When Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated by conservative love god Ronald Reagan for the Supreme Court, the very liberal National Organization for Woman called it a "victory," despite the fact that O'Connor was and remains a Republican. She won unanimous support from the Senate Judiciary Committee, even though she would not give up how she'd vote on abortion cases. The final vote in the full Senate was 99-0 to confirm her (Max Baucus was absent that day or it would have been 100-0). That's everyone from Strom Thurmond to Ted Kennedy voting for her. There are lots of reasons why any of them cast the vote they did, but one thing you can say for sure is that they all put aside their goddamned differences, shut the fuck up, and appreciated that they were doing something that had never been done in American history in confirming a (very qualified) woman to be on the Supreme Court.
Obviously, times change, discourse coarsens, the world turns, all that shit. And the presidency is obviously different than one justice out of nine. While we shouldn't expect much from Republicans who have been conditioned to automatically despise everything she does, some Democrats ought to be able to pause their screaming of "Shilling for Shillary" for a few fucking seconds and appreciate that our party just nominated Hillary Clinton, the first woman ever from one of the major parties, one election day away from being president.
And Hillary Clinton is the nominee. You might not like it. You might think that Bernie Sanders needs to fight to the convention. You might think the system is rigged. You might believe that Clinton's camp stole something or other. You might not like Hillary Clinton as a person or a politician. But she's the nominee. It's over. Time to recalibrate your thinking.
This here blog post ain't an attempt to convince you to vote for Clinton, although you're kind of a fucking idiot if you don't (and you're a complete fucking idiot if you turn from Sanders to Donald Trump, which means you never cared about Sanders's issues, just fucking with "the system," or at least your idiot understanding of it).
This is just a pause to acknowledge that Clinton's nomination is a big fucking deal. As President Obama said, she is eminently qualified for the job. She was a great senator, and her tenure as Secretary of State actually involved more than Benghazi and her email server, although that's all the fuck you hear about. We have plenty of time to complain about her coziness with Wall Street, with her hawkishness, her coziness with tyrants, and more.
But, goddamnit, if you can't understand how big this is, how important this is, if that gets lost while you're still feeling the Bern or just can't get past that icky feeling that has been injected into you by decades of right-wing media, then you are missing out. You are missing actual history, as important as nominating the first African American, as game-changing as allowing same sex couples to wed.
This celebration is going to get ruined pretty goddamn quickly by Trump and his dwindling allies. So maybe take a few seconds to calm the fuck down and say, "Yeah, this is pretty fucking amazing that this finally happened in my lifetime."
