Notes on Prophecy
Sculptor said:
When she is president, this will most likely get ugly and tens or hundreds of thousands will die.
Your vote makes you responsible for their deaths.
I think we ought to start a thread documenting all the gloom and brimstone people promise from Hillary Clinton.
By the time pundits realized they should be keeping track of similar hyperbole about Barack Obama―even by twentieth-century Republican standards for the sleaziness of sleaze, the sheer
volume is incredible―it was too late to catch up.
Take the
Watergate line;
Steve Benen↱ recently noted, "The last time I conted, there were at least ten separate 'controversies' that President Obama's critics eagerly labeled as 'Obama's Watergate,' each of which turned out to be meaningless, further diluting an already overused cliché".
And that's one bloggers, pundits, and analysts have been able to track.
Naturally, Benen used the opportunity to acknowledge
Franklin Foer↱ at Slate, whose headline leaves no room for question: "The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse".
What's galling about the WikiLeaks dump is the way in which the organization has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks. Leaks are an important tool of journalism and accountability. When an insider uncovers malfeasance, he brings information to the public in order to stop the wrongdoing. That's not what happened here. The better analogy for these hacks is Watergate. To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon's goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible. This is trespassing, it's thievery, it's a breathtaking transgression of privacy. It falls into that classic genre, the dirty trick. Yet that term feels too innocent to describe the offense. Nixon's dirty tricksters didn't mindlessly expose the private data of low-level staff.
Or, as Benen put it: "If Russia broke into the DNC’s virtual headquarters and stole materials to help a Republican win a presidential race, everyone waiting for the next Watergate just might get their wish.
Nor did Mr. Trump help the situation at all in
calling on Russia to meddle further↱, but I digress.
And, you know, it's how many years later and I still have yet to hear an explanation of how what Bill Maher describes as a giant blowjob for the insurance industry equals a socialist takeover of anything.
Something about how Republicans use the word
unprecedented―(they keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means)―goes here.
Barack Obama has hardly played the role of flaming liberal, yet he's been the best president of my lifetime and one of the best in American history. I don't expect to be any more thrilled with Hillary Clinton's overt foreign policy, but we also need to remember the rather powerful surprises President Obama has offered Americans; nuclear material, chemical weapons, and, you know, while bombing the shit out of someone or something generally brings catastrophe regardless of success or failure, it would, in fact, actually appear that
bombing the shit out of Daa'ish↗ is, indeed, having some useful effect. It is hardly the most inspiring of potential futures. Meanwhile, on the domestic front we will have a civil rights president who requires serious pressure from her left flank in order to buck the middle road on financial and political reforms in order to seek more functional solutions. The tens of thousands will die generally in the Middle East, with possible expansion in Africa because the continent, already out of hand, verges on exponential eruption. On the home front, the largest numbers of such casualties will come from crime both mundane and spectacular. In other words, America will look largely like business as usual, including the everyday hope that things will get a little better. We can expect certain upticks in particular crimes, but these will only highlight the ongoing holocausts of our domestic endeavors.
Let's put it this way: The biggest danger of your prediction coming true will come from sectors in our society that will create such problems in order to complain that they are happening. You know, kind of like we've been seeing from hardline conservatives shepherding rising nationalism through the Obama years presently culminating in the nomination of Donald J. Trump as the Republican presidential candidate.
I wonder if the would-be prophets will remember their own dire predictions in a few years?
____________________
Notes:
Benen, Steve. "A Watergate comparison that finally makes sense". msnbc. 26 July 2016. msnbc.com. 2 August 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2acHHEh
—————. "Donald Trump calls for Russia to help elect him president". msnbc. 27 July 2016. msnbc.com. 2 August 2016. http://on.msnbc.com/2adZ9Vz
Foer, Franklin. "The DNC Hack Is Watergate, but Worse". Slate. 26 July 2016. Slate.com. 2 August 2016. http://slate.me/2aORgLT
