Of all the arguments that try to support Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, and undermine Bernie Sanders’s, this one must be the dumbest — the argument that Bernie support is coming from “privileged” types who won’t suffer if Donald Trump or some other right-wing whackjob is elected.

First, the data coming from the primaries tell us that Clinton voters are on average both older and more affluent than Sanders voters. So much for the “privileged” argument. Here in the greater NYC area, you can go to wealthy white communities like Scarsdale and see “Hillary Clinton for President” on every other Audi bumper.

Second, the argument assumes that only Hillary Clinton can beat Trump or Whatever in November. Personally, I suspect any reasonably presentable vertebrate could beat Trump in November, and Cruz, too. Current “head to head” polls, for whatever they are worth, have Clinton beating Trump by an average of 11.2 points, a factoid that has been splashed robustly all over social media as “proof” that Clinton must be supported.

But the same polls have Sanders beating Trump by 17.5 points.  Likewise, Sanders does better than Clinton against Cruz.

If Republican voters were to wise up and choose Kasich, however, he would beat Clinton handily. That’s what the polls say — Kasich by 6.5 points — and that’s what my guts say, also.  The same polls currently have Sanders beating Kasich by one point; it’s pretty much a tie. And while Kasich is a long shot, given the, um, situation the Republicans are in, nobody could be ruled out. A contested convention could nominate anybody.

The “only Clinton can win” hysteria seems to have arisen from the notion that as soon as everyone finds out Sanders calls himself a “socialist,” voters will stampede to Clinton. But IMO the ones most likely to stampede will be voting Republican, anyway. This argument ignores the fact that Clinton is more disliked than liked (see poll results).

Trump’s “unfavorable” rating is even higher, of course, which is why he would lose to a can of soup. And why I am very weary with arguments that we progressive voters have to settle for a candidate we don’t like and didn’t choose because otherwise we’ll end up for President Trump.

See also Matt Taibbi, “Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton.”

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s, April 2016

All of the presidential candidates but Bernie Sanders spoke at a convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) yesterday. Sanders, the only Jew among the candidates, was in the western U.S. and offered to speak remotely, but AIPAC turned him down. So instead he gave his speech in Utah to another audience.

In brief, Clinton and Sanders are worlds apart on Israel. Sanders criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Clinton delivered a speech that could have been written by John Podhoretz. She brought down the house at AIPAC.

I have more to say on this. But let’s first look at the Republicans.

Although the AIPAC crowd remains leery of Donald Trump, he threw them off guard by delivering a prepared speech that promised to back most of AIPAC’s positions — condemning the Iran deal and placing all of the blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Palestinians. He promised to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He also drew big applause by calling President Obama “the worst thing to ever happen to Israel,” although an AIPAC spokesperson today officially distanced the organization from these remarks.

John Kasich spoke of his admiration of Israelis, his determination to scuttle the Iran deal, and his concern for the victimization of Jews. Ted Cruz did not, in fact, show up wearing a yarmulke and tallit, but given his full-court-press pandering  he might as well have. He also evoked Munich, 1938, in regard to the Obama Administration’s Iran deal. Obama = Hitler. Whether AIPAC distanced themselves from that I haven’t heard.

Now, on to Clinton. On the plus, side, she hasn’t (yet) called for the extermination of all Palestinians. And she cannot completely disavow the Iran deal, seeing as how she was partly involved in it. But she promised to call it off if any Iranian so much as sets off firecrackers for New Years.

Here are some headlines about Clinton’s speech:

Juan Cole — Hillary Clinton goes full Neocon at AIPAC, Demonizes Iran, Palestinians. “Clinton has just announced a diction and a set of policies toward the Middle East that differ in no particular from those of far right Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.”

Ben Norton — “‘She sounds like Netanyahu’: Hillary Clinton goes extra hawkish in her biased, die-hard pro-Israel AIPAC speech.”

True to her hawkishness, Clinton openly called for a strong U.S. empire. “We need America to remain a respected global leader, committed to defending and advancing the international order,” she proclaimed.

Clinton even asserted that the U.S. should act unilaterally, even if it must fly in the face of the international community. “I would vigorously oppose any attempt by outside parties to impose a solution,” she said, “including by the U.N. Security Council.”

The rhetoric of the former secretary of state — who, virtually single-handedly, helped push for the disastrous NATO war in Libya — was so hawkish, Clinton was compared to Netanyahu.

“I literally could be listening to Bibi Netanyahu right now at AIPAC,” noted Naomi Dann, media coordinator for the group Jewish Voice for Peace, and it “wouldn’t sound any different than Hillary Clinton.”

Michelle Goldberg — Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC Speech Was a Symphony of Craven, Delusional Pandering

She spent significantly more time railing against the “alarming” Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which is gaining traction on college campuses nationwide. Pledging to “take our alliance to the next level,” Clinton said that one of the first things she’d do in office is invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House. That was a barely veiled rebuke to Obama, who never treated Benjamin Netanyahu with the deference the prime minister felt entitled to. Before the speech, some had hoped that Clinton might offer a word of solidarity or encouragement to beleaguered progressives in Israel. She gave them nothing.

Naturally, reactions to this speech from Clintonistas in social media range from silence to condemning Bernie Sanders for excessive Zionism.

