Grinding Old Axes
This post is self therapy and probably not worth your time. Outline before the Jump
1) Hillary Clinton is very honest. Too honest
2) Mitt Romney is extremely dishonest. He lies often and without shame. Also he made his money conning ex friends.
3) John McCain was a major flip-flopper
4) John Kerry is much too stubborn. He won’t admit it when he is wrong. He should be more willing flip flop
5) Al Gore is a bearer of inconvenient truths who deserves much of the credit (or blame) for the existence of the internet
6) Bill Clinton is an ultra wonk who is relatively honest.
7) Walter Mondale was sharp as a knife and had charisma
8) Jimmy Carter is a visionary.
9) George McGovern was the only US politician willing to try to prevent horrible Communist crimes.
OK so I skipped Obama who was treated fairly by the mainstream media. Oh yeah, Dukakis, uh I got nothing.
On Clinton’s honesty, I just surfed to Politifact. She is notoriously dishonest. Obama is notoriously honest, Their politifact ratings are almost exactly identical.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/
Clinton campaigned in prose. She presented many detailed policy proposals. Her aids generally love her (why does she have a reputation for being unlikable when essentially everyone who knows her finds her very likable ?) but anonymously complained that she kept telling them to tell her how their proposed proposal would get through the Senate and how it would be funded without adding to the deficit. In contrast Obama claimed Obamacare would work without a mandate, got elected, and let Baucus add a mandate. Honesty is always punished.
Mitt Romney is very dishonest. Ask Steve Benen about Mitt’s mendacity
OK I will now check politifact (I never have — I just gave a hostage to fortune)
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/mitt-romney/
Let’s see 30% true or mostly true while H Clinton had 49%, 9 % pants on fire vs her 3%. 24% false or pants on fire vs her 13% . The factcheckers are only human, but their verdict is absolutely clear. According to Politifact, Hillary Clinton is much more honest than Mitt Romney.
So why is it conventional wisdome that she is untrustworthy ? Could it be that Republicans’ campaign of lies was treated as a presentation of arguable opinions by main stream media which are just not willing to do their job ?
On the Con, Bain was just an administrative vehicle. The privately owned firms were owned by ad hoc special purpose limited liability partnerships. Romney convinced his (now ex?) friends to put Bain in his name just for simplicity. Then when he went into politics, he demanded that they pay him lots of money to let it go. Not criminal fraud, outsmarting people who thought they were the smartest guys in the room, but also not cricket.
3) Here again, Steve Benen did the work. The man famous for his integrity flipped like a pancake.
The narrative trumped the plain facts. The extraordinary character and integrity of a Senator who switched his positions shamelessly could not be questioned.
Here I think the secret is the “shamelessly”. We are very sensitive to hemmming hawwing and evasion, that is to sings of shame. So we mistake psychopathy for honesty (not in this case) and mistake self righteousness for actual righteousness (especially in this case).
If anyone is interested in me going on, ask in comments. I now feel calm again. I won’t be furious with the GOP and the worked refs of the MSM for … well minutes anyway.
Anecdotally, I had a conversation with some folks who will vote for whatever Democrat that wins the primary because they agree we need to get rid of Trump. They could not bring themselves to vote for Clinton.
On Clinton, in addition to the relentless Republican smear campaign, there were things like her remarkably profitable commodities deal in Arkansas and the magical appearance of her long lost billing records from the Rose Law Firm on a filing cabinet in the White House. She did contribute to her reputation. Still, compared to Trump, she was pure as driven snow.
Grinding old axes must have been an invitation to JackD to spew his tired old right wing trolling. The billings from the Rose Law Firm? JackD – our number 1 troll!
Pgl, clean out your ears. You do recall the incidents I mentioned, right? You are maybe aware that many voters who are usually Democrats didn’t like Hillary, right? Why do you suppose that was? For a guy who’s often called a socialist or communist, being called a right wing troll is refreshing.
Propaganda works, especially when the news media prefers to have their stories written for them.
Th one here I find hard to go along with, although a matter of judgment, is the claim that Walter Mondale had charisma. I have a lot of respect for him and he was honest, but “charisma”? Maybe some, but certainly no mention for Reagan unfortunately.
HRC did make some lies, about which much was made. The most prominent was her claim to have visited Bosnia in the 90s in a war zone in a helicopter. False, and GOP really pounded on that one, compared to the thousands out of Trump’s mouth. She also looked pretty bad when she and Bill took a bunch of the silverware from the WH when they left and justified that on their alleged poverty (they did return the stuff after being outed). Then there was her giving well paid speeches on Wall Street right up to shortly before she was a candidate, which I remember thinking at the time was a really stupid thing to do, and generally she is not stupid. But she and Bill have a bad thing about money.
The funny thing about her is that before she ran there was a period when she was viewed as super cool, with that photo of her in shades and a phone. Young women supposedly really liked that. But then she ran and all those young women were swooning for Bernie and then sitting home during the general election out of some pique.
Not sure what you are thinking about regarding the alleged stubbornness of Kerry. His problem was not realizing he needed to avoid looking so darned rich so much of the time. Bad optics.
You may be right about McGeovern, but I do not remember any specifics on that. Just whom did he want to stop doing bad things and where that no other politician did?