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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 11:32 am 
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I legit don't know much about this stuff. I just did a crash course in the 6 days war yesterday. What LTG seems to say is anybody could convert, move in and have more rights than the Arabs...I'm just curious if this is happening. He could be right.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:27 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Of the people in this discussion you provide the least amount of insight. I'm sayint this with all due respect.
:lol:
long time guy wrote:
YOu cling to the Anti Semitism charge because you have nothing to add.
No, it's because you literally are using many talking points used by proud anti-Semetic people to delegitimize the Jewish people as a whole.
long time guy wrote:
My point is clear and also relevant. you have consistently along with others attempted to delegitimze the Palestinians first by claiming that it is a made up term and continuously stating that they were never a country. You then made the charge that being indigenous matters not because when someone else wanted to claim the land then the land they shall claim.
It's just a fact they were never a country and they never wanted to be a country. I don't get your last part. The issue here is that the history of that region goes back thousands of years with Jews being a strong, if not always a majority, presence there for most of recorded history and the reasons why they weren't the majority were because of being chased out and not because they chose to move away. My grandparents were forced to flee in a similar fashion from their homeland. Did they suddenly lose that right to their homeland? Now, if your answer is like IMU which is "You lost to another force" then I accept that and then Israel gets to do what it needs to do to secure their homeland back that they lost by war.



You are evading my essential point in order to pursue the rather tired argument that I'm being anti-Semitic. I'm not. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I'd be confident in saying that the majority of Jews worldwide do not have an ancestral connection to the Middle East. Because Judaism is a religion people from all over the world are free to join. Thus you have Eastern European Jews. Ethiopian Jews. Indonesian Jews. American Jews. etc. Jews from countries such as these are able to move to Israel and become and Israeli citizen as a result of their membership in the Jewish faith. This is the case even if they don't trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. You continue to reference the nomadic ways in which Jews have had to move around and you have displayed no regard for the thoughts and views of Palestinians. You are completely comfortable with Palestinians being dispossessed of their land and yet you continue to make the point about perceived Anti Semitism. What is fair is fair. They were the clear cut majority in the region at the time Israel was created. Israeli increase occurred only after it became apparent that the partition was going to go through. I will check on that but I remember that to be the case. Israeli increase was only in the areas partitioned also. Palestinians still outnumbered Israelis by a wide margin overall.

You completely ignore the fact that Jewish people from areas unrelated to the Middle East are more entitled to reside in the region than people who have inhabited it for centuries. Continue to focus on talking points and Anti Semitism however.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:38 pm 
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long time guy wrote:
You are evading my essential point in order to pursue the rather tired argument that I'm being anti-Semitic. I'm not. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I'd be confident in saying that the majority of Jews worldwide do not have an ancestral connection to the Middle East. Because Judaism is a religion people from all over the world are free to join. Thus you have Eastern European Jews. Ethiopian Jews. Indonesian Jews. American Jews. etc. Jews from countries such as these are able to move to Israel and become and Israeli citizen as a result of their membership in the Jewish faith. This is the case even if they don't trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. You continue to reference the nomadic ways in which Jews have had to move around and you have displayed no regard for the thoughts and views of Palestinians. You are completely comfortable with Palestinians being dispossessed of their land and yet you continue to make the point about perceived Anti Semitism. What is fair is fair. They were the clear cut majority in the region at the time Israel was created. Israeli increase occurred only after it became apparent that the partition was going to go through. I will check on that but I remember that to be the case. Israeli increase was only in the areas partitioned also. Palestinians still outnumbered Israelis by a wide margin overall.
I'm not evading anything. In a world where they weren't kicked out, the land of Israel would be filled with Jewish people. They were attacked for thousands of years and it obviously effected the numbers drastically. The first real chance for Jews to move back and feel at least somewhat safe was given and they did in huge numbers.

