Hokay.

Why the apparent glee that our country is destroying itself before us?

I take no pleasure in this. A year ago, before the GOP nominating process turned into a re-enactment of Marat/Sade, I assumed with many others that 2016 would bring us the dispiriting spectacle of dueling dynasties, the Demi-Dauphin of Tallahassee carrying the entitled banner of the old money Bushes and the Dowager Empress of Little Rock representing the the crafty arriviste Clintons. Although the coming November would still have found me voting D for the top of the ticket, I would have done so with a marked want of zeal. Part of this is a tad unfair to HRC, who by the accounts I’ve read swapped her surname reluctantly back in the day, but the notion of a sequence of US presidents consisting of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Clinton (or, horrors, Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Bush) would have creeped me out a little—still does. I didn’t even like the dynastic idea when Kennedy’s partisans played with it, and there, at least, they had the bare justification that their inning was unfairly called on account of brains spattered over the trunk of the limo.

But Clinton, the possibility of whose political evolution since 1964 mmoffitt is most unwilling to contemplate (of course ex-commie labor attorney Bob Treuhaft is gonna take on an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl as an intern in 1971, ’cause he didn’t have the keen insight into her character possessed by Messrs. Moffitt and Oxley) appears likely to be our nominee, and if God has not completely withdrawn Her mercy from this continent, will put paid to the political aspirations of the guy with the tiny hands. Even P.J. O’Rourke, who heartily dislikes Madame Secretary, has said that he will vote for her rather than Trump: “This man just can’t be president. They’ve got this button — this briefcase. He’s going to find it.” I find it odd, incidentally, that such pronouncements from Republicans are taken in some quarters as further damning evidence of the Dread Butch Clinton’s unfitness for office (“Aha! See, even Republicans recognize that she’s one of them!”) rather than as evidence that President The Donald is a prospect too horrifying even for some conservatives to countenance.

I grant that HRC has made a lot of compromises and got a lot cozier with corporate interests as she has maneuvered to this point in her career than many of us might like. I don’t buy that she’s the monster that at least three IWT regulars seem to think she is, and venture to hope that she might be intelligent enough to have taken a salutary fright from this election season, and draw the conclusion that the “triangulation” and go-along-to-get-along strategies employed by her husband twenty years ago—in the face, let it be remembered, of a then-unprecedented GOP attempt to destroy a presidency in progress—will not suffice in this era, and take steps to assuage the misery, resentments and anxieties that have fueled Trump’s rise. After all, FDR was regarded by some as a cosseted lightweight in 1932, and as a “traitor to his class” by those plutocrats too shortsighted to recognize that he was saving them from the tumbrels (or firing squads, as the case may be). It is likely too much to expect that Clinton will bring about profound institutional reforms, and it may be that the institutions themselves have by this point become too sclerotic to be susceptible to reform, but she may out of enlightened self-interest, and perhaps motivated in part by such vestiges of social conscience as may yet survive from her days at Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein, attempt to ameliorate some of the suffering. It’s a pretty safe bet, I think, that we’d see a surfeit of suffering during the death convulsions of the Republic that would eventually follow upon the elevation of The Man with the Golden Grift. And while I don’t see Clinton putting up Lani Guinier for the Supreme Court, it’s not a stretch to imagine the other guy nominating Jeff Sessions or John Yoo. I will repeat myself: if we stipulate, as I will just to save time, that Clinton and Trump are both evil, I believe that it is incontestably true that Trump is far the greater evil, and so grotesquely unfit by character and temperament to hold public office that he makes Richard Fucking Nixon look like Pericles.

It would be pleasant if, contrariwise, a President Sanders could usher in a golden age of comity and social democracy. At last report, he proposes to bring this about, in the face of what even he allows will very likely be a GOP-controlled House of Representatives disposed to be cranky and intransigent, by means of mass rallies. When the honorable Representative from Bumwad sees television footage from Berkeley of crowds chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, single-payer’s the way to go!” he will of course have his come-to-Swedish-Jesus moment and embrace a progressive agenda as flights of swine streak overhead. Mass rallies, I think, would be more effective for a President Trump. I have seen several billboards locally promising that “Bernie” will end college tuition and erase student debt. Let’s just address the first of those points, shall we? IANAL, but I can’t think offhand of the constitutional authority that Sanders might persuasively cite when he tells the Regents of the University of California to cut tuition to zero. Indeed, you could clone Ruth Bader Ginsberg eight times and fill SCOTUS with these copies, and I venture to doubt whether such an attempt would prevail. Ah, you object, Bernie will have the federal government pay the tuition. “How delightful!” the Regents will respond. “Beginning this fall, tuition for state residents will go from $13,500 to $100,000 per year. We’ve got lots of administrators—top people, you understand—who could use a raise.” The Administration will respond that of course their subsidy is not open-ended, but rather, tops out at, say, $20,000 per student per year. The Regents have a sad. “Bummer,” they say. “OK, tuition goes to $33,500 per year. Shucks.” Too much liquidity in the system.

If Sanders contrives by some means to emerge from Philadelphia as the People’s Choice, then by gum, he will have my wholehearted support in November. I’m guessing, notwithstanding the cherry-picked polls showing Sanders as the stronger candidate (relax, kids. Both sides are filling their baskets full of cherries as Tuesday approaches), that he has the GOP’s wholehearted support for the nomination: I think they’d eviscerate him in the general campaign. I am guessing as well that a healthy majority of Clinton supporters will swallow their disappointment, and that proportionally fewer of these will be disposed to vent by staying home, voting a purity third party or voting Tinyfingers for shits and giggles. I can speak only for myself, but this is perhaps a point on the side of being only tepidly supportive of HRC: to the extent I’m emotionally invested in this election, it is to the end of thwarting the man beneath the possum. I count support for Sanders against no man here, but to withhold a vote for Clinton in November, or to cast a spite vote for Trump, will elicit—not, pace mmoffitt, my animus, but certainly in the latter instance my heartiest censure.

cordially,

Below: President Sanders sets forth the strategy by which his programme will be put into effect.

So why do you think Treuhaft took her on as an intern? He was a closet conservative? He was a stupid old man who couldn't recognize a Goldwater Girl when he saw one?

Gotcha.

"We did poor people's law," Burnstein said.

Yeah, probably evicting poor people from rent-controlled apartments. Interesting the parts of the piece you neglected to quote:

In addition to Treuhaft's former association with the Communist Party, another partner in the firm, Doris Walker, was, and still is, an active member.

"It was who they were," Burnstein said. "It didn't really have a lot to do with the way we practiced law." Clinton must have known about those associations, he said. "It's not like it was a secret."

"It was sort of a left-wing firm," Walker said, but most of the lawyers were not communists. To dredge it up now, she said, amounts to little more than red-baiting.

In his biography of Clinton, former Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein states that at Treuhaft's firm, "she would be working for one of the most important radical law practices on the West Coast, celebrated for its defense of constitutional rights, civil liberties and leftist causes." Bernstein quotes Treuhaft as saying, "The reason she came to us, the only reason I could think of because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called Movement law firm at the time." [emphasis added]

Perfectly consistent with Goldwatergirlism, yes? Actually no, and not consistent with "her character was formed by eighteen," so why do you keep banging this drum? Since your assertion runs so obviously contrary to the facts of the case, I can only assume because you've become so invested in it that no argument or evidence can dislodge you. Fine. But hnick and boxley apart, none of the rest of us will take you seriously.

cordially but not seriously,