District 5 Diary: Hillary hate

Hillary hate at the Repug convention

In today's NY Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Hillary Clinton’s Master Class in Distraction,” by Michelle Cottle (Editorial Observer, Oct. 18):

So it’s not enough that Hillary Clinton had the 2016 presidential election stolen from her by James Comey, Russia and an electoral system so unfair and outmoded as to award victory to a candidate who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.

It’s not enough that the first woman to be a major-party presidential candidate in history had to endure decades of hatred and efforts to destroy her by the Republicans, building up to the grand finale fireworks display of “Lock her up!”

Now she’s supposed to just shut up and go away? With friends like The New York Times’s editorial page, rehashing the same old garbage, who needs Fox News?

Jonah Winter

Pittsburgh

Kevin Drum on Hillary hate:

For chrissake. If there’s a human being on the entire planet who’s earned the right to spout off about the need to crush the Republican leadership into Soylent Green and then distribute it in sacks to the poor, Hillary Clinton is it.

After three decades of calmly putting up with an Augean stable’s worth of lies and attacks and assorted other forms of vicious bullshit, if she says it’s time to fight back, maybe we should listen.

...This is not your grandfather’s Republican Party anymore. Not for a long time. This is the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

They care about nothing except kowtowing to the rich. They lie constantly about everything. They launch vile personal attacks a dozen times a day. They gerrymander and pass ID laws and refuse to let students vote and do anything else they can think of to make it harder for Democrats to cast ballots. They do all this without a smidgen of guilt and their base loves it.

But for some reason, a simple acknowledgement that Democrats could stand to be a little less civil about this produces the heebie jeebies...all of these independents and swing voters don’t seem to feel all that queasy about the Niagara Falls of malice and degeneracy produced on a daily basis by Republican candidates and cable talkers. Maybe, just maybe, they can handle the bare truth about all this from Democrats.