I wouldn't say I'm cool with the "Palestinians" not having a country too. I just don't think they have an infinite right to all lands in the area because they happened to be allowed to live there by stronger countries that drove out the Jews time and time again. I would like there to be a state of Palestine too but done in a way where Israel can feel safe too.

long time guy wrote:
You completely ignore the fact that Jewish people from areas unrelated to the Middle East are more entitled to reside in the region than people that have inhabited their for centuries. Continue to focus on talking points and Anti Semitism however.
Why is this a big deal? Israel can choose to handle immigration and citizenship how they please on the lands they are in control of. This is no different than any other country on the planet.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:44 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Why is this a big deal? Israel can choose to handle immigration and citizenship how they please on the lands they are in control of. This is no different than any other country on the planet.


BAN ALL IMMIGRANTS!
STOP BANNING IMMIGRANTS!

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:47 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
You are evading my essential point in order to pursue the rather tired argument that I'm being anti-Semitic. I'm not. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I'd be confident in saying that the majority of Jews worldwide do not have an ancestral connection to the Middle East. Because Judaism is a religion people from all over the world are free to join. Thus you have Eastern European Jews. Ethiopian Jews. Indonesian Jews. American Jews. etc. Jews from countries such as these are able to move to Israel and become and Israeli citizen as a result of their membership in the Jewish faith. This is the case even if they don't trace their ancestry back to the Middle East. You continue to reference the nomadic ways in which Jews have had to move around and you have displayed no regard for the thoughts and views of Palestinians. You are completely comfortable with Palestinians being dispossessed of their land and yet you continue to make the point about perceived Anti Semitism. What is fair is fair. They were the clear cut majority in the region at the time Israel was created. Israeli increase occurred only after it became apparent that the partition was going to go through. I will check on that but I remember that to be the case. Israeli increase was only in the areas partitioned also. Palestinians still outnumbered Israelis by a wide margin overall.
I'm not evading anything. In a world where they weren't kicked out, the land of Israel would be filled with Jewish people. They were attacked for thousands of years and it obviously effected the numbers drastically. The first real chance for Jews to move back and feel at least somewhat safe was given and they did in huge numbers.

I wouldn't say I'm cool with the "Palestinians" not having a country too. I just don't think they have an infinite right to all lands in the area because they happened to be allowed to live there by stronger countries that drove out the Jews time and time again. I would like there to be a state of Palestine too but done in a way where Israel can feel safe too.

long time guy wrote:
You completely ignore the fact that Jewish people from areas unrelated to the Middle East are more entitled to reside in the region than people that have inhabited their for centuries. Continue to focus on talking points and Anti Semitism however.
Why is this a big deal? Israel can choose to handle immigration and citizenship how they please on the lands they are in control of. This is no different than any other country on the planet.


Isn't it sort of obvious that nothing which adversely effects the Palestinians isn't a "big deal" at this point? Also you continue to make the point that Israelis had a right to the land because they were driven out but once I established that people with no ties to the land at all have rights to it which supersede those of Palestinians then it was somehow no big deal. Ok

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Last edited by long time guy on Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 12:50 pm 
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long time guy wrote:
Isn't it sort of obvious that nothing which adversely effects the Palestinians is a "big deal" at this point?
Huh?

If we all acknowledge that Israel, as of today, has a right to exist, then they have a right to set immigration policy based on their goals for the future.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:12 pm 
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I am not looking this up but I thought that Arabs that live in Israel can be and are citizens. Further they hold political office and are considered equal. The only thing I can imagine that is different is that any Jew can come there and become a citizen or something like that. But wasn't that sort of the reason for Israel anyway?

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:13 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Isn't it sort of obvious that nothing which adversely effects the Palestinians is a "big deal" at this point?
Huh?

If we all acknowledge that Israel, as of today, has a right to exist, then they have a right to set immigration policy based on their goals for the future.


Quit with the unknowingness. It is tiresome. Zionism was created before Israel was ever a state and the belief emphasizes that Jews from all over the world were entitled to reside in their "ancestral homeland". This was to be the case whether they were of Middle Eastern descent or not. In fact the guy that originally conceived the idea wasn't even Middle Eastern. How is that for irony? Palestinians were opposed to the creation of an Israeli state primarily for this reason.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:20 pm 
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long time guy wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Isn't it sort of obvious that nothing which adversely effects the Palestinians is a "big deal" at this point?
Huh?

If we all acknowledge that Israel, as of today, has a right to exist, then they have a right to set immigration policy based on their goals for the future.


