What You Don't Know About Hillary Clinton Can Hurt You

Posted by Rude One

Yesterday, the Rude Pundit was talking to a millennial dude who will be voting in his first presidential election this year. He sure hates Donald Trump, but he doesn't like Hillary Clinton because "she's so shady." That's one of those things that trigger a gut-level reaction in the Rude Pundit because it's a belief that's based on a heaping mountain of horseshit. So he went off on the millennial.

"No," the Rude Pundit snapped, "that's completely fucking wrong. The only reason you think Clinton is shady is because 25 years of conservative media shoved it down your throat. She's been accused and accused and investigated and investigated and guess what? Not a goddamn thing has ever come of it. It's all shit made up to damage her. If you keep saying over and over that someone did something wrong, did something wrong, did something wrong, but you never prove it, then you're just an asshole."

As Henry Louis Gates more politely put it in the New Yorker, "For all we know, Hillary Clinton may be guilty of everything she’s accused of and more. You might say the point is that we don’t know.
And it’s in those dark gaps in our knowledge that the political unconscious makes itself felt: you can’t tell a gun from a cigarette by the smoke alone. Which inference you prefer depends on which story you prefer—assuming you’ve been given one."

By the way, Gates wrote that twenty fucking years ago. The article is titled "Hating Hillary," and it's fascinating to reread it now in the context of an election in the middle of our third decade of thinking that Clinton must be dirty from some scandal and worthy of hate.

And this is not about her donors or her paid speeches or whatever, although the way we think about those things are colored by one of the most successful right-wing smear campaigns ever. No, this is the Hillary Scandal Industrial Complex, the nexus of Filegate-Whitewater-Travelgate-Benghazi-EmailServerGate and more, all fantasies conjured by conservatives in order to punish her for the sin of being a First Lady who tried to get health care reform passed and didn't shut the fuck up and order drapes for the president's bedroom.

You think that's oversimplifying it? Then you didn't fucking live through it in the 1990s. You didn't watch as men in both parties tore themselves to pieces over what they viewed as Clinton's lack of decorum, her failure to merely be an adornment for her husband (see the reaction to Eleanor Roosevelt for this level of intense hatred).

The scorn that Michelle Obama gets for just saying that American fat fucks should exercise a little and stop eating piles of shit is horrible, and its racist elements are disgusting, but, to be sure, it doesn't come near the level of Hillary Clinton because no one could write an article titled "Hating Michelle" and have it be about anything more than a bunch of cranky yahoos.

This was universal. "Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen. Serious accusations have, of course, been leveled against the President’s wife, but it’s usually what people think of her that determines the credence and the weight they give to the accusations, rather than the reverse," Gates wrote.

Clinton herself in 1996 offered a prescient explanation of the why she was a target for such animosity: "I believe that we’re going through a significant transition—economically, politically, culturally, socially, in gender relations, all kinds of ways—and so someone as visible as I am is going to get a lot of attention. I think if the spotlight were turned on many of my friends in their own private lives somebody could make out of it what they would: ‘My goodness, she didn’t take her husband’s name,’ or ‘She’s the one who travels while her husband stays home and takes care of the children,’ or ‘She has a very traditional role—does that mean that she’s sold out her education?’ There could be questions like that raised about nearly every American woman I know."

What pissed people off about Clinton is something that still pisses them off. Sometimes, she just sickens of all the bullshit and she lets you know. In the early 1990's, when it was still unusual to see a male candidate's wife as anything other than supportive arm candy, Clinton wasn't afraid to step in it, like with her famous remark about working instead of staying home and baking chocolate chip cookies (which led to the degrading act of publishing her cookie recipe to show sexist traditionalists that they needn't be scared of the big, bad lawyer lady).

The Rude Pundit has one other theory for why conservatives have kept up their hatred of Clinton. See, when Bill's affairs started to be known beyond Arkansas, during the 1992 campaign, she famously stuck by him. That enraged the right because they hoped the feminist governor's wife would dump him and do in Clinton's pursuit of the White House. The fact that she never threw Bill under the bus when, really, who could have blamed her, undid damage to Bill every time a new sex scandal erupted. So it exacerbated their hatred because the right could never bring Hillary Clinton to heel, even when they thought her own beliefs would make her do what they wanted.

