I'm not a huge Clinton fan but how is a claim of supporting a position in the same category as something that can (within reason) be counted and measured? How do you know she is "pretending"?
I mean look at all her other positions. She was supposedly for the Iraq war until she was against it. Against marijuana legalization until she was for it. For building a wall with Mexico until Trump supported it. For single payer healthcare until Bernie supported it. And so on.
It's normal for people to change their minds as they learn more about things. It's not normal for people to change their minds on every single political issue in lockstep with internal polling. In the same way that things like Benford's Law can be used to detect fraud, she seems to fail some fundamental test of being a real human.
Your analogy would work if you said liberals give Clinton a pass for flip-flopping while hating Trump for flip-flopping on abortion. AFAIK, liberals hate Trump for his current stance and actions on abortion rights, not for being a flip-flop (i.e. they'd be fine if the flip-flop happened in the other direction)
I mean that may be true in some sort of epistemological sense, but pragmatically both are equally ridiculous. The fact that something could be true doesn't make it any less false.
I'm talking specifically though about HRC believing all of HRC's stated positions, not about a random person changing their opinions over the course of time. The probability calculus there is very different. E.g. the Clintons literally hire people to survey the public to tell them what policies to campaign on, that's how they came up with the idea of adding v-chips to TVs or whatever. The Adam Curtis documentary Century of the Self goes into this in depth.
edit:
> I'm saying if you were to do some sort of bayesian analysis, I think you'd find the probabilities of each to be approximately equal. (E.g. within 5%.)
What would be the dataset and the priors for this Bayesian analysis? Which presidents haven't changed in response to events and changing beliefs and political realities?
(And I think both of these, the "overprepared" thing and the general insinuation that Hillary isn't human, are subtle propaganda points from the Republican strategists. So it's funny to see it in a thread about how the left wing makes right wing ideas unthinkable when literally the opposite has happened. Here's my controversial opinion that will get yelled at by most people: Hillary is a genuine and kindhearted person who deeply cares about making America better, and she was the best candidate for president from any party for decades—certainly far better than Bernie.)
Stealing the questions from the moderator (and still losing) is now being described as overprepared?
There was some amount of controversy over one such comment, by Chuck Todd (of NBC).
You're confusing two separate incidents, Donna Brazile giving one question from the primary debate to the Hillary campaign in March 2016, and Chuck Todd analyzing the first general debate in September 2016 and calling her "over-prepared". So, no.
Again, it's extremely funny how much false right-wing propaganda you're attempting to use in defense of the assertion that the left wing prefers orthodoxy to truth.
I mean it's literally just what happened. Donna Brazille even said the reason she did it was because she didn't think Clinton was smart enough to be President on her own, and that she would be 'blindsided' by basic questions.
Again, what do you have that's as concrete or tangible as the inauguration attendance count (or State of the Union ratings) to show that Clinton's support of gay marriage (or for any of her other purported stances) is in contradiction to reality? I'm not arguing that you should approve of Clinton's flaws more than Trump's, just that the ones you cite are categorically different.
Your argument would be stronger if you cited the times that Clinton said things that were shown to be objectively and observably false.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...
In particular, she's a United Methodist (as am I; I go to an ELCA congregation these days but the two denominations are in full communion), and the United Methodist Church still teaches that homosexuality is contrary to Christianity and does not officiate same-sex marriages. (Yes, the ELCA does do same-sex marriages, and no, I cannot explain how this interacts with full communion.) Going from "my religion teaches that it's wrong" to "... but that's just my religion, and the government should give same-sex couples the same rights, but the word 'marriage' is about religion and tradition" to "I support it" is a journey that lots of non-right-wing religious folks in the US, myself included, have gone through in approximately the same time frame as when Hillary did. I think Occam's razor should push us in the direction of believing that she's genuine, or we would otherwise need a reason why she's fake but lots of people of extremely similar religious and political positions have not been fake about the exact same thing.
Going a bit more broadly, I would argue that it is common for people to change their minds on political issues in lockstep with the median of people of similar political and cultural leanings, sort of by definition.