Thread by @frodofied

I'm old enough to know just how often the Republican body politic has held a Democrat or Democrats upto a certain ethical or practical standard only to completely abandon it for their own later.

The level of hypocrisy in these moments has been utterly stunning.

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So stunning, in fact, that it has opened up a credibility gap that will not close for generations.

From calling Bill Clinton a draft dodger & nicknaming him Slick Willie all the way down to Hillary's private server & Obama's final Supreme Court selection, it's been appalling.
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The kinds of moral demands they have placed on our candidates and party and the ways in which they have defined or critiqued our patriotism has been so different tha it has become an inarguable fact that Democrats are held to the highest standard while they are held to none

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They have been so successful at this game because the mainstream media has been their willing partner throughout.

I might have called them stooges at one time, but stooge suggests a lack of understanding or culpability. And that stopped being true at some point in 1992.

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It has been moral and practical questions both large and small and their expectations of us have abolutely defined and controlled almost the entire narrative of our politics for nearly three decades.

When there are no problems they invent them out of nowhere.

Tan. Suits.

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This has been our reality for so long, and it's been so pervasive that we have allowed it to weaken us as a party.

We now engage these fictions with such willingness and soberness that our reactions have come to read something like agreement or acceptance of guilt.

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While historical examples of this behavior can be found throughout the decades and from both parties, the kind of breathtaking, ethically defining hypocrisy I am talking about has been completely one sided and began in earnest with the candidacy of William Jefferson Clinton.

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To begin to create a definitive database of these incidents would take months or years & could easily form the basis of a future doctoral dissertation.

While this behavior has affected all Dems it has, unsurprisingly, been applied most often & most effectively to only two.

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Care to guess which two?

The black guy and the chick, of course. I use this terminology to highlight the undeniable fact that so much of these demands have originated not from any real sense of moral outrage but have been guided by the darker sins of racism and misogyny.

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Surveying the six national Presidential elections that @HillaryClinton & @BarackObama have each taken part in over the last three decades it is startling to see how obvious and toxic & all consuming it has been.

But we on the left are not guilt free either. Not even close.

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We have absolutely allowed the RW to set the standards, to define the parameters on both sides, and to decide for everyone when the goal posts can/will be moved, and by how much. Worse, for the sake of political expediency many on the far left have adopted the same methods.

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The Sanders crowd had criticisms of Obama & expectations of Clinton that they simply didn't apply elsewhere. Period.

Clinton's refusal to release speech transcripts she had delivered as a private citizen to Goldman/Sachs employees was taken as a sign of corruption.

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This, even though Clinton made clear that her reasons for not was because men had been making the same kinds of speeches and getting paid more for doing them for decades and no one had ever asked to see transcripts.

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Compare that reaction to the one following @SenSanders refusal to release his tax returns. The level of gross non- logic employed by his supporters was directly proportional to the faux outrage they engaged the questions of Clinton's presumed guilt vis a vis the transcripts.

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And, in the end, the effect of each action briught wildly different outcomes than expected. Clinton did release the GS transcripts after the primary, when it was no longer an active political issue & the speeches turned out to be the opposite they imagined they'd be.

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Clinton called for caution & attention to detail and a respect for optics in two, and the other was an inspiring conversation about the role of women in business.

Sanders never relented on his taxes. For a man eager to demand transparency from others it reeked of hypocrisy.

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His refusal also had the unfortunate effect of undermining one of our most effective criticisms of Donald Trump. It seemed ridiculous to be demanding Donny's tax returns when we couldn't even extract the same from the man claiming, even now, to be the head of the Party.

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These double standards we're applied everywhere. Clinton was seen as more responsible for the 1994 crime bill than Biden who wrote it, Sanders who voted for it, or her husband who signed it.

Other jaw-dropping examples are not few in number.

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One of the truly most ridiculous criticisms is one that is still alive and kicking, the overused ghost of Clinton as "Goldwater Girl." A fact of her existence at 16, but by the time it mattered she had undergone a complete political transformation.

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So complete that less than four years later she spent the summer in Texas registering Latinos to vote for McGovern.

Clinton's political identity at 16 was more important to Sanders supporters than the inconvenient truth of his which included his white flighting to Vermont.

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And that he did not hire a single POC in his entire Congressional career until 2014, that a study during the primary proved his campaign staff was only 9% minority hires while Clinton's was 36%, and that he had the worst gender pay inequity in the ENTIRE Senate.

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This is unacceptable.

We have watched two of our most important, historic, gracious and able leaders be attacked and dismantled from both sides. The critique from the left, however, is most disappointing.

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More disappointing because their critiques are toxically devoid of any acknowledgement of the unique pressures, differing expectations, outright dismissals that Clinton faced as a woman and Obama as a black man.

That is what I find most horrifying from my perspective

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This can't happen anymore. We must reject it outright from the right & demand better from the far left. This means we actively protect all of our candidates. But it also means we defend our current leaders as well. Yes, that means @HillaryClinton & @NancyPelosi goddamn it!

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And finally we must ask our friends in the media to force a discussion with their peers. There needs to be a real conversation about all of this if we really want to escape this cycle. @joanwalsh, @JoyAnnReid, @ThePlumLineGS, @soledadobrien and @speechboy71 we need your voices.
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I retweeted this thread because @ChuckGrassley and his fellow @GOP traitor/henchmen exhibited such an astounding level of practiced hypocrisy that I felt I was going to vomit a few times.

Being an American is getting more humiliating by the day.

#StopKavanaugh