Hillary Clinton lost the November election because she blew off Sanders activists and voters
The anger among Sanders backers by the time of the convention at the end of July was palpable.
According to this conspiracy theory – and that is what it is – the “Russian” hack fully explains those narrow Trump wins in three key swing states. It’s proponents argue that with the results of the alleged hacks allegedly passed on to Wikileaks (which denies it was a hack or that is source was Russian), and the resulting release of emails that showed that the DNC had conspired to throw the primary election to Clinton, and that revealed the contents of Clinton’s secret sycophantic quarter-million-dollar speeches to Wall Street banks, turned those states red.
What is ludicrous about this alleged conspiracy is that Sanders supporters already knew the DNC was in bed with the Clinton campaign. They’d already learned that first hand from Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who quit in disgust as DNC vice-chair back in late February, saying that the DNC was undermining Sanders and working for Clinton. As for the bank speeches, Clinton did all the damage herself by refusing to disclose what she’d said in those extravagantly paid gigs, and by getting caught in a lie that she couldn’t release the texts because they were “under the control” of the banks (she actually owned the copyrights). She also hurt herself by lying and saying during one debate that she hadn’t asked for the high fees when in fact her agent had demanded them. This infuriating information was all out there way before Wikileaks started releasing the documents in had in its possession.
The truth is that it was Clinton’s own actions that lost her the support of Sanders voters. There was her repeating lying about Sanders during the campaign, and her gratuitous dissing of Sanders and his supporters even after it was becoming clearer that she would win the primary because of the corrupt support she had lined up from the party’s unelected so-called “super delegates.” Then there was her decision in the fall, after winning the nomination, to ignore the 13 million Sanders voters from the primary and instead to pursue the support of what she hoped were disenchanted Republican voters upset that Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination, all doomed her in the general election.
The anger among Sanders backers by the time of the convention at the end of July was palpable and was demonstrated when over 700 Sanders delegates walked out of the convention en masse, many tossing their convention credentials over the tall security fence. Clearly, they were not going to back Hillary Clinton in November. Remember, those delegates were Sanders activists who represented millions of voters back in their home states.
Hillary Clinton didn’t lose Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and most importantly Florida because a small percentage of voters switched from her to Trump in those states. She lost those states because millions of Sanders voters nationally, and hundreds of thousands of Democrats and independent progressives in those crucial states decided they couldn’t vote for her because they were disgusted by both her and the Democratic Party. Some voted Green, some wrote in Sanders’ name, which in most states meant their votes weren’t counted, and some just got fed up and didn’t vote at all, or just skipped the presidential line on their ballot.
In other words, even if the Russians did hack the DNC and Podesta emails, and even if the leaked emails (all of which by the way were true and accurate, not fake or doctored!), did manage at the last minute to persuade a few thousand Clinton voters to switch their votes to Trump, or to simply not vote for Clinton, that only had an impact because so many hundreds of thousands of more progressive voters had already written her off as a voting option. The point is that the races in those states never should have been that close in the first place, and wouldn’t have been had the Clinton campaign not played so dirty in the primary, and then been so patronizing and vengeful towards the Sanders campaign and Sanders voters after gaining the nomination.
Leaving aside the reality that there is no evidence that Russian government hackers did obtain those emails and handed them over to Wikileaks to release during the last weeks of the campaign (the evidence is really that they were obtained by insider leaks, not by Russian hackers), the truth is that mounting evidence of Clinton corruption and of cheating during the primaries – evidence that was coming to light even without and often before disclosure of the emails – led millions of furious Sanders backers to decide they would never vote for Clinton.
The “false news” about Russians hacking US democracy, pushed by the Clinton campaign, sclerotic Democratic Party leadership, elements within the intelligence establishment and the Obama administration and parroted endlessly by the corporate media and by normally sentient liberals usually quick to condemn “conspiracy thinking,” doesn’t bode well for any real effort to wrench the Democratic Party away from its thoroughly discredited corporatist political stance, and raises the prospect of further Republican gains in the coming off-year Congressional elections in 2018.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the only way forward is going to have to be an abandonment of the Democratic Party by progressives and its replacement by a genuine progressive socialist party that is clearly of and for working people, and for those who cannot find work in this increasingly dystopian America.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton lost the election because of M-I-S-O-G-Y-N-Y in the USA
This absolute HATE for women in Leadership is so ingrained in the Culture that
Shirley Anita Chisholm said that she felt more discrimination as a woman than as a black person about 50-years ago …
The HATE that President Obama managed so graciously in public is nothing compared with what Hillary Clinton or any other woman must endure in the USA.
