Does this happen to ANY candidate not named Clinton?

I did not support Bill Clinton in 1992. He rubbed me the wrong way. Bob Kerrey was my guy.

What made me warm up to Clinton -- well into his first term -- was the mainstream media's constant barrage of Clinton-hate. No previous president had suffered from so many smears and lies. "Responsible" journalists detested the Clintons -- so much so that they conferred legitimacy on Ken Starr's outrageous inquisition. Of course, the then-new right-wing media infrastructure continually condemned the President as a potheaded, draft-dodging Communist infiltrator. Today's young voters may be surprised to learn that the left also loathed Clinton: The Nation often explored the same propaganda memes -- Mena, Whitewater, Vince Foster -- spewed by the Dittoheads and the WSJ editorial page.

In that era, supporting Bill Clinton became a radical act.

The same is now true of Hillary Clinton.

I did not want her to run in 2016. She has pissed me off ever since she took the Secretary of State gig in 2008. Hillary the fighting liberal senator was much more admirable than Hillary the head of a neocon-friendly State Department. Regular readers know of my disgust with this administration's foreign policy: Neither Hillary Clinton and John Kerry can escape blame.

Why do I support her now? First and foremost, because a vote for Sanders is a vote for Trump -- PERIOD. I'll say it yet again:

A socialist cannot win in November -- not when 69 percent of the populace tells Gallup that the greatest problem facing this country is "big government."

(I'll stop mentioning that poll the moment any of my readers offers a rational, practical counter-argument. None of you can do it. By the way: The result of that 2015 poll is consistent with previous polls, as demonstrated by this chart.)

I've had just about as much as I can take from Bill Curry, Salon's chief Sanders propagandist and de facto Trump propagandist. Why does Salon keep publishing the emissions of this asshole?

Obviously, one must grant Curry's right to make the case for Bernie Sanders -- even though Sanders is the candidate that the Republicans want to run against. But Curry does not have the right to lie. He does not have the right to use the sort of propaganda tactics normally associated with Roger Ailes.

(Curry is also writing a book which will portray Barack Obama as -- get this -- a "populist." Yeah. Right.  Do you think that book will mention Obama's bald-faced lying on NAFTA in 2008? Or all the free trade deals, including TPP, which Obama has pursued since he got into power? Or all the money that Obama got from Wall Street? Or his administration's refusal to prosecute any "malefactors of great wealth"? Or the administration's ferocious prosecution of whistleblowers? Or the administration's support for Israel's indefensible attacks on Gaza? Or the administration's pro-Nazi coup in Ukraine? "Populist" my ass.)

Curry's primary deception tactic is the pretense that "It's all over" -- that Hillary has no chance, and that her walking-dead campaign is being artificially propped up by an amorphous entity called "The Democratic Establishment." Such pronouncements are pure psy-war, bearing no relationship to reality.

Something similar happened in 2008, when a thousand Obot online thugs used a similar psy-war tactic to get Hillary to drop out of the race prematurely: Drop out now, Hillary. You have no chance. Voters will hate you for your arrogance. You must drop out now....

Remember all of that Let's-play-with-Hillary's-head crap?

And yet Hillary kept winning primaries right up to the end. Despite endlessly hostile media coverage, Hillary came very close to victory -- much closer than Sanders will. And she would have nabbed the top prize if not for some very dubious dealings by the party Elite, which has always despised the Clintons.

Salon has used the "It's All Over" psy-war tactic for months. Curry gave us the most recent example just a couple of days ago: "It should be over for Hillary: Party elites and MSNBC can’t prop her up after Bernie’s Michigan miracle."

Oh yeah? The WSJ headline was much more accurate: "Hillary Widens Delegate Lead." USA Today: "For the Record: Sanders wins headlines, Clinton wins delegates."

If Hillary is a walking dead woman, why does she have so many delegates, and why does Bernie have so few?

Curry pulled the same shit in early February: "It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system." Almost over? Not if you know how to do basic math. Here's the delegate count right now: 1221 for Hillary, 571 for Sanders, with 2302 needed to win.

Late in February, Curry made a truly insane argument that Hillary was trying to win by appealing to racism (the 2008 canard resurrected). Curry derided her "failed strategies" and her "losing plan." Oh really? Let's look at those numbers again: 1221 for Hillary, 571 for Sanders, with 2302 needed to win.

Curry has been playing this deceptive psy-war game since last August: "Hillary’s in danger, Trump is sunk." The guy ain't no Nostradamus. When did Salon morph into FOX?