Quit with the unknowingness. It is tiresome. Zionism was created before Israel was ever a state and the belief emphasizes that Jews from all over the world were entitled to reside in their "ancestral homeland". This was to be the case whether they were of Middle Eastern descent or not. In fact the guy that originally conceived the idea wasn't even Middle Eastern. How is that for irony? Palestinians were opposed to the creation of an Israeli state primarily for this reason.

Who cares? Why can't they determine their own immigration policies? We certainly do here.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:23 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
long time guy wrote:
Isn't it sort of obvious that nothing which adversely effects the Palestinians is a "big deal" at this point?
Huh?

If we all acknowledge that Israel, as of today, has a right to exist, then they have a right to set immigration policy based on their goals for the future.


Quit with the unknowingness. It is tiresome. Zionism was created before Israel was ever a state and the belief emphasizes that Jews from all over the world were entitled to reside in their "ancestral homeland". This was to be the case whether they were of Middle Eastern descent or not. In fact the guy that originally conceived the idea wasn't even Middle Eastern. How is that for irony? Palestinians were opposed to the creation of an Israeli state primarily for this reason.

Who cares? Why can't they determine their own immigration policies? We certainly do here.


Palestinian people care but its obvious their feelings don't matter to you.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:26 pm 
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Their thoughts matter on getting them their portion of the land. Their thoughts don't matter on what types of Jews are acceptable in Israel. That's a pretty offensive thing to say that some Jews aren't deemed Jewish enough to live there.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:51 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Their thoughts matter on getting them their portion of the land. Their thoughts don't matter on what types of Jews are acceptable in Israel. That's a pretty offensive thing to say that some Jews aren't deemed Jewish enough to live there.


Apparently you were for the "ethnic" argument before you were against it.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 1:57 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Now, if your answer is like IMU which is "You lost to another force" then I accept that and then Israel gets to do what it needs to do to secure their homeland back that they lost by war.

That is not my answer. That is a response to the "keep the borders as they are right now" side, since they state Palestinians have no right to the land that Israel illegally seized. If the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Israel that Israel lost in previous wars, then the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Palestine that the Palestinians lost in previous wars (illegally, per the Geneva Conventions).

I do not wish for any further wars between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I'm not a warmonger...that is Netanyahu's gig.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:05 pm 
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IMU wrote:
That is not my answer. That is a response to the "keep the borders as they are right now" side, since they state Palestinians have no right to the land that Israel illegally seized. If the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Israel that Israel lost in previous wars, then the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Palestine that the Palestinians lost in previous wars (illegally, per the Geneva Conventions).
They didn't gift anything and the land was "won" by defending against attacks on all sides. There also was never a war where Palestine "lost" because Palestine didn't exist as a country that could lose land.

As I've said a few times though, if you truly believed in a two state solution you wouldn't be saying things like this acting like Israel should never have existed in the first place.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:10 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
That is not my answer. That is a response to the "keep the borders as they are right now" side, since they state Palestinians have no right to the land that Israel illegally seized. If the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Israel that Israel lost in previous wars, then the U.N. is allowed to gift land to Palestine that the Palestinians lost in previous wars (illegally, per the Geneva Conventions).
They didn't gift anything and the land was "won" by defending against attacks on all sides. There also was never a war where Palestine "lost" because Palestine didn't exist as a country that could lose land.

As I've said a few times though, if you truly believed in a two state solution you wouldn't be saying things like this acting like Israel should never have existed in the first place.

A people should not be tied by a parcel of land. They should be tied by a singular culture and have the ability to rule themselves.

There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.

And Rick...you are not omniscient. You cannot tell me what I truly believe. I have to tell you. And I tell you that Israel exists and should exist. Palestine exists and should exist. And they should exist peacefully in the pre-1967 borders, with Abbas-led Fatah in power in Palestine, and anyone but the Likud party in Israel.

The international community should sanction Israel until they stop the settlements, pull back the Mossad and agree to sit down with Abbas.