5 Minute Forecast – How to Stumble Into WWIII
“I believe it was in one of your newsletters where I read sometime back that an ex-KGB analyst suggested that the U.S.A. would fracture into six distinct geographical parts politically.
“I submit to you that it did fracture into at least three. I feel it is possible that the Russian involvement was not to help Trump or undermine Clinton but to start to accelerate the natural divisions within our country and then sit back and watch us unravel.”
“The high school I attended had several rivalries with other schools, as did those schools. One year before a big football game between two other rivals, somebody burned a large L in one school’s lawn and a large T in the other school’s lawn, each being the first letter of the other school’s name. It must have been fun to ‘sit back and watch’ those two beat the dickens out of each other during that game.
“Are we not doing the same thing now within the divisions in us? Who but the Russians benefit from sitting back and watching what unfolds? Just sayin’.”
The 5: Did you see the Reuters/Ipsos poll showing a third of Californians support seceding from the union now that Trump’s in power?
Anyway, we had it right here in The 5 as 2008 was drawing to a close. The guy’s name was Igor Panarin, and he said there was a 50-50 chance of such a disintegration thanks to immigration, economic decline and “moral degradation.”
Alas, his timing was way off; he forecast this rift would take place in the summer of 2010. Also noteworthy is that he was not keen for this development.
“Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage,” The Wall Street Journal summarizes him, “its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.A.”
Of course, the Russians are trying to get out from underneath the dollar, and trade with the U.S.A. has been squeezed by U.S. sanctions since 2014. But that’s another story…
But let’s leave aside the worst-case scenario right now. Let’s connect the dots between Hillary’s pivot and one of Trump’s major campaign pledges.
Under the pivot, the military is slowly concentrating its naval forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, a Trump campaign memo from last October promises “a Manhattan Project urgency to rebuild our navy.” At present, the Navy has 272 deployable ships; Trump wants to grow that to 350.
That won’t come cheap. The Congressional Research Service’s naval specialist said this month that’ll cost at least $5 billion a year for the next 30 years. And that’s just to build the ships; day-to-day operations and maintenance will be even more.
While we’ve been forecasting a collision between Trump and a GOP Congress over spending priorities — and we still expect that to be the case — Republicans have generally been united in pushing for more military spending.
For an administration that’s supposed to be “isolationist”… it sure seems to be ratcheting up Hillary Clinton’s “Asian pivot” policy.
We’ve been on the case from the beginning here at The 5: During her term as secretary of state in late 2011, Clinton laid out an Obama administration plan in Foreign Policy magazine, shifting America’s global military priorities. The United States would wind down its wars in the Islamic world and “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region — where the Pentagon would position 60% of its naval assets by 2020.
Chinese leaders understandably saw themselves as the target of the pivot. “America’s strategic move east is aimed in practical terms at pinning down and containing China and counterbalancing China’s development,” said the state news agency Xinhua.
The plan was well underway by mid-2013 when a Foreign Policy writer declared, “The U.S. military is encircling China with a chain of air bases and military ports.” Indeed…
Some of the disputed territory in the South China Sea is claimed by not only China but by Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and the Philippines. In the event of conflict between China and the Philippines, the United States of America has treaty obligations to side with the Philippines.
“It’s just a matter of time before some incident or accident at sea sparks a war,” says Jim Rickards.
For months, the United States has conducted “freedom of navigation” patrols in the South China Sea — not that China is threatening anyone’s freedom to navigate the waters it claims. And as we mentioned last week, Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson has proposed blockading the South China Sea.
“Attempting to deny China access by a blockade or other means would be tantamount to an act of war,” Jim reminds us. “China fired back immediately. A leading Communist Chinese publication said, ‘Unless Washington plans to wage a large-scale war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent China access to the islands will be foolish.’
“All it would take to start a war is some spark such as a collision at sea or an attack based on mistaken identity or misunderstood intentions. For example, an accidental collision at night between a Philippines naval vessel and a Chinese fishing boat resulting in Chinese casualties has the potential to start the next world war. Now, I’m not saying it necessarily would, but the potential exists.”