June, 2016 | The Bitchy Pundit

STOP Trivializing Misogyny

June 20, 2016 by Bitchy

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Here’s the latest pile of irrational poop that Hillary supporters are putting out there. I saw some variation of this three times yesterday. Twice, my totally respectful comments were deleted (that’s pretty telling). I guess they were too threatened to allow the absurdity of this meme to be pointed out (and yet the meme stayed up in both instances, sans my comment).

I’ll get to the misogyny later, but let me first address the complete and utter ignorance displayed here. When someone takes forty-six percent of the vote in a primary, they make demands. This has been true since the beginning of time. This is how George HW Bush became Reagan’s veep even though by all accounts, the Reagans and the Bushes couldn’t ever stand each other.

On September 11, 2008, Obama came to Bill Clinton’s office (one block from my house) for what was supposed to be an hour long meeting. The Clintons hadn’t yet started campaigning for Obama. Yes Hillary endorsed him a couple of months earlier, but it was clear that the Clintons weren’t really throwing much support behind him. That meeting lasted for over two and a half hours. I know this, because a friend of mine and I were waiting out front to get a glimpse of Obama. When Bill and Barack finally came out, I looked at my friend and said, “Bill got something big out of this”. That was very likely the day that Hillary became Secretary Of State. Less than ten weeks later, Obama announced that she would be his Secretary Of State.

Here’s a picture I took that day:

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Either the women posting this meme have no earthly idea how politics works, or they’re trivializing real misogyny because they have long term thinking deficiency, and believe that this kind of bullshit is going to help their cause right now. But it’s not helping you right now, because lots of people know how unelected officials get their posts. If you don’t know how literally every cabinet level nominee and veep have been chosen since the very first presidential election, it’s best you not post about politics. This is clearly not your thing, and you should stick to what you know. If you’re intentionally shitting on every woman in the world who has been a victim of real misogyny because you think this serves you well right now, it’s best you stop commenting on misogyny because you’re actually hurting women.

You are hurting the victims of GamerGate. You are hurting me, who gets private (I’ve taken to making them public and getting a little public shaming out of the deal) messages calling me a cunt, or telling me to “eat a bullet” (that was from a couple of days ago) simply for voicing my opinions on the internet. You are hurting all of us by trivializing misogyny. And you’re doing it by sounding like a bubble headed ditz who knows nothing about politics. Can you tell that I’m offended to my bitchy core by these idiotic people?

What’s worse than that, you’re advocating for misogyny. The very definition of misogyny, is treating women differently simple because they’re women. You want the guy who got forty-six percent of the democratic primary vote to be the only primary candidate in history to do that well and walk away with nothing? Why? Because Hillary is a woman. That’s what you’re saying. Treat Hillary differently because she’s a woman.

Think. Think before you post. What you’re doing here is eighteen different kinds of inane. And by the way, this looks to me like it has David Brock’s fingerprints all over it. You know David Brock; he’s the guy running Hillary’s social media. You know, he’s the guy who once very effectively labeled Anita Hill “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”. Yeah, that’s the guy Hillary is working with now( cause she’s an awesome feminist, and you’re helping him by peddling his bullshit.

Perhaps the people posting this meme are just dazed and confused by the fact that Bernie isn’t asking for something that will further his own career. He’s not demanding to be veep, and he’s not demanding the position of Secretary Of State. He’s asking for the democratic party to adopt a more liberal platform. Quell horreur! I would very much like to ask the intellectual powerhouses who have been posting this drivel to explain something to me: which part of Bernie’s ask are you opposed to? Have you even thought about it?

Have you thought about any aspect of this kind of propaganda? Because from where I sit, there’s nothing intellectually sound or honest here. As a woman with a presence on the internet, I beg you to stop it. You’re not helping me, and you’re not helping your daughters. You’re certainly making zero difference to Hillary and her current situation as the presumptive nominee of the democratic party.

Stop. Just fucking stop.

Why The Douchiness, Hillary?

June 7, 2016 by Bitchy

It’s like the Clinton’s can’t stop themselves from being gratuitously douchey.

Seriously, setting up an email server next to the coffee maker in the kitchen. Why? How did you think this was going to turn out for you?

Bill showing up at several polling locations on primary days. Why? Were the few votes you may have ginned up worth making yourself even less trustworthy than you already are?

And now she’s declared victory on the night before the most delegate rich state in the country votes? Why? What’s the fucking point? What does she have to gain by telling California and New Jersey that it’s over and that they don’t get a say in the results. Sorry, thanks for playing! She could have waited twenty-four hours, secured enough pledged delegates and votes to ensure beyond the shadow of a doubt that Bernie didn’t get enough votes or pledged delegates to overtake her, and then announced that she was the near certain presumptive nominee.

She could have proudly pointed out that all the votes were cast, and that if the super delegates voted perfectly in line with either the direct votes or the results in their respective states, she won.

But no, instead she’s acting like (and the media is helping her) she secured enough pledged delegates to win. She hasn’t, and she technically won’t until July 25th.

Twenty-four (okay, maybe closer to twenty-eight) hours is the difference between douchebag and winner.

She’s going to win. That’s a foregone conclusion. So why not fucking wait until all the votes are cast. What has she gained by shitting on Bernie voters in California and New Jersey?

Nothing. Not a damned thing, other than to validate the opinions of people who think she’s shady and not to be trusted.

I don’t know why the Clintons keep doing ridiculous things that offer very little benefit for them, but I do know that anyone who makes the argument that their untrustworthy numbers are entirely a product of republican attacks are slightly more ridiculous than the people they’ve chosen to make themselves stupid to defend.

Stop it Hillary. Just fucking stop it. You still need to win the general election, and banking on the fact that your opponent is a bigger douchebag than you are isn’t what I would call a winning strategy.

