One sad benefit of the Clinton campaign is that it will always provide me with an example to show why I am an independent, not a Democrat. I will not support a Democratic candidate who displays the same faults which I have been criticizing George Bush over for the past seven years. Clinton backed the war, despite her attempts to hide this fact. She has stronger ties to the religious right than the presumptive Republican candidate. She backs the same types of abuses of executive power practiced by George Bush. The campaign has also showed that Clinton and her supporters practice the same type of politics as George Bush and Karl Rove, with more examples surfacing this week.
Clinton sounds exactly like George Bush when she pushes a tax break which helps oil companies while pretending it helps consumers. Her supporters sound a lot like George Bush when attacking the experts who argue against the plan:
“We believe the presidency requires leadership,” said Wolfson. “There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with. And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”
Maybe it would make sense to ignore the experts if the plan made some sense, but certainly not in this case. Even worse, Hillary sounds like Bush when she attacks Congressional Democrats who wisely opposed this measure:
After several days of back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over whether a summer-long elimination of the gas tax would help or hurt, Clinton took a hard line, asking her colleagues in Congress to take sides.
“I believe it would be important to get every member of Congress on record,” Clinton told supporters at a rally in southern Indiana. “Do they stand with the hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with the oil companies?
“I want to know where people stand and I want them to tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?” she added.
The use of Bush/Rove style politics gets worse. Peter Dreier has described how Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal has adopted the tactics of the “vast right wing conspiracy.”
Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he’s not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.
Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren’t being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers — including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers — in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists.
Clinton supporters have also adopted another Bush tactic–voter suppression. Women’s Voices Women Vote, which has close ties to the Clinton campaign, has been found to be behind robocalls in North Carolina aimed at suppressing the black vote by providing false information on voter registration. It is a sad day when Hillary Clinton allows Michele Malkin to take the high moral ground in exposing a scandal on the left.
The fiasco over Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force has long been forgotten ever since it was surpassed by things like Iraq, torture, etc. But you will recall that the Left was (justifiably) up in arms over the way in which Cheney handled that issue at the time.
What is forgotten even more though, is that he learned that set of tricks from Hillary Clinton’s handling of the Health Care Task Force. Hillary’s affections for Bush/Rove/Cheney style power grabs are far from a recent phenomenon; in many respects, she’s had those affections even before there was such a thing as Bush/Rove/Cheney style power grabs.