You got what you deserve, Republican Party...

[A Black Falcon]

The Party is unifying in fear of Donald Trump. Fear of the GOP is the only unifying force this party has. Unfortunately, they have unified around a candidate that might not beat him.

What the heck? No, of course not. The party is unifying because parties almost always unify once they have chosen a candidate. Unless something incredibly unlikely happens to split a party (slavery in the 1850s, for the biggest example), parties unify once they choose a candidate. The unification for the Democrats this year is proceeding faster than it did in '08 probably partially thanks to fear of Trump, but it'd happen regardless, it always does.

That's my point. It should have been a no-brainer for someone as intelligent as Clinton to see that it was a bad idea... unless you feel beholden to the same interests that require endless war for their perpetual enrichment. Bad judgment or corruption? Which is it, and which is worse?

No, you're missing the point. The Senate, particularly, was lied to by the Bush Administration in order to get that vote through successfully. House members were not pressured nearly as much as Senators, were not shown classified briefings skewed with half-truths (at best) to convince them to support it, etc. Sure, the Senators should have been able to see how bad an idea it was despite all that, but their exposure to all that pressure and intelligence had an impact which it would not have had on a House member. I've heard some explanations that the Democrats who supported the bill voted that way not only because of fear of voting against what they thought would be, and was at the time, a popular bill, but also because of everything they had been shown, believing that this special info was real and not just a pack of lies put together to get the desired result.

They absolutely should have known better, but blame the Bush Administration for that, not the Democrats in the Senate who voted for that bill -- which, remember, was not a final "we will go to war with Iraq" bill, just a step towards that that they should have known probably would lead to war. But again, it's the Bush team who are to blame here! I imagine that however that vote had gone Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have come up with a way for them to start that war anyway. They REALLY wanted it.

VP is not an important position (and I was not left-leaning in 2008 anyway) and I was not a fan of John Kerry as SoS. Another weaksauce Democrat who lost a winnable election because he was too timid to fight for progressive principles.

Kerry is the current SoS you know, and I think he's doing a very good job! Hillary was also good, and Kerry has done a great job so far.

As for Kerry in '04, yeah that was a disappointing campaign. It should say a lot about how popular that war still was at that point that his major introductory line at the Democratic Convention that year was "reporting for duty" with a salute... I still remember that, it was not a great moment. But he was a good Senator, and has been a good Secretary of State as well.

On one vote that has cascaded into a worldwide clusterfuck the likes of which will continue to cause problems for decades to come? Yeah, just a little matter.

Again I blame Bush for all this, he and his team initiated these policies. And do you really think that losing that vote would have completely derailed their plans to invade Iraq? They'd have found a way...

What of her foreign policy experience is worth bragging about? A four year stint as SoS? In which we saw the Middle East collapse even further into anarchy because of our assistance in overthrowing dictators? What was accomplished under her watch, exactly? She has that small amount of experience and it's not really that great a body of work.

Hillary is an old Democrat in the mindset that you can't appear to be weak on crime or on defense. So expect more 'interventions' and the defense budget bloat to continue unabated.

On the subject of crime, she's right on target with where the Democratic Party is now in wanting reforms to do what we can to reduce how much nonwhite people are unfairly penalized by the justice system. She's no "old Democrat" on that, not now anyway.

As for foreign policy, America is, like it or not, the most powerful country in the world. If we ignore that and stick our heads in the sand it does nobody any good. You need to use your power wisely, as the disastrous decision to invade Iraq shows, but you can't just stay at home, that helps make things worse. Probably the biggest negative event of Hillary's time as SoS was/is the collapse of Syria, and the decision to NOT intervene there in the early days was made by Obama... a decision that might have been a poor one, considering the direction that country has gone in since. We certainly should not have sent ground troops to Syria, but we could have done more than Obama allowed. Maybe things would have ended up just as bad as they have, but you never know. But anyway, yes, the actual issue is pretty much the opposite from how you describe it. As for actual interventions, Libya has indeed sort of collapsed, but I do think that intervention was more good than bad; Quaddafi was a very bad leader, and stopping him from slaughtering lots of people, and helping take him down, when there was hope for a better Libya was a chance worth taking. Of course, even anti-intevention Obama supported Libya. Bernie didn't really oppose it either, I think, which is why he didn't hit her hard on Libya in the debates.