Don’t Do It Bernie

June 6, 2016June 6, 2016 by Bitchy

This post probably won’t make my fellow Bernie supporters happy but please hear me out and know that when I say that politics isn’t emotional for me, I’m being earnest.

Bernie might win California tomorrow (that’s a big maybe). He will definitely lose New Jersey. He most definitely will not overtake Hillary in the pledged delegate count. He would have to win two-thirds of all the votes in both New Jersey and California in order to do that. It’s going to be over for him tomorrow. It is my sincere wish that Bernie gracefully exits the race next Tuesday, after the last primary ballot is cast in DC.

I know what my fellow Bernie supporters are thinking right now: It was rigged so he should take the fight to the convention! Yes it was rigged, but not nearly as much as you think. Here’s a little reality check:

Of the nineteen open primaries, Hillary won eleven to Bernie’s eight. Of the twenty-three closed primaries, Hillary has won fourteen to Bernie’s nine. The percentages were roughly the same, although Hillary did a little better in the closed primaries.
Hillary keeps claiming that she’s gotten three million more votes than Bernie. Shaun King made a case that this number is a lie. He’s right. It’s not an accurate number, but it’s not nearly as inaccurate as he claims. If you take the percentage of votes cast in the caucuses for each candidate, and extrapolate those numbers out to the number of voters each caucus goer represents, Bernie doesn’t even pick up three quarters of a million votes because Hillary would also get more votes by doing that.
The voter suppression was real, and the long lines we saw over and over again for the first time in a democratic primary were no accident. We have a systemic voting problem in America, and both parties are guilty of creating the problem. But to assume that every single voter who was turned away, was going to vote for Bernie is absurd. The correct assumption is that the voters who were turned away would have voted in roughly the same proportion as the votes that were cast. You would have to practice some utterly baseless kind of magical thinking to assume that Bernie would have won if all the votes were counted (and cast). Hillary’s lead was just too insurmountable for that to be possible.

I will say this though; Hillary supporters who were fine with what happened in this election with polling locations closing or mysteriously moving without notifying anyone, voter rolls being scrubbed, and the rest of the fuckery that went on here should be ashamed of themselves. I’m ashamed of you. I now know that you were full of shit in 2000 and 2004 when you were screaming, “Voter suppression!” We should all be incredibly offended when any American’s vote is taken away from them. But not you guys. No, you’re the sorriest group of so called liberals I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.

But I digress. My point is that Bernie didn’t win, and no amount of Cirque Du Soleil like acrobatics you try and do on the data will ever change that simple fact.

So back to my point. I emphatically believe that Bernie should not push for a contested convention. He simply has no basis with which to make his case. He didn’t win the popular vote, nor did he didn’t win more pledged delegates. While it’s true that every single poll shows that he’s the strongest candidate to defeat Trump in November, he can’t make that case without being a massive hypocrite. That argument basically tells super delegates that the voters made a mistake, so they should subvert the will of the voters and select him for the sake of the party. Selecting the nominee is not what super delegates should do, and Bernie has been saying that all along. To turn around now and ask them to select him would make him look like just another craven politician who will do anything to get elected and that will disillusion a lot of his voters.

Bernie did something extraordinary here. He inflamed and mobilized liberals who have figured out that the democratic party doesn’t represent us. He shed a bright light on the corporate corruption of our government, and managed to break through the republican framing of the issues that we’ve accepted for thirty years. For thirty excruciating years, we’ve been talking about low taxes, big gubment, and defense, defense, defense! Remember when Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over!”? Well that was the last nail in the liberal coffin, and Bernie is the first politician in thirty years to pull the fucking lid off that coffin. He ran on a platform of raising your taxes in order to provide you with more cost effective health coverage. Could anyone have imagined that running on a platform of raising taxes would garner 46% of the vote in any election in America?

I would hate to see this movement damaged by Bernie angling for a convention fight that will ultimately get him nowhere. He’s not going to be the nominee, and the super delegates aren’t going to select him. He literally has nothing to gain by angling for a contested convention, and Hillary is just going to pummel him and the media with the data I shared with you above. Pushing for a convention fight is a move that includes no gain, and nothing but pain. It would be a terrible idea.

I believe that the best path forward for this movement is for Bernie to leave the race and endorse Hillary on June 14th. He should spend the next five months campaigning for real progressives running for congressional seats all across the country. We should all be focused in giving Hillary a significantly bigger progressive caucus to have to deal with than the one we have now.

Yes, I’m going to advocate for supporting Hillary but I’m not going to share my reasons just yet. Emotions are running too high, but trust that I have reasons that aren’t what you think they are.

This movement didn’t start with Bernie, and it isn’t dependent on Bernie becoming president. The numbers clearly show that we don’t have enough people with us to take the white house yet. But there are certainly enough of us to make a difference in state and congressional races. That’s where our focus should be.

Time is on our side. Hillary’s base is the fifty-five and older demographic. This has never been a particularly liberal demographic. I recently saw a tweet that said, “Hillary is pulling her voters to the right”. Bullshit. Hillary’s voters were once proud Reagan democrats. They were always right of center. That’s who the baby boomers are. But Gen X is clearly to the left of them, and the millennials are even further left of Gen X. We know which direction the electorate is headed. We just need to be smart about plotting a course forward right now.

I strongly believe that our path lies in down ticket candidates. If we can find more progressives to run, and to support, we can take over the democratic party. But damaging this movement with a convention fight is not going to help to advance the cause in the short term.

I hope Bernie is going to be smart about this. He was smart enough to run as a democrat, rather than an independent. He was smart enough to take 46% of the vote away from Hillary, despite all the money she had collected before last summer was even over. I sincerely hope that he’s going to do the smart thing next week.