You have to understand that history in order to understand Clinton. Read the Gates article. It's all there, twenty years ago: her hatred of the press, the small circle of confidantes, the warmth that people say she has on a personal level, all the accusations of Machiavellian manipulation, and, especially, the so-called scandals that never became scandals.

"So," the Rude Pundit said to the millennial, "it's just being dumb and ill-informed to not vote for Hillary because of fake scandals. However, there are lots of reasons not to vote for her that have nothing to do with that."

And that is where we will pick up in part 2. 

Hillary Clinton and Video Games: A Cautionary Tale (Part 2 of What You Don't Know About Hillary Clinton Can Hurt You)

Back in the dark ages of the 1990's, a certain hysteria was sweeping the land. Pre-Internet, before your children could watch people slice off parts of themselves and have sex with them on YouTube, some parents' groups were falling on their fainting couches over violence and a little bit of sex in video games. This came after the fainting over dirty words in songs. When she was First Lady, and running for Senate from New York, Hillary Clinton took up the cause of stopping the kiddies from seeing digital breasts and blood.

In December 1999, campaigning in more conservative areas of Long Island, Clinton spoke out against the manufacturers of video games and called for uniform ratings across media, hinting that if it wasn't done voluntarily, she would introduce legislation for that if she became senator. She talked about visiting a video arcade: "It's a very revealing and sobering experience." As for games at home, "I couldn't help but be upset when I read about the two boys from Columbine being obsessed with the game Doom."

Her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, using a report from the Federal Trade Commission that said that media companies, including video game makers, targeted young people in their advertising of content with violence, went out on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton in September of 2000: 

"President Clinton, making a rare appearance with Hillary Rodham Clinton to support her Senate candidacy in New York at the Jewish Community Center in New Rochelle, condemned the abuses cited in the report. The Clintons suggested they would support government restraints if the industry did not curb advertising aimed at underage audiences."

While a senator in 2005, Hillary Clinton became outraged because the 2004 game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a mini-game involving "graphic" sex. This is known as the "Hot Coffee" mod to the game, and if a badly-animated cartoon guy nailing a cartoon woman is your thing, you can watch videos of it. Clinton asked the FTC to investigate Rockstar games to see if this was intentional (it was), saying, "I hear from parents all the time about the frustration they feel as they try to pass their own values onto their children in a world where this type of material is readily accessible."

In a statement on her formal letter to the FTC, Clinton went further: "The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder...I am announcing these measures today because I believe that the ability of our children to access pornographic and outrageously violent material on video games rated for adults is spiraling out of control."

The measures she was calling for included legislation to "prohibit the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors and put in place a $5000 penalty for those who violate the law." In December 2005, along with Senators Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, Clinton announced she was sponsoring a bill, the Family Entertainment Protection Act, that included the fine and community service to the on-site manager of any business that sold or rented "a Mature, Adults-Only, or Ratings Pending game to a person who is younger than seventeen." It also imposed ratings system oversight so that the government could judge whether or not games were being marked "Adults-Only" correctly.

The bill failed to even make it out of committee, thanks to pressure from the video game industry, as well as free speech advocates who called it government censorship. Oh, and the fact that any of the connections that Clinton was making between violence and video games was utter nonsense.

The point here is not that Hillary Clinton attacked video games, although if the Rude Pundit were a gamer, it would give him pause. The reason for bringing this up deserves some context, especially for the kids reading this blog, and it connects very clearly with the 1994 crime bill that has gotten so much attention lately.
And that, sweet readers, is for Part 3. 

What You Don't Know About Hillary Clinton Can Hurt You, Part 3: The Balance Sheet

Last night's debate in Brooklyn was utterly and completely useless. It told us nothing new, and no one stumbled bad enough or soared high enough to make a difference. The Democratic audience was as boorish and annoying as any Republican debate crowd. When the 1994 crime bill was brought up, Hillary Clinton was asked if it was a mistake that she supported it (she was First Lady and could not vote on it) while Bernie Sanders was never fully asked about the fact that he really, actually voted for it. The bill didn't become law because Hillary Clinton advocated for it. It became law because members of Congress voted for it and the president signed it. So, really, the effects of the bill are more on Sanders than on Clinton. She is not completely innocent here, but a little perspective is always necessary.

