Former Bernie Sanders supporter admits that he allowed himself to be brainwashed by Republican anti-Hillary propaganda.

Courtesy of Social Justice for All: 

Let me be as candid and transparent as possible: I was a very strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, and until the past four weeks, held out great hope that he would become our next President. Over the course of the past month, I have had to do a great deal of reflecting and ask myself where does this seemingly irrational antipathy for Hillary Clinton come from? Why have I participated in it? After doing some research and looking hard at systemic misogyny, I have had to confront myself with the truth that I bought into a narrative about Hillary Clinton that has been produced, packaged, and perpetuated by mostly the GOP with the help of many democrats and independents. 

This narrative is a 30-year-old vilification of a woman who is bright, independent, wealthy, and powerful — a woman who asks for what she wants and needs. How very dare you, Ms. Clinton? How dare you have a mind of your own? How dare you be bright and powerful? How dare you ask for what you want and need? Don’t you know these rights are still exclusively for white, Christian, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual men? 

My research indicates that the reality — the facts (I realize facts are immaterial when talking to many Trump supporters) — are that Hillary Clinton is one of the most honest politicians tracked by the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking project Politifact.

I never tire of sharing this graphic.

 The author sums up his remarks thusly: 

I truly believe that Hillary and her platform are beneficial to targeted communities: people of color, people in poverty, people with disabilities, veterans, LGBTQ people, and all of the intersecting identities thereof. She is a hard-working, fundamentally honest person for whom — as she so nicely framed it — “the service part has always come easier than the public part.” 

This article is actually from the beginning of this month, but I thought it important enough to share with all of you this morning. 

You see the thing that all of us who support Hillary have had to contend with is this deeply ingrained belief that Hillary is untrustworthy, a liar, a cheat, etc.

I actually came up against that with my own daughter who was adamant that Hillary was deeply, deeply flawed.

However when I asked her for examples she kept resorting to responses like "You just know by looking at her," or "You just feel it," and "Everything she says feels like a lie."

In the end she really could not provide any factual examples (Except the Bosnia sniper story. That really was bullshit.), in the end she had to admit that most of her "feelings" about Hillary's trustworthiness were the result of the opinions of her friends, and not really based on actual empirical evidence.

The thing that is so frustrating is that these opinions are baked into the narrative about Hillary Clinton.

And even after you reveal that the bakers were the folks at Fox News, or The Drudge Report, or Info Wars it is still a struggle to undo that perception and correct all of those lies.

Which of course is exactly what those bakers were counting on when they first fired up the ovens. 

Pentagon officials respond to the idea of a Donald Trump presidency, "This is not the country I joined to defend. I am turning in my papers. I’m moving to a farm."

Courtesy of the Daily Beast:  

The plans of the next president are personal to the officers of the Pentagon, who are threatening to retire if The Donald becomes commander-in-chief. 

Republican presidential candidate and business mogul Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to build up the U.S. military if elected president. 

But it is not clear he will have the experienced commanders within the ranks to do it.

Here is some of what those experienced commanders had to say:

Some said repeatedly hearing Trump and the other GOP candidates spelling out a plan that is only a more brazen—and perhaps reckless—version of the current strategy was not reassuring. 

This Daily Beast correspondent has heard such sentiments from at least a dozen commanders in the past few months. Such conversations can also be heard at common areas—in cafeteria lines and around lunch tables. 

There are fears of being asked to carry out futile war plans that would bring instability. Almost all of today’s commanders are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They all know someone who died in combat; indeed, they may have sent someone on a mission that ended with death. And because of that they bring a unique vantage point to lessons learned, from the frontlines where the cruelty of warfare is impossible to miss. Those who send them, meanwhile, sit thousands of miles away and learn what is happening through the filter of distance.

And so in the course of conversation, plots of a different kind emerge—contingencies in case Trump really is elected to the White House. 

“By 2016 I will have my 20 years in and can get out of here,” one military official said, referring to the amount of time a service member needs to collect retirement pay. 

“This is not the country I joined to defend. I am turning in my papers. I’m moving to a farm.” 

“Personally, I hope no one will be called upon to serve under a President T… I can’t bring myself to type the words,” said retired Rear Admiral John Hutson.

So apparently they are not buying Trump's quote,  “I will be so good at the military your head will spin.”

Gee go figure.

(H/T to Occupy Democrats.)

Congress poll numbers now in the single digits.

Courtesy of Swampland:

Gallup announced that Congress had reached a new low, winning the approval of just 9% of the American public. This breaks Congress’s record nadir from last year, when the amount of Americans who thought lawmakers were doing a good job dipped to 10%. 

Gallup has been asking Americans how they feel about how Congress is handling its work for 39 years, and the average approval rating since 1974 is 33%. Affirmation hit its high in 2001, following the Sept. 11 attacks, at 56%. As to why approval ratings now equal the number of letters in Harry Reid’s name, pollsters said that “Americans’ views of Congress have not recovered” from the government shutdown. Even with all the media focus on Obamacare snafus, they note, lawmakers couldn’t sneak out of the doghouse.

Yes it could be argued that the President's poll numbers are also down, now around 44%, but let's face it, there is a HELL of a lot of difference between 44% and 9%.

Let's face it STD's and Adolph Hitler now poll better than the Republican led Congress.

THAT should indicate a complete reorganization of the Congress, and replacement of its more partisan members, but of course politics is all local, so we will see if this has any impact in the next elections cycle.

I kind of think that it might.