Curry dares to accuse of Clinton of trafficking in "half-truths," as designated by Politifact. I check Politifact every day -- the code is embedded into this very blog -- and you know what? Hillary Clinton's statements have consistently received the highest honesty ratings from that organization. For example, she recently made the following point:

In 2006, Bernie Sanders "voted in the House with hard-line Republicans for indefinite detention for undocumented immigrants, and then he sided with those Republicans to stand with vigilantes known as Minutemen who were taking up outposts along the border to hunt down immigrants."

Was she lying? Not according to Politifact.

Compare Politifact's overall rating of Sanders to the rating given to Hillary Clinton. Hillary comes out ahead, though not by much. (Of course, both are miles ahead of any Republican.) Despite the disinformation we've heard for decades, Hillary Clinton is -- by Politifact's reckoning -- the most honest presidential candidate in America. She's also more honest than our current president, the one that Curry considers a populist.

(Curry also bewails the Citizen's United Ruling. Then why is he trying so hard to insure that the Republicans run against the candidate that they want to run against?)

Curry continually falls prey to what I call the "Me and my buddies" syndrome: He talks politics over coffee with his like-minded friends -- and then, using that extremely narrow database, he makes presumptions about what the next 300 million Americans must be thinking.

That's why the Saloners pretend that the vast majority of Americans are enthused by Sanders' attacks on big business. Example:

While boomers have been self-absorbed and anti-government since the ’60s, their children are growing up in a world where it is corporate power that is run amok, it is corporate power that has become corrupt, it is corporate power that is limiting their possibilities...

This is a classic example of the "Me and my buddies" fallacy. Let's look again at that Gallup poll:

While 69 percent of the 824 Americans polled identified government as the biggest threat, 25 percent saw big business as the largest problem for the country...

Do I agree with the priorities of my fellow citizens? No. But numbers are numbers, and wishful thinking is wishful thinking.

Bill Curry's malfunctioning nose can't smell his own bullshit. Here's a reality blast, dude: It's over for Sanders. He will never get 2302 delegates, and he sure as hell would not prevail in a brokered convention. Even if I supported his candidacy -- and please note that I happen to like Sanders -- I would have the honesty to admit the hard, inescapable truth: Bernie has no chance. Numbers are numbers, and wishful thinking is wishful thinking.

You know why Hillary won all those delegates? Because more Democrats voted for her than voted for Sanders.

As simple as that.

There was no conspiracy. You can't blame Debbie Wasserman Schultz or Goldman Sachs or the Illuminati. If it pleases you psychologically to posit an Evil Clinton Conspiracy where none exists, see a shrink.

(And you can't claim that Sanders' campaign is being dramatically outspent, because he has plenty of money.)

C'mon. Do you honestly think that the mainstream media has engaged in some sort of pro-Hill complot? What a laughable suggestion! It would make as much sense to argue that the media has paid insufficient attention to Donald Trump.

Stephen Colbert and his fellow political wits on teevee give Sanders much more love than they will ever give Hillary. Outside of MSNBC -- which isn't that popular or influential -- Hillary has received more smears than than the entire Charmin product line sees in a decade.

Yes, there are legitimate grounds for criticizing her: I would point to her "Friends of Syria" efforts and her slavish obedience to Israel. But the media (even the left media) won't mention these issues, because most of our highly-visible writers are biased against Assad and in favor of Bibi.

And let's face it: Sanders is not much better on foreign policy. He's not the Great Anti-Neocon Hope.

Instead, journalists have assailed Hillary on bullshit pseudo-issues like Benghazi. Sweartagod, I've seen stories which tried to give the impression that it was Hillary Clinton, not Susan Rice, who made that much-maligned appearance on Meet the Press.

Emailgate? Complete nonsense, as I've detailed in previous posts.

We've seen an unending stream of articles which have tried to convince us that Hillary Clinton does the bidding of Wall Street. Mother Jones (not a journal considered friendly to the Clintons or to "The Establishment") looked into this charge, and found a surprising lack of evidence.

Mainstream journals and liberal sites have resurrected the "Clintons as racists" lie which we heard so often in 2008. Absurdly, these stories blamed Bill Clinton for the laws passed by the states which resulted in the increased incarceration of blacks. Presidents do not write laws -- and they certainly do not write state laws.

Ultra-absurdly, some pro-Bernie propaganda stories have suggested that the Clintons wanted to jail more blacks in order to suppress the African-American vote. Why on earth would the Clintons want that? This conspiracy theory makes no sense at all. African Americans have always supported the Clintons heartily (though not in 2008). Black voters helped Hillary attain her present commanding delegate lead.

(Bill Curry seems to feel that Hillary's black supporters are ignorant children who blindly follow the commands of the DNC. I don't think that black people are so gullible.)

