Uh-oh, Pap. Git the squi'rl gun. Hitlery Klintoon is on the electric teevee again. She's on that Fake News CNN!

"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about," Clinton said in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength." Clinton alluded to previous controversies—like the 2000 election recount to the "swift boat" attacks against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election to the confirmation of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh—as evidence of what she sees as hardball tactics by Republicans.

"I remember what they did to me for 25 years—the falsehoods, the lies, which unfortunately people believe because the Republicans have put a lot of time, money, and effort in promoting them," Clinton said. "So when you're dealing with an ideological party that is driven by the lust for power, that is funded by corporate interests who want a government that does its bidding, it's—you can be civil, but you can't overcome what they intend to do unless you win elections."

And, oh, what a row this has set off. Kellyanne Conway, who made her bones by being one of the most festering of festering gobs during the 1990's, is simply shocked by HRC's tone. From TPM:

“I think her discourse now is dangerous,” Conway said of Clinton. “I don’t like that kind of talk and I avoid it—my boss has called for civility.”

I trust that I don't have to provide examples about how that last assertion is complete bollocks, but it is interesting that Kellyanne's "doesn't like that kind of talk, " especially since she doled it out by the bucketful in the 1990's toward both Clintons and, as Molly Ball pointed out in The Atlantic, she took on as clients a number of groups that specialize in That Kind Of Talk.

But as a pollster, she worked for certain groups that other Republicans avoided or dismissed as fringe, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “promotes hatred of immigrants, especially non-white ones,” and the Center for Security Policy, a think tank headed by Frank Gaffney Jr., which has been accused of pushing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Her 2015 poll for the center claimed to show that a majority of American Muslims supported Sharia law in the United States, but it was widely criticized for methodological flaws; that December, Trump cited it when he first proposed banning Muslims from entering the country.

Maybe she wore earmuffs. Anyway, I'm sure that she—and her boss— are completely avoiding the guy who did this.

In January 2013 EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler liked a photograph of the Obamas sitting at a sports game, depicted looking at a white person’s hand holding a banana. The image was posted by a page called Mia mamma è vergine , Italian for “My mom is a virgin,” which posts memes and videos. In July 2014 Wheeler joked that Hillary Clinton was in the Bible’s apocalyptic predictions, a common right-wing trope painting the former secretary of state as demonic. In a comment under a post from the page Atheist Republic bemoaning Clinton’s reverence for the Christian holy book, he wrote, “I think she’s mentioned in the Book of Revelations….right after the Four Horsemen.”

In February, the personal Twitter account ...has maintained since April 2009 retweeted Jack Posobiec, the right-wing provocateur who propagated the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democratic elites operated a child sex ring at the Washington restaurant Comet Ping Pong. The theory became so popular by the end of 2016 that a 28-year-old man armed with an assault rifle stormed the pizzeria that December, threatening employees and customers.

Once Kellyanne recovers consciousness, I'm sure she'll get right on this. Luckily, she won't have to go out of her way to do so because this guy is the head of the freaking EPA, the civility administration* apparently having been unable to find a useful tool of the extraction industries who isn't a howling public racist. Man, the hell with this argument. It's perennially the wrong fight with the wrong people.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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