@whisperwatch – An argument I’m hearing among the left after this 2016 election concerns moving on and “uniting” before knowing what the fck happened. People are trying to shepherd folk away from spending serious time analyzing what went wrong and which decisions made by which people/politicians caused “President Trump” (bleh!)
There’s nothing futile about pinpointing what went wrong and attempting to make people understand how their head-in-the-sand reactions to facts caused it. We can’t paper over how this came to be with shallow unity. Shallow unity isn’t a long term fix and is easily broken with the slightest challenge.
I say this because people are still walking around here making excuses for why the unsinkable Hillary Clinton sunk on her maiden voyage as a general election candidate.
Not only that, educated grown-a$s people are blaming everyone BUT Clinton in her own political demise. Some are even saying Jill Stein’s 1% is the reason Hillary Clinton lost Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and Pennsylvania! No.
Figuring out what happened and the role certain decisions played in bringing about a “President Trump” (bleh!) is imperative. This has to be dealt with and the Democrats have to be taken to the woodshed before moving on under a hollow “unity” banner.
How can anything be learned unless one realizes how they got themselves in the situation to begin with? That’s like saying ‘Let’s not talk about how we got in the ditch’ without knowing whether or not the person driving the car is at fault. Can he drive? Did he ignore warning signs about there being a ditch? Was he watching the road? Did the city/state neglect installing a sign to warn drivers of the ditch? Etc. This is called critical and analytical thinking. Nothing wrong with that.
There’s a reason why engineers analyze everything after a building falls, a plane crashes or a boat sinks. They need to know what happened so they won’t repeat the same fcking mistakes in the future and endanger more people.
This 2016 election, to many including myself, was like an engineering disaster. A combination of many things went “wrong” all at the same time to cause this catastrophe:
-Clinton,with the help of her allies and apologists, was determined to run for President in an atmosphere ripe for anyone promising to change the system
-Revelations about Clinton’s financial entanglements with Wall St, the Clinton Foundation, foreign donations and campaign cash
-Consequences of Clinton’s decision to set up a private server in her house to control information
-Repercussions of Clinton’s questionable decisions as Secretary of State
-Corporate media giving billions of dollars in free airtime to Trump
-Corporate media paying little attention to Bernie Sanders outside of the debates
-Corporate media all but completely ignoring the green party for the entirety of the election cycle
-Corporate media allowing Clinton’s allies to engage in red-baiting
-Corporate media ignoring most of the content of the wikileaks revelations in favor or saber rattling around Russia and Putin
-The weight of the decisions made during Bill Clinton’s presidency
-Laws passed during the 1st Clinton Administration and how the consequences of such policies affected who came out to vote in 2016
…and on and on and on!
So, you’ll get no kumbaya from me at this point. A number of things happened all at once to contribute to this situation and Clinton’s media-allies are determined to defend themselves, their jobs and their access in the wake of their insistence on her as the nominee.
Some people who sounded the fcking alarm during the primary actually ended up voting for Hillary Clinton anyway, which makes it hard for them to effectively make their points today about what happened.
Every time they try to discuss the issue, hard core Clintonites throw the Popular Vote count in their face. Well, the Popular Vote includes a lot of people who had a serious problem with Clinton as a candidate but who were shamed/scared into voting for her over Trump.
So thinking critically and figuring out how we got to “President Trump” (bleh!) is crucial. If not, it’s like replacing your shattered window with a plastic garbage bag: it’s not a long term solution and it looks ridiculous.