Here we are, faced with two terrible choices for president this fall (unless there’s a miracle and Bernie Sanders somehow manages to become the Democratic nominee): a lunatic racist Republican versus a wild-eyed interventionist-warmonger who loves big corporations.
Hillary Clinton’s probable victory in the Democratic presidential nomination is said to mark an important historical achievement for women. Certainly, she would become the first woman in the United States to be the nominee of a major party. From a broader historical vantage point, however, there’s nothing novel about a woman marrying a powerful political leader and achieving power as a result, which is what happened in Clinton’s case. It’s time for the system to reward women who achieve power of their own accord.
Hillary Clinton seems poised to become the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major American political party. It’s supposed to be a major symbolic moment, at least in terms of identity politics. But it feels hollow, largely because of something most commentators hesitate to say in public: if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton, she wouldn’t be where she is now. Why can’t a nation of 319 million people find a woman president who didn’t marry her way into the job? Because the system still won’t allow it.
So this is how American political parties are supposed to unify at the end of the primaries: everyone is supposed to vote for the winner, even if that winner is anathema to everything most members of that party believe in. Best system anyone ever invented, eh?
The media went crazy over false reports that Bernie Sanders supporters threw some chairs at a Democratic convention in Nevada. They deplored the burning of Make America Great Again hats at a Trump rally. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton personally destroyed several Middle East nations…yet the media doesn’t have anything to say about that.
Tribune Publishing, parent company of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, has changed its name after 168 years to Tronc.
In American politics, all progress is symbolic. And even by symbolic standards, it’s empty. Like, why would the first woman president have to be one of the few women in public life to have achieved fame and political power via marriage rather than her strengths?
After North Carolina passed HB2, the “Bathroom Law” designed to prevent transgendered people from bothering cis people in restrooms, I began thinking about the universe of high-profile Americans who really do cause mayhem in johns. Mostly, they’re Republican senators, coaches, and Republican Congressman who are also coaches.
The South Carolina state legislature has passed, and the governor says she plans to sign, a bill that would ban abortion in the state after 20 weeks of pregnancy, without the standard exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
Supporters of Hillary Clinton claim that her heart wasn’t into her public support for NAFTA, that she argued against the free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada as First Lady in the Bill Clinton White House. In politics, however, secretly doesn’t count.