The most bizarre critique of Clinton’s speech was from Max Fisher at Vox, who acknowledged it was a very hard-line speech, but who assured us we should not be concerned, because she doesn’t really mean it. The rhetoric is just a strategy for working with Israel, he says. She can be counted on to continue Obama’s policies, even though she more than hinted Obama’s policies aren’t good enough .

On to Sanders. Speaking to supporters in Utah, Bernie Sanders voiced support for a two-state solution. He supports Israel’s right to nationhood, but he also criticized Israel for their actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

Consistent with his ongoing critique of economic inequality, Sanders, who is Jewish and spent time at a kibbutz after college, offered a plea for a more humane handling of the Israel–Palestine conflict. “To be successful, we have to be a friend not only to Israel, but to the Palestinian people, where in Gaza, they suffer from an unemployment rate of 44 percent—the highest in the world—and a poverty rate nearly equal to that,” Sanders said, according to a prepared text of his remarks.

Israel, he argued, is compounding the suffering with its own aggressive policies. Sanders called on Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to pull back settlements in the West Bank and turn over hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenue to Palestinians. Peace, he also said, “will mean a sustainable and equitable distribution of precious water resources so that Israel and Palestine can both thrive as neighbors…Right now, Israel controls 80 percent of the water reserves in the West Bank. Inadequate water supply has contributed to the degradation and desertification of Palestinian land. A lasting a peace will have to recognize Palestinians are entitled to control their own lives, and there is nothing human life needs more than water.”

It’s also worth watching what he said on CNN last night. He’d like the U.S. to invest more in economic development in the region than in shipping arms to Israel. He also questioned why we’re hard on Iran but consider Saudi Arabia our good friends. He’s actually thought about this stuff, in other words.

Lots going on in the world, including the President’s historic visit to Cuba and the terrorist attack in Brussels, but I wanted to be sure to comment on the AIPAC speeches before they were old news, which will be any minute now …

Most of us have grumbled about those working-class white male voters who keep getting snookered into voting against their own economic interests. And it isn’t always just about dog-whistles and gays, guns and God. You can find them supporting “right-to-work” laws that will have the effect of reducing their earnings, for example.

But would more, shall we say, informed votes have mattered much?

Ian Welsh’s Why Poor White Males Are the Core of Trump’s Support is worth reading. “Wages for working class white males peaked in 1968, forty-eight years ago,” he writes. I had thought the peak year was 1972, but whatever. It was some time back then. The point is that since the late 1970s wages for working class white men have relentlessly drifted downward. He continues,

“So, for damn near 48 years, poor whites have done terribly. For forty-eight years, ordinary politicians have promised to do something about it, and nothing has improved….

“It is a FACT that working class whites will not see any improvement worth mentioning under any normal politician, including Clinton. They may see an improvement under Trump, they certainly would under Sanders.

Interesting thought, huh? Ohio governors do have history regarding the Guard.

This is a scenario Charles Pierce alluded to, after DT hinted that his people might riot at the convention if he doesn’t get the nomination, and I confess it hadn’t occurred to me before. This might give us a clue why Kasich is bothering to stay in the race. Maybe he’s planning a coup.

Since this is Saint Paddy’s Day, let’s quote the Irish Times:

With most of the remaining states allocating delegates proportionally, Kasich’s aides believe he could prevail at a convention at which no candidate enters with a majority.

“The plan is to win Ohio, and some other states, and if that happens, nobody is going to have enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot,” said John Weaver, Kasich’s chief campaign strategist, who also worked on Republican Senator John McCain’s losing presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2008.

Kasich’s plan, according to aides, is to leverage the momentum to gather more endorsements from mainstream party insiders and Republican donors.

With the wind at his back, he hopes to score more victories in upcoming primaries including Pennsylvania, Maryland, Wisconsin, Connecticut and California, where he believes the terrain is friendlier to his brand of Republican moderation.

It’s a long shot, but it’s a shot. And, frankly, I’m not sure Hillary Clinton could beat John Kasich in a general election. He’s anodyne enough to pass for normal; she is more hated than loved.

Thanks again, Debbie Wasserman Schultz …

I don’t normally quote the National Review, but this article was so extraordinary — not in a good way — that I felt compelled to point to it. And jeer.

The original article, by Kevin Williamson, is behind a subscription firewall, but here it is quoted in another article. Speaking of white working-class supporters of Donald Trump, Williamson said,

The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

One might ask, where can these people drive a U-Haul to find steady jobs that pay a living wage, so that they might put down roots and raise families, etc.? Because I sure as hell don’t know, either.

Of course, in National Review land, these people aren’t being marginalized because the economy has no place for them. It’s all the fault of government handouts! The author of the linked article, David French, seems to think all these rednecks on narcotics are living off bogus disability checks. There’s no evidence supporting claims of rampant fraud in the SSD system, but it’s a beloved myth on the Right.

Weirdly, while David French thinks the fracturing of the Holy Nuclear Family is what’s wrong with America, in the past he has defended Bristol Palin as a perfectly wholesome roll model for American youth. Of course, he also mentioned this —

My wife, Nancy, worked with Sarah on her most recent book, she worked with Bristol on her book, she edits Bristol’s blog on Patheos, and I represented Bristol in a lawsuit — when a man sued her after he profanely accosted her at a bar. (He lost.)

And French is a staff writer at National Review. I ask you, who is a bigger freeloader on society? French, his wife, and the Palins? Or some injured, unemployed guy attempting to keep himself alive on stingy SSD payments? Hmm…