Midgen wrote:
Either that, or the stress of actually losing an election to Donald fscking Trump is actually killing her.
It might be. Had anyone presented this matchup as a hypothetical after 2012, I think any of us would have predicted that Hillary Clinton, or pretty much any bog-standard Democratic candidate would have swatted Trump aside with relative ease. Last year at this time, I still expected him to gas out and someone else to pull into the lead in the primaries and I think almost everyone else did too. This was Not Supposed To Happen (tm)
The fact that Hillary Clinton is not blowing Trump out of the water by double digits is, itself, essentially a massive loss for her. It is an admission that she is possibly the most unbelievably toxic candidate ever to run for President. Against a candidate as simply unsophisticated on so many issues (even those where he's right about the underlying fundamentals) and so prone to saying things that the press can normally use to just annihilate a politician, 10% should be her
floor margin of victory in the popular vote, and she should be rocking at least a 5% margin in every swing state. This should look like 1984 in reverse.
It doesn't, because the Democrats have essentially nominated Cersei Lannister, and are now wondering why she can't put away Archie Bunker. The reason should be relatively obvious, no matter what words come out of her mouth, we've all been watching her play Game of Thrones in real life for almost 30 years, and the only reasons to vote for her amount to A) because you're just in the tank for Democrats no matter what B) You don't get that rude, boorish, insensitivity is vastly preferable to someone who wants power for the sake of power and has no idea what she will actually do with it (her wild swings between center-left and progressive ought to establish that beyond a doubt) or C) because vagina.
It's not hard to make the case that there aren't really compelling reasons to vote for Trump, but the fact that she's NOT leading by ridiculous margins indicate that the reasons to vote AGAINST Clinton are very good ones indeed.
Her pneumonia is, in itself, pretty minor - the inability to just come out and say "yes she's got pneumonia" speaks to her, and her campaign's fundamental allergy to the idea that the public has any right to question her at all. Her "basket of deplorables" remark - and the support for it and attempts to excuse it - indicate that she and her supporters are every bit as bigoted as they imagine their opponents to be. It's revealed "racist", "misogynist", and "Islamophobe" and "homophobe" to be simply slurs that have no place in civilized discussion. If you need to use these words to make a point, it's an indication you don't have one. All of those concepts can be explained and decried just fine without using ad hom slurs that really mean "people I disagree with."