It’s tough to parlay space in the intertubes into a paycheck, so I’m not surprised to see aspiring blogger Rebecca Bohanan stoop particularly low to ace a place in Huffpo’s virtual column inches. Still, when you cite validators like war criminal Madeleine Albright or CIA asset Gloria Steinem to certify your bullshit -- well, there’s a limit.
It’s not the first time our factually challenged scribe has beat the drum for Hillary, who she erroneously thinks invented universal health care! But Bohanan does more than ape the neoliberal Albright/Steinem trope that an entire generation of young women are morons in the thrall of their boyfriends’ dicks and electoral choices because they won’t line up like lemmings to support Hillary Clinton. She’s also parroting that perfect blend of neocon/neoliberal fearmongering that corporate Democrat apparatchiks have relied upon since the mid-1980s to strong-arm Blacks, Latinos, women, union members, progressives and working class people of all ethnicities to continue to vote for the corporatists’ bullshit and against their own self-interest.
Normally, I wouldn’t give this kind of two-cent crap my time of day, but Bohanan gratuitously took a shot at my friend Spencer Thayer and his brilliantly seditious and wildly popular website wontvotehillary.com WITHOUT LINKING TO IT, and that just cannot stand.
On a more serious note, Bohanan shat down the neck of an entire generation of young women. That’s right, lassies. In Bohanan’s worldview, if you won’t hold your nose and vote for Hillary, you’re just a tool of patriarchy. A failure as a feminist. A zombie vessel of mansplaining. And all your hook-up pals for Bernie are woman-haters who won’t vote for her because she has lady-parts.
This is actually a flat-out lie. First of all, an appalling number of so-called progressive white men are falling in line like Stepford wives to pledge their support for Hillary. Take my personal friend John Bachtell, chairman of the Communist Party USA, who just came out publicly in US News & World Report, I kid you not, to declare that we must get in line and back Hillary because: Trump. I love you, John, but the next time you’re at Waldheim Cemetery you ought to apologize to the remains of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
Or take perennial corporate Democrat enabler and one-time Sanders supporter Tom Hayden, who declared in April that he was abandoning Bernie for Hillary not just this coming November, but in the hotly contested California primary, because she has the backing of what the brilliant writers at Black Agenda Report adroitly describe as the Black misleadership class. Same thing with California governor Jerry Brown, who’s rallying with other panicked white male Democratic Party toadies to back the anointed candidate of the banksters and the corporate bloodsuckers, arguing that despite his longstanding lousy relationship with the Clintons, Bernie has made her better.
These rationalizations are also flat-out lies. Hillary Clinton will do what virtually every president of either party since FDR has done to working class people, people of color, women, children and the poor at home and abroad: fuck them politically and economically with the pointy end of the stick. Look at her record, including her chronic public fibbing -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning website Politifact rates fully 50% of Hillary’s public pronouncements half-true, mostly false, flat-out false or pants-on-fire lies.
OK, so lots of politicians are liars. Unfortunately, a cursory review of Hillary’s political positions on the issues, her legislative agenda and her track record as Secretary of State is even more horrifying -- including for women and their children. On Iraq and Libya, she rolled like a true blue neocon hawk, inflaming ongoing conflicts in which literally millions of civilian women and their children bear the brunt of those horrors. She’s been backpedaling from her craven vote on the Iraq war this election season, but Hillary owns the disaster that is Libya. While it’s true that her callous remark “We came, we saw, he died.” referenced the summary execution by sodomization of a man rather than a woman (Western bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi), she ardently pushed for the clusterfuck that produced the currently failed state. The consequences for women and other living people in Libya has been a disaster.
Not too feminist by my measure, but then again Hillary pal Madeleine Albright thought that US policy under her watch during the Clinton administration -- which killed half a million Iraqi kids -- was a-OK. Small wonder prominent Republican hawks favor Clinton over Trump, who they deem insufficiently interventionist.
This record alone renders Hillary faux-feminist in the extreme, since policies that harm women and children are not feminist. Not so, according to Bohanan’s calculus, though, because some white men oppose Hillary and that MUST BE SEXISM! By that logic, us girls should be singing the praises of heinous fucks like Margaret Thatcher, Imelda Marcos and Sarah Palin because they are prominent political creatures with vaginas. There’s a profoundly anti-feminist undercurrent in both Bohanan’s frame and Hillary’s record, which Barbara Maclean has ably documented as fundamentally neocon -- and no neocon is a feminist. Yet this is exactly the fundamental reality that apologist apparatchiks like Steinem are trotted out to try to undermine.
