From a post on Digby’s blog:
Much of what people know of Hillary Clinton falls into the “everyone knows” category. Everyone knows she’s a serial liar, corrupt, and untrustworthy. But how does everyone know what they think they know? Is what they know true, or do they simply feel like it’s true? Because that’s truthiness, the term Stephen Colbert invented to poke fun at people who think with their guts instead of with their heads. (I’m trying to remember a time the “neoliberal warmonger” threatened to take the country to war over someone flipping off our sailors.)
After being steeped in twenty-five years of anti-Clinton propaganda myself, I don’t claim any kind on immunity. I don’t even believe what I think I know about her. But I’m damned sure the people who who worked oh-so hard at stuffing my head with propaganda didn’t have her best interests in mind, or mine. So I focus Clinton’s long list of accomplishments and policy proposals. They are not feelings. They are on the record. What’s Hillary Clinton really like? People who actually know her speak glowingly. Me? I don’t know for sure. But I know what her opponents are like. Their deeds on the record too.
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Indeed. Many of us have been steeped in twenty-five years of anti-Clinton propaganda. I know that colors my reaction whenever I read here some Clinton-bashing. How could it not?
I was trying to think of a simple metaphor to illustrate the problem with having a poisoned discourse about Hillary Clinton, and what I always come back to is Hermann Goering and the “Big Lie”: Repeat some bullshit over and over until people start to think, hm, we keep hearing this stuff, there must be something to it.
If people writing here want to criticize Hillary Clinton, fine. I have plenty of criticisms myself. I just know there are triggers that make me want to disregard the comments. For example, it seems to be trendy to write that Hillary has thrown So-and-so under the bus. Sorry, this is a metaphor that may work for that sociopath Trump, but when you use it to describe Hillary Clinton, you’re attributing to her an attitude that she doesn’t have. Another trigger for me is when someone starts about “the Clintons”. Yeah, I understand Mr and Mrs Clinton have been a political team as well as a marital team, but when you write “the Clintons”, you are denying Hillary agency. You’re saying that she’s just the little woman doing her bit for the team.
Those sort of comments have the same effect on intelligent discourse as did–a few short months ago–remarks about “BernieBros”.
