Hillary the Hawk

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Out of the Hillary fog bank, comes a voice of reason in the form of Bob Scheer’s Truthdig blog. He says what every politician knows: Hillary is the Democrats’ stealth war candidate.

Let’s face it: No matter how much many of us who oppose the war in Iraq would also love to elect a female president, Hillary Clinton is not a peace candidate. She is an unrepentant hawk, à la Joe Lieberman. She believed invading Iraq was a good idea, all available evidence to the contrary, and she has, once again, made it clear that she still does.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote [to authorize the war] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” she said in New Hampshire last week, confusing contempt for antiwar Americans — now a majority — with the courage of her indefensible conviction that she bears no responsibility for the humanitarian, economic and military disaster our occupation has wrought.

Read the whole thing here.

This election already is resembling 2004: Moneybags Hillary coming out of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the candidate of the middle class, i.e. status quo. Like Lieberman before her, Hillary is ranked against the so-called left. In 2004 the DLC gang saw Howard Dean as the commie slime. (Dean,of course, is a conservative doctor whose major left wing interest as Vermont governor was providiing children with health care.) But much to the chagrin of the rightwing Dems, Dean is still hanging around. He can be a real pain in the ass. As head of the Democratic National Committee, he knows where the bodies are buried in the Dem garbage dump.

Obama remains a curiosity in all this. The one person who actually might win the election for the Dems is John Edwards. He was a DLCer in 2004, but appears to have shaken off the deadly soccer mom image and is flirting with populist notions. Then there’s Gore, who almost surely will get a pat on the back from Oscar for his climate movie and could turn out to be the Hollywood candidate. If that’s the case, Gore will have money to fight Hillary.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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