The truth is that Hillary has happily backed a boatload of domestic and foreign policy positions that hurt women and their children -- and yes, men. Rania Khalek has adroitly documented that Hillary is well to the right of Trump on a host of issues, including trade and foreign policy. Hillary advocates a twelve buck an hour minimum wage -- with women workers shouldering a disproportionate burden of that poverty salary. She opposes single-payer healthcare, backing instead mandatory health insurance that millions of women and their children can’t afford to use -- but that’s been a bonanza for insurance companies and the larger ‘health’ sector, which has given her more than $13 million. She is a darling of the Wall Street class that crashed the economy in 2008, thanks to deregulation pushed through by her husband Bill -- and that white male bastion of the 1% has been happy to fork over millions of dollars for Hillary’s presidential run, just as they did for her Senate campaigns.
Hillary has said she could ‘compromise’ on abortion if it included exceptions for a mother’s health. She tacitly backed the right-wing coup in Honduras, leading to sweeping human rights abuses -- including the assassination of environmental activist Berta Caceres. Michelle Alexander and Musa Al-Gharbi have laid out the appalling consequences of Hillary’s support for policies in arenas that range from Bill Clinton’s crime bill to the dismantling of the social safety net, actions with enormously negative consequences for poor and working class people, including millions of Black and white women and their children. She’s reportedly the favored presidential candidate of the Saudis, who run one of the most hostile regimes to women on the planet. Even nurses -- a boatload of whom are women -- can’t stand her. National Nurses United has vowed to vigorously oppose Clinton and her policies both inside and outside of the upcoming DNC, on issues that range from single payer health care to affordable college education.
For a quick snapshot of Hillary’s willingness to say anything and betray anybody to boost her political positioning, it’s well worth a few minutes of your life to check out this video. Among the pearls in the piece: she opposed gay marriage for years, until she changed her mind in the face of prevailing popular sentiment. She says she’s a progressive, except when she says she’s a centrist. She’s blamed the Wall Street crash of the housing market on homeowners. She actively worked to get NAFTA passed during her husband’s presidency, including helping Bill block opposition from labor and environmental groups -- although she later claimed she was a “critic” of NAFTA “from the beginning.”
I could go on and on about Hillary’s shady relationship with the truth -- or about her faux feminism and faux populism and faux environmentalism, but why not check out the extensive clips list that Bohanan straw man Spencer Thayer has assembled instead? Read, weep, then tell me Hillary’s the only candidate for us lassies. And don’t buy the argument that Bernie’s pushed Ms. Clinton reliably to the left -- a useless pile of steaming wishful thinking that BAR’s Glen Ford has deftly debunked.
To address Bohanan’s dubious numbers re the alleged sexist manpeople dynamic, I ran my own completely unscientific poll on my Facebook page, and I gotta tell you the ladies just aren’t buying it. I know the vast majority of the females that rallied in with opinions in my poll, and the notion that these intelligent, formidable, fearless women are in thrall to hominids with a pecker is just laughable. Nope, they can’t stand Hillary on her own (de)merits -- and they don’t need some manperson to ‘splain it to them. The age of my poll participants varies from pretty damned young to full-blown crone, with a couple dudes who also rallied in (H/T to poll participant and LGBT activist Andy Thayer, who reminded me of the Saudis’ reciprocated love for Hillary).
I’ll note that it’s quite true that a key target of Bohanan’s lame diatribe, younger folks, are in general rejecting Clinton by huge margins. In Illinois alone, my home state, 86% of 17-29-year-olds backed Sanders over Hillary. Presumably that includes - gasp - women. They’ve got literally scores of reasons to reject the woman candidate in this race, and it would be really great if their female elders took note and voted accordingly.
To be fair to Bohanan, she’s hardly the only liberal/neoliberal shill out there who is happy to suspend a commitment to the facts to back her gal. But let me suggest an alternative.
There’s another woman candidate in this race besides Clinton, and she’ll be on many ballots across the country: the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who’s called Clinton out for her ‘false feminism’ and raging hostility to policy positions that would have real benefit for women and their children.
I’ll vote for Stein in the general election if Hillary is the Democratic Party nominee. I most certainly will not vote for Hillary. The binary of voting for one of two wings of the same corporate party is not a choice -- especially if one has to choose between either Trump or Clinton. It’s a trick bag -- one that young people of both genders in particular are overwhelmingly rejecting.
They intuitively understand that the lesser of two evils is still evil -- and that neither of these candidates offers a real ‘choice’ for those of us hungry for living wage work, affordable education, quality health care that doesn’t impoverish patients, equal rights, an end to racist criminal (in)justice policies, and protection for the planet that sustains us all. Those of us who are older could learn something from the kids.
And we better get ready to join them on the barricades, because that’s where we’ll all need to be if either Hillary or Trump wins.
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