Not all Bernie supporters went trashing Hillary during this contentious primary season. But a significant minority of them did. These are, by in large, the same minority who are now flocking to Jill Stein, a woman whom they thoroughly ignored or outright rejected in favor of Bernie. And now that Bernie wants them to support Hillary instead of Jill, they flock to Jill anyway, essentially saying to him, by deeds rather than words, "Fuck you, you old, coot! We don't care what you have to say anymore!"
I know democracy dictates such people's vote counts just as much as mine, but damn! Even Tinder dates are less back-stabbing and fickle!
You see, it's people such as these who have deliberately trashed Hillary's character. They claimed to do it out of love for Bernie, but in truth, they did it out of a hatred for anything that got in Bernie's way, and that meant Hillary became Satan incarnate to them. They regurgitated anything from Faux News they could get their hands on, and because the attacks came from the Left, many people bought them as true, in spite of most of them having been debunked long, long ago.
First they destroyed Hillary's poll numbers, then they promoted Bernie by saying, "Bernie is the better candidate because he polls better than Hillary!" Which is a little bit like pissing on someone else's sandwich, and then saying, "My sandwich is better because it has less urine on it!" Well, technically, that's true. But when you're the one responsible for the urine-soaked hoagie, isn't it a little bit unfair that you fault your own urine? In like manner, it's a strange sort of logic that the people who made the argument about Hillary's bad poll numbers were the ones responsible for them in the first place!
Don't believe me? Consider the following graph, provided by Real Clear Politics:
Starting in November of 2014, Hillary polled pretty well, with approval numbers in the 51% to 52% range. The e-mail story broke regarding Hillary back in 2013 when the Romanian hacker "Guccifer" broke into Stanley Blumenthal's email account, and showed that emails were sent to Hillary on an address which was clearly private. The story began to pick up steam in January of 2015, but this did not significantly hurt Hillary's poll numbers. Whitewater, Vincent Foster's suicide, Bill's philandering, they were all just as well known then as now, and still Hillary's positives were at 52%. Then The New York Times broke a new twist on the email story on March 3, 2015.
But no! That's NOT when her poll numbers dipped! The numbers did not really begin to decline until weeks later, proving that it was not the email story dragging her down. It was when she officially declared her candidacy for president that her poll numbers dipped, proving that the real reason for Hillary's disapproval among certain voters was certain people, primarily men, hating "uppity women."
Hillary's positive and negative numbers remained tied at 45% until roughly July of 2015. That's right about when Bernie Sanders began picking up steam. And when the vocal minority of Bernie supporters began trashing Hillary any way they could. At the time, it wasn't that they really hated Hillary. She was just in the way.
Hillary, to her fault, gave them plenty of motivation to begin hating her. When asked about the Keystone Pipeline, Hillary gave a non-committal answer. She was later forced to come out against it through the backlash. When pressed about her past record opposing gay marriage, she again hedged before flip-flopping in favor of it. When asked about the Trans Pacific Partnership, she again gave nuanced answers before coming out against it based on a technicality which satisfied no one.
But those actions of Hillary's did not come anywhere close to justifying the kind of vitriolic hate-filled rhetoric which came at her from the most fervent on the Left - many of whom were political newbies. They got very, VERY fired up, and very VERY anti-Hillary. All out of love for Bernie, or so they said.
And now they've completely abandoned Bernie for Jill. Bernie at least had a legitimate shot, because only two-party candidates can win in our polarized system. But Jill is nothing but a spoiler, and everyone knows it. "Lady Nader" (as I call Jill) is Trump's best shot at victory.
Makes you wonder what the Bernie-Bailers are really committed to, doesn't it?
So now it's over, and it's time for everyone on the Left to go back to loving Hillary at least as much as they did back in February of 2015, when she was approved of by 52%, and hated by only 42% (all Republicans). But it's not happening, in large part due to the continued trashing of Hillary from the Left. In fact, so bad has this trashing been that I've been forced to continue my pro-Hillary investigative posts, just because people keep coming up with more and more bizarre accusations dragged out of imagined slights in Hillary's past - all of them taken from Right-wing news sources.
Well, I can't abide that sort of nonsense anymore, and I hope you can't, either.
You people who trashed Hillary from the Left are the same people who gave her a 52% approval rating to begin with. So now get your asses back up there! You tore her down, so you rebuild her!
If you make a mess, you clean it up! And at the risk of sounding like your mother, I'm sick and damned tired of cleaning up your messes for you!
Eric
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