Hillary Clinton needs to shut the fuck up.
After the profound embarrassment of losing to the most pathetic, despicable, perhaps the most disliked and supposedly unelectable political opponent to ever lie and bumble and bullshit his way into a presidential election, she should have taken it as a sign that it was time for her to bow out of politics with what remained of her dignity. The tiresome refrain since before the Democratic Primaries began last year has been that we need someone “electable,” someone “who can beat Trump.” As if that should be a very difficult thing to do. It’s as though everyone’s forgotten how terrible and what a long-shot was the candidacy of Donald Trump. Few people believed he could win. Trump didn’t so much win as Clinton lost.
She and her supporters can continue to blame Russian social media bots and sexism for her loss to Trump, and while I don’t deny those as factors, they were not the keys to her failure. Voter suppression was more pivotal in the 2016 election, and has been in most elections, but even that can’t take the bulk of the blame for Clinton’s loss. Her lack of support, her poor record, her position as a champion of the moneyed establishment, and a lack of policy beyond more of the same, had more bearing on her loss than trolls or sexism.
People generally did not, and do not, like Hillary Clinton. I voted for her, despite my dislike, and since then, she has done nothing but make herself more unlikeable. Her attacks on Bernie Sanders, saying that “nobody likes him,” and essentially claiming that he’s a do-nothing fraud, incapable of accomplishing anything, are, apart from being classless, insulting, and hypocritical, bullshit. Sanders is more popular than she has ever been. Her refusal to say whether she’d even back him if he won the nomination is further insulting, and speaks to the petty and dishonorable person she is, all the more so considering the way he campaigned for her after her campaign forced him out of the primary in 2016 through corruption and dirty tricks.
Clinton also made the unfounded and stupid claim that Tulsi Gabbard is a “Russian asset.” Because everything is about Russia. For which Gabbard, claiming that the attack damaged her campaign prospects, as if they were promising prior to that, is suing Clinton.
Clinton, acting as representative for the Democratic Party’s ruling neoliberal, business-tied, pro-war wing, which so closely resembles the Republican Party of yesteryear, is taking every opportunity to attack any dissent to the status quo, anyone with a more progressive stance than the DNC establishment’s paid-for, and proven failure, policy positions. She’s taking every chance in interviews to sabotage any possibility of the Democratic Party changing for the better.
Whatever her intentions, she is succeeding primarily in helping Trump and the Republicans. By attacking more progressive Democrats and continuing to promote the so-called “moderate” policies of her failed campaign, she is helping Trump as she did then, setting up the loathsome buffoon for yet another victory this November. Perhaps that’s her goal: to ensure that no one succeeds where she failed; see to it that no one proves she was wrong, that in fact she was a terrible candidate with a poor platform, and that her loss was a response to her unlikeability.
But it’s not only Hillary Clinton who needs to shut the fuck up.
Obama could stand to shut the fuck up about a few things as well.
His comments universally decrying “call out culture” and “wokeness,” while of some merit, are flawed and ultimately unhelpful. While true that calling out people online may not be the most productive thing, and that sometimes the “canceling” of people can go too far, to write it off entirely and say it’s “not activism” is willfully missing its point and overlooking its value. At its best, “calling out,” or “canceling” people for bad behavior, whether words or actions, is the natural evolution of boycotting and an offshoot of activist journalism. While sharing videos online of, for example, a racist harassing a black child for accidentally brushing his backpack against her ass lacks the gravity and moral weight of the Alabama bus boycott and its publicization, for many, it’s done with similar spirit. And there is absolutely merit in shutting down the talking points and activism of the right-wing. I don’t give a fuck if bigots have children. They push policies that endanger the lives of other people’s children, and need to be stopped. Respectability politics get you nowhere. There is nothing to be accomplished in finding common ground, which amounts to capitulating and unilaterally disarming, when the other side is so immoral and destructive. It should be taken as evidence that it’s time for Obama to shut the fuck up when the likes of Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren start complimenting him. The assertion that people need to stop complaining and that their problems will be solved merely by voting is asinine and condescending.
Lest I get accused of only saying a woman and a black man need to shut the fuck up: virtually every white man in politics needs to shut the fuck up.
I never want to hear Bill Clinton’s sickening, sexually abusive, faux-liberal conservative, pandering bitch ass say another word.
Similarly, for the likes of Biden, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg, and the rest of the inconsequential or outright counterproductive “moderate liberal” crackers. They have no place in politics anymore, and no business representing what pretends to be the major liberal or progressive party in US politics.
And it goes without saying that every cracker, from the “traditional conservatives,” to the neo-fascists of Trump’s Republican party, needs to shut the fuck up, and would be doing the world a favor if they all left to start the new racially and philosophically homogeneous nation of their dreams in Antarctica, or some fetid swamp or desert no one gives a shit about, where they can stop being a burden on decent society.