At the same time, Hamas remains without a position of true power within Palestine.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:21 pm 
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IMU wrote:
There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.
I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to but Egypt, Israel, and Jordan have all worked out the issues from the 6 days war.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:23 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.
I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to but Egypt, Israel, and Jordan have all worked out the issues from the 6 days war.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're feigning ignorance or you truly know nothing about the region.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:26 pm 
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IMU wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.
I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to but Egypt, Israel, and Jordan have all worked out the issues from the 6 days war.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're feigning ignorance or you truly know nothing about the region.
I don't. Which war are you referring to where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan and has not been settled?

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:41 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.
I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to but Egypt, Israel, and Jordan have all worked out the issues from the 6 days war.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're feigning ignorance or you truly know nothing about the region.
I don't. Which war are you referring to where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan and has not been settled?

West Bank:

Israel (Shimon Peres) attempted to concede the West Bank back to Jordan in 1987, but the deal was rejected by the Prime Minster before it was consummated. In 1988, King Hussein transferred the territorial rights of West Bank over to the Palestinians. In 1994, when the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was signed, Jordan hoped to use this to spring board good relations between the PLO and Israel.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/01/world ... sions.html

Gaza Strip:

The Gaza Strip and Palestine were left as topics for future discussion in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. They were not addressed at all. It wasn't until 1994 that Israel started giving control of Gaza to the PA.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:49 pm 
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IMU wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
IMU wrote:
There was a war where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan. Fine. The land should be given back to those two countries then, and if they decide to gift the land to State of Palestine, that is none of Israel's business.
I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to but Egypt, Israel, and Jordan have all worked out the issues from the 6 days war.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're feigning ignorance or you truly know nothing about the region.
I don't. Which war are you referring to where the land was illegally seized from Egypt and Jordan and has not been settled?

West Bank:

Israel (Shimon Peres) attempted to concede the West Bank back to Jordan in 1987, but the deal was rejected by the Prime Minster before it was consummated. In 1988, King Hussein transferred the territorial rights of West Bank over to the Palestinians. In 1994, when the Israel-Jordan peace treaty was signed, Jordan hoped to use this to spring board good relations between the PLO and Israel.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/01/world ... sions.html

Gaza Strip:

The Gaza Strip and Palestine were left as topics for future discussion in the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. They were not addressed at all. It wasn't until 1994 that Israel started giving control of Gaza to the PA.
You mentioned Jordan. Israel and Jordan worked out their differences on the West Bank. Jordan actually occupied it illegally until Israel "won" it in the 6 days war. Jordan has ceased the claim to it and it's between the Palestinians and Israel now.

Israel isn't in the Gaza strip at all.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 2:57 pm 
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Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Israel isn't in the Gaza strip at all.

Except for every few years when Israel decides to murder thousands of Palestinian civilians, you mean.

There is nothing to work out regarding the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They should be immediately in the hands of the Palestinian Authority.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Wed Sep 20, 2017 11:00 pm 
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Back to the Slay Kween:

Quote:
This is why I can’t entirely agree with the chorus of people who rushed to condemn What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s “intimate view” of what it was like to go up against Trump in the 2016 election. On the left, a quick consensus formed: Clinton lost; she has nothing useful to say anymore and never did; she needs to shut up and go away immediately. It’s not really so clear. Hers is a strange story in an increasingly strange world. It’s one that needs telling. And as her die-hard defenders proclaimed, Clinton can write a book if she wants, and nobody gets to stop her. They’re not wrong. She has every right to write a book about the election. But not this book. Nobody should ever be allowed to write a book like this.

You can play a dire game with What Happened. Call it the $20 Million Game. Open the book to a random page and remember that Clinton sold her last book for an advance of $14 million, and then consider that the figure for this one is probably even higher. “You could say my campaign started with a snappy internet video … but I think it started with something a lot more ordinary: a Chipotle burrito bowl.” Twenty million dollars. A monstrously mangled idiom: “Never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction.” Twenty million dollars. A description of something called alternate nostril breathing: “This practice allows oxygen to activate both the right side of the brain, which is the source of your creativity and imagination, and the left side, which controls reason and logic.” Twenty million dollars. And a double whammy of artless literary allusion, in response to some early idiocy of Trump’s: “The episode was silly, but also an early warning: we were in a ‘brave new world.’” Line break. “If the inauguration on Friday was the worst of times, Saturday turned out to be the best of times.” Twenty million dollars. An impossible amount of money. For this.

