencies all asserting there was the highest probability Iraq had WMD’s. Even Clapper has come forth and claimed Iraq did have chemical and biological weapons which were transferred out of the country during the 15 month prologue leading up to the Iraq invasion. Other foreign countries also had similar intelligence indicating the presence of WMDs. Finally 90% of the public believed the U.S. would be attacked again, along with a public majority who approved of the invasion, followed by a decisive bipartisan agreement between the executive and congressional branches of goverrnment to invade Iraq — far different from the unilateral decision-making we are witnessing today under Obama’s presidency.
Generally speaking, party polarization, manipulation of facts, alienation of the press, divisiveness in the country, secrecy and non-transparency, pushing the envelop of executive powers are all far greater under the Obama administration than what was experienced under the reviled Bush years.
Speaking of making up evidence…what about the latest allegations by intelligence analysts complaining that the information forwarded by them to higher-ups was deliberately distorted?