oI believe he would not because it's a bad idea too obvious for anyone but Clinton to attempt. Or maybe Trump. Who knows. We're so fucked.

... And you've already forgotten that Colin Powell also used private email sometimes while Secretary of State? Come on, she wasn't the only one. And her email server may well have been more secure than the governments', you never know...

Neatly wrapped up in a bow so that the secretary of state would face no legal penalties. Plenty of underlings to throw under the bus, after all.

No underlings are being thrown under any busses because no one broke any laws.

The conspiracy theory here is that the statement from the prince was made up by 'hackers' and I don't believe that for a hot second.

No, the conspiracy theory would be that it's real.

Like Republicans and their speaking fees to finance and petroleum and assorted Jesus banger groups?

Clinton is a classic American politician. It would be folly to assume she is not on the take because that is what politicians do.

Well, what is corruption? I guess you think that the regular order of the way politics works is all corrupt, while I'd say that only actual corruption -- that is, people illegally taking money they aren't allowed to -- is corruption, while the rest is the effects of a broken campaign finance system that we need to reform. I know that Washington has an effect on people the longer they are there, as exposure to lots of lobbyists but not so many normal people has its effect, and yes, special interests do have an outsize influence on policy, on a broader level I do not agree with the idea that politicians are all corrupt. I think most are not corrupt, and only the rare exceptions are actually corrupt. Speaking fees and the like are not corruption, it's just a speech. Most people would not change their vote for that "small" an amount of money!

So yes, special interests pushing an agenda get members of congress to support unpopular things, such as the NRA, because of the outsize influence of lobbyists and their money, but I would not call that all corruption; that's using a far too broad definition of the term. That's just an unfortunate result of having a representative democracy. There's no way to make it so that people with more money don't have more influence than people with less money, that's an impossibility. We could do a lot better job than we do, yes -- we need campaign finance reform, to overturn Citizen's United, to require disclosure of where all money is coming from, to crack down on or ban SuperPACs, to make it easier to stop clearly false attack ads (I mean ones based on actual lies -- think Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, etc.), and more -- but in some way, there are going to be people whose job it is to try to influence legislators' votes.

But as they say, Democracy is the worst political system ever... except for all the other ones. :p

That is what she is saying today, when she needs votes. Again, at best, she's just your average politician who thrives in the slime. If Obama pushes it through, who believes for a moment she'll try to undo it?

She was wholeheartedly on board with NAFTA and defended it for two decades. In 2016, people have come to understand that free trade agreements with unregulated labor markets are bad for American workers and all of a sudden Clinton agrees?

We'll see, but I'd hope she would do something, and while politicians do sometimes campaign for something and then do the opposite, it hurts them politically to do so and she knows that.

How crazy that no one outside of the cult of Clinton finds this new stance sincere.

It's disappointing that you can't see how much sexism is behind most attacks on Hillary. People can't change their views on a thing? It happens all the time, though. Yes, she is more pro-trade than Bernie, that is true, though, no question. But the main reasons I dislike TPP aren't just for trade reasons -- you can try to make an argument that people in other nations are helped by this kind of deal, maybe doing more overall good worldwide than harm -- but for the weak environmental, labor, etc. parts in the deal. NAFTA is similar, it hasn't been great, but maybe could have been better... or maybe we'd have been better off without it, I don't know. I am terrible at economics and always have been, so I'm not going to be the one to try to make that analysis. (I like foreign policy MUCH more than economics...)