She’s not trying to be honest or readable; Clinton is still desperate for you to support her campaign. Everything she writes feels metallic in the mouth, weightless and inauthentic. She starts her book with a record of what she felt watching Trump’s inauguration. “Deep breath. Feel the air fill my lungs. This is the right thing to do. … I’m imagining I’m anywhere but here, Bali maybe? Bali would be good.” This is not how a 69-year-old woman writes. It’s an imitation of how some of her fans write, a sterile, chatty facsimile of a first-person blog. She wants, still, to be relatable.

“In the past,” Clinton writes in her introduction, “for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down.” Maybe that’s true. But the unguarded recollections in What Happened sound a lot like someone who will be stuck in election mode for the rest of her life. They sound ghost-written and focus-grouped, scrubbed to a shine, as fake as anything any career politician says from the podium. Just like on that night in Midtown Manhattan, when Podesta delivered a non-concession in her place, she won’t face the audience. As Kafka taught us in Before the Law, sometimes there’s nothing behind the guard. This book was written by the absence of Hillary Clinton.

In literary terms, the book could be classed as a Mary Sue self-insertion fanfic. Reading What Happened induces a horrifying claustrophobia, the feeling of being pent up in a small room as someone delivers an unending lecture about how much better they are than everyone else. Like every horrifying little room, this one is cluttered with cutesy sayings on every wall. Each chapter begins and ends with an inspirational quote about believing in yourself and reaching higher, 25 epigraphs in total. One (“It is hard to be a woman. You must think like a man, act like a lady, look like a young girl, and work like a horse”) is attributed to “a sign that hangs in my house.”

To be fair, Clinton acknowledges that she made mistakes — but they are all of a particular type. Her optics were faulty; her messaging went out of tune. She didn’t successfully communicate how great and progressive she really is, how wrong you were to dislike her. This is a politician who never made craven or reactionary decisions, just tough choices and hard compromises. Her wars are glossed over; her racist 2008 campaign disappears almost entirely; her support for the Honduran coup regime that murdered Berta Cáceres is unmentionable, disappearing into a warm fug of “kindness and love.” Sometimes it’s even more direct. “I have friends who get frustrated with their spouses who, instead of listening to them vent about a problem and commiserating, jump straight into trying to solve it. That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving.” She failed because she was simply too good at making things better.

Clinton endlessly details minor episodes from the campaign and at the end of each one triumphantly announces that the whole kerfuffle only proves that she was right all along. NBC’s Chuck Todd, she tells us in one episode, “actually criticized me for being too prepared. I’m not sure how that’s possible — can you be too prepared for something so important? Does Chuck ever show up for Meet the Press and just wing it?” A strange tic emerges, where everything her campaign did that was tin-eared and senseless is presented only as a peril wisely avoided. We made sure not to appear elitist. We made sure the race wouldn’t look like a coronation. Repeatedly, she details what she should have said in debates and interviews; that familiar shame of coming up with a snappy rejoinder 10 minutes after an argument’s finished is spun out into an entire book. It’s as if she’s describing a different campaign: Not the one she led, but the one she would lead if she had another chance.

What Happened doesn’t describe a real election but the image of one; it’s soaringly, malignantly useless. It offers no juicy insider details about the campaign, just a dry accounting of who attended which event and occasional remarks on how wonderful it all was. It doesn’t even really answer its own implicit question. Clinton’s book was sold as an explanation of how the most qualified candidate in history could lose to a man like Donald Trump. After all, the question of why she lost has been pored and debated over for nearly a year; we’ve all been trying to give it an answer. But most of Clinton’s actual analysis of the subject is confined to a short chapter, “Why,” wedged into the closing sections of the text, and it’s nothing new. No original take, no personal reflections, just what amounts to a précis of think pieces from Vox, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. There’s even a graph of the words she most frequently used in speeches, with a big Vox watermark underneath. And while Clinton devotes an entire chapter to “those damn emails,” widespread voter disenfranchisement merits just three out of nearly 500 pages. After all, it didn’t happen to her.