The left press tried very hard to use the Bill Clinton-era Omnibus Crime Bill against Hillary -- even though Hillary had no office when it was passed, and even though Bernie Sanders voted in favor of it. (How many stories about that bill did you read in recent times? How many of those stories bothered to mention Bernie's vote?) That legislation was also supported by many black leaders of the time, and would not have gone forward without the aid of the Congressional Black Caucus.

We are continually told that Hillary supports TPP: In fact, she opposes it. Many of my readers will presume that she must be lying. That kind of smug faux-hipness is what caused so many Nation-reading lefties to buy into the Clinton smears of the 1990s. Smirk away, assholes: You're not as bright as you think you are.

Hillary's approach to taxation is amazingly progressive.

On Thursday, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center released an analysis projecting that Clinton's plans would haul in more than $1 trillion in extra federal taxes over their first decade. More than 77 percent of that money would come from the top 1 percent of taxpayers; more than 50 percent would come from the top 0.1 percent.1 That may not sound like soaking the rich to your typical Bernie voter, but keep this in mind: The expiration of the Bush tax cuts for top earners, which required a fierce political showdown back in 2012, was only projected to bring in about $624 billion over a decade. Hillary's plan is far more ambitious by comparison.

Her proposal also channels the idea that the super-rich ought to be treated differently than the merely affluent. As of now, the very top income tax bracket starts with single filers who make $415,000 a year, which, as I've written at length, is absurd. Clnton would slap an additional 4 percent “tax surcharge” on all incomes above $5 million, while also imposing the ever-popular Buffett Rule, which forces millionaires to pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent.

Pie in the sky? An impossible dream? Well, look at history: Bill Clinton actually did manage to raise taxes on the wealthy, and thereby got the government out of the red. No sane person believes that Bernie Sanders can pull off such a trick.

On health insurance, Hillary supports the public option. This approach, though not ideal, is far more do-able than is Sanders' plan to scrap Obamacare and institute socialized medicine. Although I have every personal reason to like the idea of socialized medicine, it's just not going to happen. Congress is what it is, and only a raving loony would suggest that a Bernie victory would result in hordes of Democratic Socialists taking control of the House and Senate.

When was the last time you saw an outrageous smear-story directed against Bernie Sanders? Such attacks are as rare as green geese -- now. If, by some miracle, he were to attain the nomination, then the anti-Sanders headlines would slam against your eyeballs on a daily -- hourly -- basis. By November, his approval rating would be in the single digits.

Salon writers are working very hard to convince you that Hillary won her primaries through underhanded means. But no "Establishment" conspiracy secured victories for Hillary Clinton. If either party's Establishment possessed that kind of eldritch power, Marco Rubio would be trouncing Donald Trump. Besides, everyone knows that the Powers-That-Be have always despised All Things Clinton. They tolerate Hillary now for but one reason: They understand, as I do, that a self-proclaimed socialist (of any stripe) cannot win in the general election.

To prove that Hillary Clinton has been on the receiving end of a decades-long media mudslinging campaign, let me cite but one minor example from 2013. A thousand other smears could illustrate the same point, but this particular one sticks in my craw.

The juxtaposition of that photo and that headline is clearly designed to give the impression that Hillary not only takes bribes, but does so with a cavalier "screw you" attitude. Apparently, we are to believe that the beads around her neck in the photo are part of that ill-gotten Saudi booty.

Does this kind of smear happen to ANY candidate not named Clinton?

The truth of the matter is revealed toward the end of the article: The law prohibits all government employees from keeping gifts worth more than $300. (You already knew this fact if you're a West Wing fan.) When foreign leaders insist on making such gifts -- and they do -- diplomacy prohibits a refusal. The General Services Administration takes charge of these items and either sells them or donates them to a good cause.

When I first saw this propaganda piece, my mind flashed on the outrageous "darkened video" defamation which Daily Kos did so much to promote in 2008. (That particular Big Lie transformed this one-time Obama-voter into a staunch Obama opponent.)

You know damned well that both Clintons have been subjected to this kind of nonsense continually for decades.

You know damned well that no other politician -- not even Barack Obama -- has had to withstand these nonstop smears.

You know damned well that Hillary's negatives owe more to this tireless propaganda campaign than to anything she has actually said or done.

You know damned well that neither the mainstream media nor "The Establishment" has ever backed Bill or Hillary Clinton.

I'm still angry at Hillary, and a large part of me wishes that she had not run. But my motto remains the same: When they hand you lined paper, write the other way. Salon is handing you lined paper.

If Hillary posed no threat to the system, there would be no reason to smear the Clinton name. If Hillary posed no threat to the system, there would be no parade of fake "scandals." The candidate who deserves your vote is the candidate who is the most lied about.

Vote Clinton. It's the radical thing to do.