Sanders and Clinton and Khan, Oh My! DNC Launches Limping Rightblogger Campaign

By general consensus, the Democrats put on a good show at their convention in Philly last week, notwithstanding that they had to vigorously shush kibitzers from the Bernie Sanders camp and their headliner wasn’t exactly star material.

Even rightbloggers had a hard time picking apart the presentation, so after some grumbles they moved into their positions for the election campaign that is now — God help us — officially launched: that Clinton is a bitch, Sanders supporters should support Trump, and other similarly brilliant ideas.

The Democrats’ stagecraft and feel-good speeches were sour grapes to many of the brethren: “A churlish remark: I was sick of Morgan Freeman as the voice of America’s conscience years and years ago,” tweeted Jay Nordlinger of National Review about the voiceover on a Hillary video. “(I know he’s gifted.)”

Barack Obama’s speech provoked the ancient Obama’s-so-vain shtick: “WATCH OBAMA REFER TO HIMSELF 119 TIMES DURING HILLARY NOMINATING SPEECH,” said Grabien News. “This, sadly, is close to par for the course,” sighed Some Guy at RedState. “On Jan. 5th, 2016, he gave 33 minute speech on gun control and referred to himself 76 times. On October 1, 2015, he addressed the nation for 12 minutes on mass shooting and referred to himself 28 times.… While giving a speech in India that lasted 33 minutes he referred to himself 118 times….” Despite this brilliant data journalism, Obama’s approval rating is higher than it’s been in years. Maybe it’s time they finally pulled out the Whitey Tape!

Maybe the biggest deal of the DNC, in retrospect, was the appearance of the parents of Iraq War casualty U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan. From the stage Khan’s father, Khizr, bitterly attacked Trump; Trump later implied Khizr’s wife, Ghazala, didn’t speak because she was forbidden to do so by Trump’s cartoon idea of Islamic law; in a Washington Post op ed, Ghazala Khan smacked Trump’s wig off, prompting Trump to issue a typically belligerent non-apology.

The Khans were forthrightly supported by some of the tattered remnants of the #NeverTrump movement, such as Jay Caruso at RedState — “Khizr and Ghazala Khan are not going to be bullied by Trump. Good for them.”

Other #NeverTrumpers, however, took a yes-but approach — for example, momentary #NeverTrump Presidential candidate David French tried to finesse the issue in a series of tweets (e.g., “2. I also note that Mr. Khan spoke to near-universal media acclaim, while many got angry that Patricia Smith spoke at the GOP convention,” etc.). Later, French wrote, “Sadly, the American people have given us two candidates who disrespect families of the fallen” because #Benghazi, so you see, both sides do it. A cynic might get the impression #NeverTrump actually means #OKTrumpJustNotWhereICanSeeIt.

Trump was supported against the Khans by #EverTrumpers such as breitbart.com (“HILLARY CALLED BENGHAZI MOM A LIAR, BUT MEDIA FREAK OUT OVER TRUMP ON MUSLIM PARENTS”), Senator Jeff Sessions, Ann Coulter, and Islamophobic rageclowns Robert Spencer (“does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military?”) and Pamela Geller (“DNC, Mainstream Media’s New SPOX — Muslim Parents of Fallen Soldier WHO OPPOSE TRUMP BUT NOT JIHAD TERROR”).

Some rightbloggers, perhaps seeking to pick up disaffected Bernie Bros, noted that Hillary Clinton isn’t really that big a leftist — which, of course, is as bad as its opposite or anything else because…Hillary Clinton.

“Clinton has a new greatest career accomplishment: Getting through that ‘tough on Wall Street’ talk without laughing,” said Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s site. “Almost one in ten of [Democratic] superdelegates were lobbyists for such groups as Goldman Sachs and Planned Parenthood,” said Don Surber. That’ll get the kids to give small-town realtor Donald Trump a second look!

Trump himself made a visibly insincere appeal to Sanders voters, in which some of the Trump-ier brethren joined him.

At TownHall, Mytheos Holt, who has been laying out “The Intellectual Case for Trump” at the Federalist in installments, told readers Trump was against “Big Pharma” — a pitch clearly meant for Berners, not traditional conservatives, though Holt sweetened it for the hometown crowd by claiming Trump would also end Obamacare. Drug companies, Holt noted, have given more money to Hillary than Trump — not because, as you might think, Trump is obviously nuts and thus a bad investment risk for any corporation, but because he’s “stubbornly independent” and will “get tough in negotiating with drug companies on behalf of Medicare patients” — like Al Gore’s “reinventing government,” only tough, see!

Also, Holt identified “areas where these instincts should serve him well” such as “340B drug pricing” — a safe claim because Trump wouldn’t know 340B from 867-5309, but would probably endorse it if it were put before him because it sounds good. And tough!

