God Bless Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is a calculating, pandering, triangulating dissembler who has long since decided that political power is more important than observing everyday moral compunctions like honesty and transparency. She worships at the same third-way, neo-liberal economic alter her husband made popular, which contributed mightily to the staggering levels of inequality, wage stagnation, and economic busts under which we have been suffering for 25 years. She is a de-regulating, contracting out, technocraticlly-minded, corporatized Larry Summers-disciple elitist. She has hawkish foreign policy instincts and was complicit in the dominoes of shitstorms in the middle-east that started with the invasion of Iraq.

She is, in short, a pretty run-of-the-mill politician and a pretty standard product of the Democratic Party political establishment.

And my holy God, I will be voting for her with the enthusiasm of a fat kid in a donut shop, because a President Trump would be the stuff of nightmares. And this is coming from a guy with a needlepoint portrait of Michael Myers from Halloween in his kitchen.

Even if the modern office of the Presidency weren't so weakened by the realities of polarization and the modern media landscape, I wouldn't expect huge changes from a Hillary Clinton presidency. She has neither the temperament nor the desire nor the ability to enact them. But, I expect that she will probably 1. maintain and possibly improve the gains in healthcare coverage achieved by Obama. 2. Fight to maintain gains in gay rights. 3. appoint non-crazy people to Federal judicial positions, including probably the Supreme Court. 4. Not try to deport millions of people. 5. take some action on mass incarceration/aggressive policing. 6. Not totally ignore global warming or the need for new sources of energy 7. Not cut budgets for major social welfare programs. 8. probably not wake up pissed off at Putin for making fun of her hair and decide to start a nuclear war.

In short, she'll probably do a pretty good job as a manager-in-chief and will more or less support the policies I support and probably won't actively promote many of the policies I don't support.

I don't trust a President Trump to do any of those things. He is a terrifying person. A mean, stupid man-child with no ideology, no conscience, no policy goals other than whatever happens to occur to him in a given moment and a vague desire for attention. His instinct for demagoguery would be impressive if it weren't so frightening. It's hard for me to imagine somebody I would less like to be in control of nuclear weapons.

If you are unenthusiastic about Hillary, I suggest you get enthusiastic now, because a stale, day-old quarter pounder and fries is still better than a steaming bowl of cyanide. Faced with that choice, I'll take gross fries for $1000, Alex.

This has been Today in Clictivism with Joe.