The Chris Moeller Archives

Nevertheless, she persisted-- in blaming everybody but herself

Hillary Clinton has retired to history as the woman who couldn't quite parlay her husband's marital infidelities into a presidential tenure of her own. Rather than ushering in the full consummation of her master plan, 2016 instead brought surprising and humiliating defeat before Alexander Hamilton's Electoral College and a divorce for the Weiner/Abedins. With the financial funnel to the Clinton Foundation now clogged perhaps for all-time by the two-time candidate's failure to grasp the United States presidency and then to parcel out weapons and munitions to tinpot dictators, Hillary has instead returned to the practice of pimping books to the upper-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party in her efforts to build a personal financial fortune.While she engages in that, Bernie Sanders moves forward a plan in the United States Senate to provide all Americans with health care coverage that's paid for by their taxes-- no copays, premiums, or deductibles.

Which direction should I direct my eyes?

The Intercept has a well-timed report on the push-back against the Bernie/Elizabeth Warren single-payer plan by the health care-for-profit industry. What's shocking, or maybe not so shocking, in the piece is how many of the lobbyists speaking up in opposition to health care as a human right are former congressmen-- and Democrats to boot. There's former Representative Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, now openly representing the American Hospital Association. And former Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota, who now lobbies directly for Aetna, AFLAC, and Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals.

New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait, a Democrat in the most modern definition of the word, puts Bernie on blast for "misleading" people with his life-saving plan. If you can make heads or tails of Chait's argument, drop me a summary in the comments. New York's Rebecca Traister and Slate's Michelle Goldberg got a girlfriend's back as Clinton devotes several hundred pages in print to a lengthening list of people that are responsible for her electoral failures-- Sanders, who endorsed her to his own personal detriment; the New York Times, about which you could say the same; Vladimir Putin; Jill Stein; and Jim Comey-- none of them being her or a member of her campaign staff. Instead of writing about health care, or police shootings, or U.S. bombing campaigns that pause only to re-load, we get from both Traister and Goldberg's reviews that million dollar question: why isn't Hillary even angrier?! Hmm. I just don't know. I hate Donald Trump. That I know. Let me click on this link. These two journalists both ask also-- point-blank-- why are people so angry about Hillary's new book? It's a question that answers itself regarding a publication that never gets around to addressing the military policies Clinton has enthusiastically endorsed that kill tens of thousands of innocents in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine, and Somalia, and that relentlessly and ruthlessly betray the Democratic Party's attempts to brand itself honestly as AN ENEMY of privilege, racism, and violence, even though the stated purpose of the book, by the title alone, is to tell us "What Happened."

Cognitive dissonance.

posted by CM @ 9:18 AM