Opinion of Hillary Clinton

[traininthedistance]

How will losing the 2016 election save America?

Actually there's a legitimate case to be made that it's more important to win 2018 and 2020– because redistricting– and we'll have a better chance then if we narrowly lose in 2016.

Is that worth the damage that a Republican trifecta can cause in the meantime?  Probably not, because (among other things, but most importantly) SCOTUS.

Anyway, Hillary is not a shoo-in of course but it would be a pretty fact-free cavalcade of motivated reasoning to claim she doesn't give the Dems our best chance as far as we can tell right now.  I can't say I particularly like her, and I'll very likely vote for whatever sacrificial lamb tries to pull her left in the primary, but as a GE candidate she would obviously get my vote because good God I'm not going to cut off my nose to spite my face.

[traininthedistance]

It astounds me that anyone could defend Clinton and speak of the President's "sacred duty to be truthful" in the same breath without being overwhelmed by irony.

Hillary's support for the Iraq War would be more justifiable if she had not so thoroughly backpedaled on her support in 2008, when supporting that war was politically inconvenient. And when she did this, she made exactly the sort of arguments that you see in Beet's defense - which, besides giving the American intelligence community far too much credit for their competence, allege the sort of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy that has served as Clinton's go-to excuse for every misstep that she's made since the late nineties.

I know that the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy" is a bit of a laugh line among right-wingers and Moderate Heroes... but, uh, if you take a look at the sort of tactics that right-wing media figures and politicos started using in the early '90s (and not really before then), well I think it's an entirely understandable thing to say and believe, modulo semantic quibbles.  I really can't fault her for that one iota, and if that makes me look like a partisan hack then oh well.