Thread by @frodofied

It gives me hives. My blood pressure starts to climb. My mouth will sometimes go completely dry.

It's crazy I know, but there it is...

The thought that after everything we have been through, that she's been through, that another woman will get recognition as "First."

1/

2020 gives me a sour stomach, and it's only 2018. And yet from this distance I can see that @TheDemocrats are going to get the tone wrong in two years.

Nothing new.

In my dreams 2020 would be a taking back of 2016. It would be an acknowledgment that we / #SheWon.

2/

The convention would be as much about thanking @HillaryClinton as it would be her leading the mantle to whomever we nominate.

She would be introduced as the legitimate President of the United States, and she would introduce the nominee and pass the mantle to her / him.

3/

Pure fantasy.

Instead we are almost certainly going to have to endure months of our candidates fighting with each other over who is most unlike Clinton or, at best, arms length backhanders about Clinton being the past of the Democratic Party and it's time to move on.

4/

The problem is, of course, that many in our party (another Sanders legacy, thanks a million Bernie) have relearned history with the rest of the world.

The silliest, fastest, and most successful reeducation effort in the world happened in 2015 / 16.

5/

Somehow, in under two years, Russia, the Benghazi Committee, Bernie Sanders, and later Trump, were able to erase @HillaryClinton's actual life and history, and replace it with a poisonous fiction that still lingers.

It's a total joke really.

But not the funny kind.

6/

I mean come on.

In 2014 @HillaryClinton was legitimately the most popular political figure in the nation. Her approvals were in the 60s.

And yet.

I can take it, understand it, accept it as inevitable even, that Republicans some independents fell for the ruse, but not us.

7/

Democrats were disorganized, unable to focus on the big picture, flighty even, but we were also smarter, kinder, more loyal. We learned lessons.

Like don't throw your fellows under the bus. After what we did to @algore in 2000 I couldn't imagine we'd allow it again in 2016.

8/

But apparently all that stuff I thought was completely wrong b/c merely sixteen years after having one election stolen from us, one where our nominee won the popular vote but a third party decided the actual winner was someone else I stood openmouthed watching 2016 happen.

9/

I mean fuck.

16 years later I watched as people who have used @HillaryClinton's celebrity to boost their own reputations and to raise unheard of amounts of campaign dollars, not only not step up to defend her, but try to jump up and down on her imagined political grave.

10/

Jesus, I love William Jefferson Clinton, but way more people put a lot more effort into defending him, even from things that were largely indefensible, than they ever did her.

It will never not be mind boggling to me, not now, not decades from now.

Shit makes no sense.

11/

But here we are.

We are only left with the cards still on the table, and we have to play them.

And I will play them. I will focus on who to support in 2020 and that person will be the nominee. And I will fight for them harder than I fought for their predecessors.

12/

I'll do that b/c the only way to get any measure of justice back into our political system or back into our voting booths is to leave the 2020 floor bleeding out.

We'll have to battle many of the same monsters.

But at least we know their faces, and to the extent we don't?

13/

We now know the cues. We have now spent so long fighting multi-front political wars that it's almost impossible to remember when we mostly just had to battle one other party.

Yes, experience will matter then, just as it akways has.

Russia is out here fully representing.

14/

But we see you Vlad.

Bernie & his minions are still out here trying to take down any Democratic comer. @BetoORourke is only the latest & will not be the last.

As his fans cont to come at us for calling him out it's really hard not laugh in their face when they say "unity."

15/

Watching as his hypocrisy is at last being revealed I am both relieved and annoyed. I was writing threads about Sanders' race & gender problems in the Fall of 2015.

Watching his team come into this still as cocky as ever makes me really not be able to take them seriously.

16/

I'm going to be completely honest and reference a recent past thread here and just tell them to fuck all the way off.

Bernie couldn't accomplish shit in 2016 even when he had actual political capital to spare and the media was licking his ass.

We didn't need them then.

17/

So, with his support base now seriously shrunk I'm all good with responding to them with little more than the bird.

He deserves no more than that, so flip it freely.

And @HillaryClinton?

I'll never be able to thank her enough as she'll do what she's always done. Fight.

18/

She'll do whatever the party or the nominee needs her or asks her to do. She'll fill the coffers, campaign till she drops, and smile and be right the whole way through.

She will make me proud like she always does.

She will be a good Democrat and better American.

19/

And no matter what happens history can never take the truth.

In 2016 she was the first woman to be nominated by a major party for President. She battled half the world, misogyny up to her eyeballs, and the world's worst man.

And she won.

@HillaryClinton will always be First.
/