But the crime bill is an interesting case. Because, see, it is of a piece of a kind of liberal self-loathing that started under Reagan and didn't end until Barack Obama was elected. Oh, gather round, dear millennials, come over to the campfire and listen to the Rude Pundit spin a tale or two.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the worst thing a politician could be called was "liberal." Saint Ronnie Reagan made liberalism into the enemy of real America, and the people bought into it. "Liberal Democrats" became a pejorative, used any time any Democrat proposed anything that smacked of government interference in "freedom," which is defined as "shit conservatives like." It worked so well that many Democrats began running away from liberalism for fear that they might be tarred with the foul epithet. That's how we got the sight of Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis riding around in a goddamned tank in the 1988 election. 

You don't want to appear like a punk-ass, bleeding heart liberal? Show how tough you are. Go shoot some shit up.

For Democrats, defensiveness about liberalism became the default setting. Sure, sure, your Ted Kennedy or your Barbara Mikulski could get away with being openly left-wing. But, especially if you wanted a national profile, you had to hedge on your ideology and demonstrate that you could be as tough and mean and violent as a Republican. And that meant you had to do some things that showed that brute strength and also showed that you weren't beholden to liberal interests. Remember, too, that we were still in thrall to the Cold War mentality, so "liberal" equaled "commie" to many people.

After 12 years of Reagan and Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton was elected president. Now Clinton was always aware of the need to not seem too liberal, as his near-psychotic support for capital punishment showed. Clinton's presidency was marked by what has been praised as his "triangulation" on Republican issues, especially when he had to deal with a Republican-led Congress for most of his terms. That meant that he would take up a conservative goal, like welfare reform, and make it his own, adding in a few progressive elements here and there. You could call it "compromise," if you like, except compromise usually entails a more even split in what each side gets. Otherwise, it's just "surrender." Many of us called it "abandonment." (The Rude Pundit stood in a voting booth in a church in Indiana in 1996 for several minutes, wondering if he could pull the lever for Clinton because of welfare reform. He did, for the sake of Supreme Court nominees, always the endgame of any discussion on whether or not to vote. Of course, Clinton didn't get a chance to nominate anyone in his second term.)

What does this have to do with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders? In the first part of this series, the Rude Pundit dismissed outright the various made-up scandals that have given Clinton this undeserved aura of shadiness. That just doesn't fucking matter because it's all lies with a good publicist. And there is no reason in the world to give a frantic rodent fuck about what she did or didn't say in her speeches to Goldman Sachs. It's another fake-out that Sanders is annoyingly using to dent Clinton. And, at this point, how many fucking politicians aren't beholden to one well-funded group or another? If Hillary does Wall Street's bidding, Sanders has certainly backed off anything radical against the NRA.

The second part of this series looked at Clinton's blatant exploitation of unwarranted fears of the effects of violence and sex in video games. And that's where the rubber hits the road for this blogging voter. It's not because of video games, per se, but it's because, like her husband and like so many Democrats before and even now, she chose to demonstrate that she has conservative street-cred in the most convenient of situations.

This is where her support for the 1994 crime bill comes into play. She chose to become a strong advocate for it because she and Bill were using the threat of gangs, crack, and super-predators to show that they can be tough and right-wing, too (and were unafraid of offending African Americans). It's there in her 2002 speech supporting the Iraq war. She said, "In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001." She was almost totally wrong, except for the 9/11 stuff. But it sure sounded hawkish as hell.

The Rude Pundit's discomfort with Hillary Clinton is not because she's flip-flopped on some things. It's not because she's got skeletons in her closet. Christ, Clinton's closet is must be swept clean at this point. No, it's the political expediency that bugs the shit out of him. It's the selling out of liberal goals in order to appeal to people who wouldn't vote for her anyways.

And you can argue that Clinton has done so very much for women and for the dispossessed around the world. You can do that, quite successfully. But then someone could easily counter that Clinton's vote in support of the Iraq war undid a huge amount of the good she has done. It's that inability to connect women's rights and human rights to the cataclysm of the wars and conflicts she advocates for, that great harm has been done to families because of the 1994 crime bill she supported. That balance sheet, finally, is the reason the Rude Pundit can't support her in the primary.

(Obligatory note: Yes, he will support her in the general if she's the nominee because the Rude Pundit isn't a self-righteous prick.)