Open Letter to Salon.com

I am an extremely political person. I try to keep politics off this blog because given the state of politics in this country and the obstructionist mentality of the GOP and the hijacking of the GOP by racists, homophobes, and sexists, there really doesn't seem any point on commenting about them. When you have major candidate in this race--who is THE front runner--waffling on the support of a white supremacist, then these truths are self-evident, as they say.

I'm curious what the fate of the GOP will be after this election. I doubt it will survive intact, because this election has exposed "the base" to be unrelentingly racist at the expense of the traditional bean counters. I imagine this election will split the party in two. Because, hello, the genie is out of the bottle. The Tea Party isn't about small government. It's about hating anyone who isn't white. End of story. Will the Eisenhower model emerge or the racist contingent? Clearly there isn't room for both.

However, something interesting has been happening on the Democratic side. Salon.com is a fairly left site that I read for political and entertainment value. It's an echo chamber more or less, and I freely admit that. But not so much anymore. It has become the Hillary bashing site. The number of articles that paint Hillary Clinton as nearly as horrendous a political choice as either Trump, Cruz, or Rubio are growing in direct proportion to her seemingly inevitable win of the Democratic nominee for president. The Super Tuesday election has brought the knives out. Wow, it's getting uglier and uglier by the day. The number of photos of her appearing smug, angry, arrogant, and insert a modifier in here of your choice that is highly unflattering are increasing. You get the "picture."

And yet, when Hillary Clinton was a senator she and Bernie Saunders voted in unison on issues 83% of the time. Okay, let's repeat that; 83% of the time. And yet as she begins to sew up the nomination, you'd think that she was basically Ted Cruz's older sister.

The progressive left has begun to paint her as a war monger. I don't see her as a war monger. I can see a rational argument being made for toppling bat-shit insane dictators like Khadafi, where there is a hope that one can now have democratic elections in a country that has suffered under the rule of the type of man who had no compunction in blowing up airplanes, who had a long history of terrorist acts and who was, by all accounts, INSANE. Hillary is being pilloried for voting for the war and yet Bernie Saunders voted for U.S. troops in Afghanistan--the country where no invading country has won a war in something like 400 years. So there's that. 

Speaking of pictures. The really distasteful part of this whole campaign against Hillary is that at its heart it's beginning to feel misogynistic. Have you noticed how much the press shows close-ups of her face, All the lines, the puffiness, the general hallmarks of an older woman. It's becoming on par with the sort of ridiculous photographs they show of Trump. 

Salon, stop it. In your zeal to champion Bernie Saunders you're losing my respect. Again, I like Bernie, too. But there is never any discussion of how someone like Saunders, who is so much more left than probably 90% of his colleagues in the Senate, is actually going to govern when even a majority of his own party cannot support his platform. When you have a sitting President, who in another era I would consider a moderate Republican, is basically inert because of an obstructionist Congress, how is someone as progressive as Bernie Saunders going to govern? How? How does Bernie plan to implement all these pie-in-the-sky programs. The current president can't even get bridges fixed and the roads paved. How is Bernie going to PAY FOR ALL OF THIS?????

These questions are never asked, and I think they are as legitimate as someone asking of Ted Cruz: since many of the people in this country are not religious (and increasingly are not religious), how can Ted Cruz possibly govern when a huge percentage of the electorate is not evangelical?

You have a bias. You like Bernie Saunders. I like him, too. Politically, he's much closer to my viewpoint than Obama. But Hillary and Bernie are VERY CLOSE politically. The first debates were marked by the other saying, "I agree..." So cut this shit out. Champion Bernie. He's a man with a tremendous amount of integrity and smarts. That should be enough. You don't need to stoop to what is becoming a sexist, stealth smear campaign against Hillary. I'm going to say this again. Stop it.