At a recent press conference, a news correspondent asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who selected Budapest, the home of right-wing leader Viktor Orbán, as the site for a meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Leavitt’s reply was as concise as it was juvenile: “Your mom did.”
The fusion of imperial prerogative with adolescent snark is telling. There was no need to plant stories in the media about Budapest as a desirable site for a summit, or generate some pabulum rendering its status as a right-wing hotbed with a degree of plausible deniability: just “your mom.” No data, no warrants, no evidence, just a schoolyard jape. Yet, the comment contains a world.
Still, for all the hand-wringing from the bothsidering bullshit artists and the clutching of the Civility Pearls for her saying that - she was right.
Hillary: “I’m going to dig my own grave. Get ready for me to fumble the bag so hard it plunges the country into a new Dark Age.”
Liberal Democrats: “Yas Queen.”
I don’t think anyone (at least not here and definitely not me) is yas queen’ing Hillary. I have a lot of reasons to fault her for a great many things, but when people were calling for their fainting couches because she spoke frankly about the Confederates, I just had to laugh. I grew up around a metric shit-ton of deplorables.
I mean, you still see so-called centrists and alleged leftists going hysterical over the term deplorables. Of course the wingnut snowflakes pretended to be so offended, too, just like when Obama made his “bitter clingers” comment. The way the usual suspects queened out over Obama’s statement was even funnier to me, since he was talking about the very state I grew up in and he was absolutely correct about that.
Do I? That’s not the critique of the campaign I’ve seen leftists fixate on. Meanwhile, centrists still venerate and emulate her. Hell, the Harris campaign poached heavily from Hillary’s 2016 team and adopted much of her “bring on board as many ‘moderate Republicans’ as you can” strategy.
There’s this idea that people who disagree with you politically are sub-human. And then there’s this consequential idea that “we need to win the sub-human voters” whenever you’re down in the polls. The end result of these combined theories of politics is a liberal party that constantly flirts with fascism under the table, while denouncing it from the front-page.
Consequently, you have people in your party viewing you as a corrupt and compromised candidate while people in the opposition party see you as a huckster and your base as suckers you’ve gulled into support. This is, incidentally, how Republicans saw their own liberal candidates in 2016. And its a fact Hillary leveraged to spoil Bush and Kasich via media back channels.
What she didn’t consider was the appeal of open and honest fascism when stacked up against two-faced neoliberal pandering. It cost her the race in 2016. And it cost her heir apparent the race eight years later.