Vagueness seeps everywhere. Discussing her decision to launch a second presidential bid, Clinton protests that she wasn’t simply after power. “I wanted power to do what I could to help solve problems and prepare the country for the future. It’s audacious for anyone to believe he or she should be President, but I did.” What problems? Solve them how? The answers reveal a strange antinomy of her liberal-centrist leadership cult. Clinton’s policy team started using data and focus groups to work out what problems Americans were concerned with, and started scouring think tanks for solutions. Clinton is not partisan or ideological. She simply follows the facts. In other words, she did something that absolutely anyone else should be capable of doing. She is an exceptional individual who deserved to be president, precisely because she’s just another cog in the bureaucratic machine. In the counter-democratic universe of establishment managerialism, elections are just another interview process for another government job; the winner should be the person with the most gold stars on their résumé, and we can trust that they’re embedded enough in the mechanisms of government to use their authority properly. It’s a politics of systems and social control: Power is always a question of efficiency and problem-solving, never one of justice.

Most of all, the howling absence of Hillary Clinton is felt whenever she tries to describe what interests me most: how it actually felt to lose. Usually, it’s deeply unpleasant to mine someone’s pain for your own enjoyment. Nobody owes me her suffering or her vulnerability — unless, that is, she’s writing a book about it. A book about defeat that doesn’t tell you what that pain is really like isn’t a testament to its author’s unblinking bravery. It’s just a bad book. Clinton has no visceral insight into those sad hours on election night in her hotel room. Instead we get a few scraps of cliché — “It was like all the air in the room had been sucked away, and I could barely breathe” — and crowding mundane detail. “My brothers and their families were around. Someone sent out for whiskey. Someone else found ice cream — every flavor in the hotel kitchen.”

Later, as the Trump administration whirred into chaotic motion, we don’t get an insight into how she felt but a series of coping strategies. It’s like a self-care book written by a serial killer. Aside from the alternate-nostril breathing, she drinks plenty of Chardonnay but refuses antidepressants. (“Wasn’t for me. Never has been.”) She redecorates her other mansion, the one next door to the mansion she lives in. She retreats from her quest for world domination, returning to the simple joys of being a multimillionaire. In one revealing anecdote, a well-wisher sends her a thousand origami cranes. Hanging them up inside your house, the accompanying note tells her, brings you good luck. Clinton hangs them on her porch.

In the end, Clinton simply does not have the right tools to tell her own story. Many critics are upset that she spends her book blaming her defeat on Bernie Sanders and James Comey and Russia and everyone but herself. What did you expect? Her book could never have been anything else. This is crystallized in one minor but telling detail: Occasionally, she refers to a “now” in which the reader reads, a “now” that’s explicitly identified as late 2017. What Happened is not meant to last; it’s not meant to be pored over for years to come. It exists in the provisional present of politics. It’s a campaign book, written after the fact.


it goes on like this

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:48 pm 
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Here's a little someone I like to call "me"

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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.


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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:18 pm 
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Curious Hair wrote:
Here's a little someone I like to call "me"

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looks like the back has a cape.....

what the christ.....


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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:22 pm 
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Curious Hair wrote:
Here's a little someone I like to call "me"

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#Imwearingher

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Sherman remarked, "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Grant looked up. "Yes," he replied, followed by a puff. "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."


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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:27 pm 
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FrankDrebin wrote:

#Imwearingher

:lol:


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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 12:21 am 
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Gotta believe that asshole has had more miles on it than the Tri-State.

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:13 am 
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This guy is awesome

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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:51 am 
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Curious Hair wrote:
Gotta believe that asshole has had more miles on it than the Tri-State.

CH, at first, I was thinking you were saying that this was you.....I was surprised, to say the least.


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 Post subject: Re: Hillary Clinton
PostPosted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 7:53 am 
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rogers park bryan wrote:
Boilermaker Rick wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:

Hey, your friendly neighborhood Leonard Cohen fan dropping in to remind you that "Hallelujah" is about fucking. It's about lots of fucking.

That SNL skit was one of the weirdest things I've ever seen on tv. I'm not even sure exactly what it was saying.

I'll bet that idea sounded great to the coked up writers/show runners

Same guy had the coked up Aldean/Petty idea this week.


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