Showing posts with label Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clinton. Show all posts

Sunday, July 03, 2022

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it

A few days ago, Margaret Atwood put out a tweet (now it has 140,000 "likes") about how America turned itself into The Handmaid's Tail world because people couldn't get over high gas prices.
 And in response I posted one of the "But Her Emails" memes, this one based on McCarthy's post-apocalyptic nightmare The Road, because it struck me how similar these two concepts were, that people will vote against the important things if they get distracted by trivial issues. And now my little tweet has about 800 "likes" which amazes me, and it also got a few comments of its own. 
But here's what surprised me: a number of the comments obviously did not understand the "but her emails" meme at all.
I had assumed everybody would remember the "but her emails" line came from 2016, when Republicans egged on the American media to make a big stupid hairy deal about Hillary Clinton using a personal email server for some of her Secretary of State emails. Because of this nonsensical "scandal", a few thousand voters decided her judgement was too risky so they just had to vote for Trump instead -- such a corrupt and incompetent man that America suddenly risked nuclear or climate destruction. Thus the "But Her Emails" meme was born.



But I realize now that some people have already forgotten all about this, so the "But her emails" line doesn't mean anything to them. 
Americans have a tendency to deify their presidents anyway, but when I hear people talking about how "Americans elected Trump" I want to remind them that only a few thousand votes swung the Electoral College and Hillary actually won overall by 3 million votes. (Of course, this works in reverse, too -- Biden also won overall by millions, but he needed a few thousand votes in key swing states that gave him the Electoral College win.) 
This is why I think Democrats are absolutely right to worry about America forgetting about the terrible January 6 Insurrection and how Trump was responsible for it -- this convenient amnesia happening already, or at least it was happening until the J6 Committee started holding their hearings in prime time and telling the Jan 6 story in such a clear and compelling way.
Because those who forget history are doomed to repeat it - and people need to remember what a terrible president Trump is, how the people around him are terrible also, but how easy it is to let trivialities affect the vote.
I am hoping that support for Trump is starting to crack: But he knows it:
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