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, playing Friend to the Working Man, denounced the TPP trade deal that’s anathema to Bernie Bros, lamented rust-belt blight, and declared “the Democratic Party has given up on these [blue-collar] workers, who were once considered to be their main constituency.”

As it happens, Kincaid also denounced TPP in a 2015 column — but mainly on the grounds that it “includes communist Vietnam, a dictatorship with the blood of those Americans on its hands, which has no respect for the human rights of its own people.” In fact, in that very same column, Kincaid denounced Bernie Sanders because he had “collaborated with the communists through the Soviet-run U.S. Peace Council” and “worked closely with the communist fronts which were busy in the 1980s trying to undermine President Ronald Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies toward the Soviet Union.” But there’s no mention of Sanders in the more recent column; new realities, comrades!

Others beat on Hillary Clinton with the ancient bitchy-pantsuit-lady stereotype. While most people who heard Bill Clinton’s convention speech, in which he described meeting Hillary for the first time — “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s name. I’m Hillary Rodham, who are you?” — thought it was sweet (or at worst made Bill look a tad stalkerish), Amy Otto of the Federalist thought it meant, “and so her relentless pursuit of power began.”

In fact, every DNC speech made Otto think that. Obama said Hillary had “real plans to break down barriers and blast through glass ceilings”; Michelle Obama said “Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life”; Joe Biden said, “She’s always there. She’s always been there, and so has Tim Kaine.” Jesus Christ, people, does Otto have to spell it out?

Make no mistake, America: you have been warned. The folks who support Hillary and praised her at the convention kept telling you one thing that might concern you if value containing government power. Hillary seeks power over other people so fiercely she resembles something out of the movies: the Terminator.

She’s a monster of ambition, like that Abraham Lincoln! Ask those poor Confederates if you don’t believe her.

Ann Althouse, who once made a big vaginal deal of some onion rings in a 2008 Clinton ad, headlined a post, “Is there some reason why Hillary keeps doing this gaping-maw face?” This, she answered herself with a quote from Ann Althouse: “She wanted his charisma in her, merged with her, giving her what without which Nobody would ever vote for me.” Later Althouse suggested “that wide-open-mouth/insane-elation thing with her face” suggests Hillary Clinton “does not believe she is loved,” which feeling must be “excruciating” to Hillary Clinton, because “the love [Bill Clinton] naturally attracts overwhelmed her earnestly entitled effort to become President 8 years ago.…” Go ahead and laugh, but Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction, too.

Rightblogger menfolk were more inclined to say, like misogynist nerds talking about Ghostbusters, that Clinton got everything because she was a chick. In fact, Robert Stacy McCain actually claimed that “the Ghostbusters remake was Sony’s election-year contribution-in-kind to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, part of the continuing effort by the media/entertainment/education establishment to promote the Feminist™ Brand in the lead-up to this year’s election.” “Her whole campaign is based on her sex,” said Don Surber, just as Obama’s “whole campaign was based on the color of his skin.”

“Hillary’s Critics Don’t Hate Her Because She’s a Woman,” insisted National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, who portrayed objections to her delivery as merely aesthetic, e.g., “When attempting to sound inspiring, she instead seems irritated; when aiming to be meaningful, she comes across as censorious…” See, that’s not at all the same thing as “bitch” and “nag”!

Mind you, there were more intellectual attacks on Clinton. “Hillary Is a Menshevik” said E. Jeffrey Ludwig at American Thinker. Sanders supporters are Mensheviks, Ludwig said, because they heckled speakers, which only Commies do. Hillary is also a Menshevik, though “a more subtle Menshevik than Sanders,” in part because she picked Tim Kaine — who in the eyes of normal people is a laughably MOR Veep pick, but whom Ludwig seemed to think a bit Menshevik as well:

“[Kaine], like Hillary, does not openly and boastfully speak of [the Democrats’] identification with Marxist philosophy,” admitted Ludwig, “but instead speaks of his commitment to ‘social justice.’ ” What could be Commier than that? Also, Ludwig continued, “Kaine boasts of his Catholic upbringing (remember, Josef Stalin attended a seminary for a while to become a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church). But he portrays himself as a warrior of the caring wing of Catholicism like Pope Francis – all for one and one for all.” It’s the American River Ganges all over again — but this time with obscure communist splinter groups. Also, “the left is united ideologically with the Islamist terrorists in their bid to destabilize the U.S. and the West.…”

Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, the torch has been passed! If that’s not sufficiently elevated for you, you can read a Hillary Tongue Truther here (“What are the odds that our media will ask her about the anomaly on her tongue and whether or not she has had a biopsy?”). Mind you, this is just the first week of the campaign proper; there are fourteen more to go. Stay with us, folks — the rhetoric could reach new levels of…well, new levels!