Political Links...regarding the villification of Hillary Clinton during this election

[shadowkat]

1. Some Questions for Bernies Sanders Supporters

2. IF you are a Liberal and Think Hillary is Corrupt You are Rewarding 25 Years of GOP Smears

3. The Puzzling Vilification of Hillary Clinton - A Psychoanalysis

4. Bill Maher Explains Hillary Hatred Perfectly

5. The Best Way to Vilify Hillary Clinton - The GOP Spends Heavily to Test it

It's an interesting discourse on our deeply ingrained sexism. For many, completely unacknowledged and unselfaware. Reminds me a little of the Buffy hate in the Spike/Angel wars in fandom, and the Hermoine hate in the Harry Potter fandom, not to mention the Doctor Who, Supernatural, GoT fandoms. Mainly, and interestingly enough, from female fans.

6. Edited to add this article on Facebook, which links to a 1996 New Yorker Article on the topic:

1996 article Hating Hillary by Henry Gates

Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen. Serious accusations have, of course, been levelled against the President’s wife, but it’s usually what people think of her that determines the credence and the weight they give to the accusations, rather than the reverse. At times, she herself sounds at a loss to explain the level of animosity toward her. “I apparently remind some people of their mother-in-law or their boss, or something,” she says. She laughs, but she isn’t joking, exactly.

The remark chimes with something I’ve been told by the redoubtable Sally Quinn, who—in part because she’s a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, in part because she’s the wife of the Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee—must herself count as a figure in the so-called Washington establishment. “There’s this old joke about the farmer whose crops fail,” she says. “One year, he’s wiped out by a blizzard, and the next year there’s a rainstorm, and the next year there’s a drought, and so on every year. Finally, he’s completely bankrupt—he’s lost everything. He says, ‘Why, Lord? Why, why me?’ And the Lord says, ‘I don’t know. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.’ “ She pauses, then says, “That’s the problem—there’s just something about her that pisses people off. This is the reaction that she elicits from people.”

Well, from many people, anyway. “A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,” Arianna Huffington says. “I think gratitude is great if you can communicate it, but if you have to keep telling people how grateful you are . . .” William Kristol, a Republican strategist and, since September, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, puts it this way: “She strikes me as a sort of moralistic liberal who has a blind spot for actions that are in her own interest. These are exempt from that cold gaze that she casts over everyone else’s less than perfect actions.” On the whole, though, he’s one of the more dispassionate voices you’re likely to hear on the subject. Peggy Noonan, who came to prominence as a speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, speaks of “an air of apple-cheeked certitude” that is “political in its nature and grating in its effects,” of “an implicit insistence throughout her career that hers were the politics of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of a lower moral order.” She adds, “Now, with Whitewater going on, nonliberals are taking a certain satisfaction in thinking, Uh-huh, you were not my moral superior, Madam.”

Some of this glee relates to a discomfort with Hillary’s political identity. In the 1992 campaign, her husband presented himself as a different kind of Democrat. Many people who wanted a different kind of Democrat to be President fear that the President’s wife is not a different kind of Democrat. (In Ben J. Wattenberg’s “Values Matter Most”—the book that prompted Bill Clinton’s infamous midnight-of-the-soul telephone call to the author—Hillary is identified as “a lady of the left” and compared with Mikhail Suslov, who was for years the Kremlin’s chief ideologist.) Of course, if you ask why they fear she is not a different kind of Democrat, the answers are less than entirely satisfying. It’s true that she served on the board of a liberal advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, but then many C.D.F. members regard the First Lady with heartfelt disappointment. It’s also true that the Clinton health plan, which she spearheaded, involved significant government oversight, but then congressional conservatives routinely pass complicated bills in which government has a complicated role. (Consider, even, the tort-reform movement, which Vice-President Dan Quayle spearheaded, and which sought to vest the federal government with new powers to regulate product liability and other civil litigation.) But if you want to understand how conservatives perceive Mrs. Clinton these matters are ultimately a distraction. For they recognize her, almost on a gut level; in a phrase I’ve heard countless times, they “know the type.” In a word, they look at Hillary Clinton and they see Mrs. Jellyby.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1078093752256030&set=a.102236856508396.3404.100001662458374&type=3&theater

"In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person."
—Henry Louis Gates

The quote above comes from a fascinating article called “Hating Hillary”, written by Gates for the New Yorker in 1996. Even now, 20 years after it was first published, it’s a fascinating and impressive piece, and if you have a few spare moments I strongly recommend it to you. (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary)

And I’m reading pieces like this because now that Hillary has (essentially if not officially) won the Democratic Primary, I have become increasingly fascinated by the way so many people react to her. In truth, I sometimes think that I find that as interesting as Hillary herself. And I can’t help but notice that many of the reactions she receives seem to reflect what Gates referred to as “a cultural inventory of villainy” rather than any realistic assessment of who she really is and what she has really done.

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.

And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

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[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Truly. And if they think they hate Hilary, wait til they have four years of Trump...