Here we go again, folks:

Radio host Pete Santilli made shocking remarks about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, claiming she should be "shot" for being "involved in the killings of American troops."

Santilli hosts a show on his website, but says he's "ready to take my show to national syndication; that is, of course, if the FCC regulated AM/FM radio stations can handle my truth & honesty."

(WARNING: this post contains language that may disturb some readers.)

"Hillary Clinton needs to be convicted. She needs to be tried, convicted and shot in the vagina," Santilli said, Right Wing Watch reports. "I want to pull the trigger."

Santilli criticized Clinton over the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consultate in Benghazi, Libya. He also slammed Clinton over what he called "the fake hunt down of this Obama bin Laden thing":

I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don't want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you've killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all. On behalf of all of those people, I'm supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.

The Great Clenis Obsession of the 1990s was a garden party compared to what we're going to get now.

Funny how the imagery of women getting shot in their reproductive organs keeps being brought up by right-wing men, isn't it? Remember Steve Stockman's campaign bumper sticker, "If babies had guns they wouldn't be aborted"? How about Rush Limbaugh saying that abortions should be done with a gun. Remember that?

Labels: batshit crazies, domestic terrorism, Gutter politics, Hillary Clinton, misogy, right-wing hatemongers, violence

This is what happens when you start poking around the Intart00bz. One of my old compatriots from the Morning Sedition days posted a link to the video I posted earlier, which led me to a one-hour documentary about Squeeze. Then I saw a link to this article about Hillary Clinton's 2006 prospects:



...which immediately made me think of this song:



And of course if Hillary Clinton runs again, we'll have to listen all over again about that time that Bill was Tempted by the Fruit of Another.

At this rate, soon I'll be catching a local high school production of Annie Get Your Gun, then coming home and Pulling Mussels from a Shell for us to have for dinner, then getting Slightly Drunk, , and then waking up tomorrow and having Black Coffee In Bed.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, music

We Can Has Two Preznits in 2016? Is there any way we can elect BOTH Joe Biden AND Hillary Clinton next time? Think about Hillary's ferocity combined with Joe Biden's ability to charm everyone in the room.

We've had some interesting speculative 2016 imagery in the last few days. On Monday we had Joe Biden doing his interpretive Full of Vim Vigor and Vitality At Seventy dance, which consisted of careening all over Pennsylvania Avenue like a cat chasing a laser pointer, grinning and glad-handing and hugging and just being the affable if slightly nutty uncle that is his public persona. This is Biden's schtick, and it's allowed him to be an extremely effective and busy Vice President, even in the face of the screaming infants that constitute today's Republican Congress.

Then yesterday we saw something that I've been waiting forever to see from a Democrat -- Hillary Clinton in full Bullshit Detector mode, calling out the clowns of the Republican Party on their Benghazi witch hunt.

Oh, the hell with it. Let's let Rachel Maddow put Benghazi in context, shall we?:



Let's not pretend here that this panel full of howler monkeys is about anything other than a) trying desperately to find something to latch onto in order to annul the 2012 election by impeaching Barack Obama; and b) trying desperately to find something they can use in 2016 Republican campaign videos to prop up whichever GOP howler monkey gets that party's nomination in 2016.

Does anyone believe for one moment that Marco Rubio loses even one minute of sleep about Chris Stevens or the others killed in the Benghazi attack while serving in a conflict zone? Does anyone honestly believe that these Republicans give a shit about loss of life, especially when these very same Republicans refuse to allow discussion of guns in this country even in the face of the corpses of twenty dead children?

Congressional Republicans have latched onto Benghazi in a way they didn't latch onto Lebanon, or any of the many other consulate attacks that took place during the terms of presidents of THEIR party. This is not about Benghazi, particularly when it is the House that has the power to allocate funds for consulate security. This is the Washington hearing equivalent of the move in Virginia to apportion that state's electoral votes in future elections so that no Democrat can ever win that state. Ever. Americans rejected the cruel, harsh, greedy Republican vision for this country last November. They can't win on the merits of their policies, so they're going to win by rigging the electoral system, or by attempting to destroy ANYONE who might stand in their path.

Hillary Clinton has been a favorite punching bag of the Republicans since 1992. Back then she was a prospective, and then an actual, First Lady who didn't "know her place". She was regarded by Republicans as just as "uppity" as Barack Obama was in 2008. Clinton spent years in the Senate trying to be Joe Biden, charming and glad-handing and working with some of the very same people (***cough*** John McCain ***cough***) who attempted to rake her over the coals yesterday. The only reason she wasn't AS savaged in 2008 was because the racist bigots in the Republican Party had a better target for their bigotry and their hatred in Barack Obama. This woman knew damn well what she was going to be presented with yesterday, and she wasn't going to let a lightweight legacy fratboy named Rand Paul, or a smarmy pathological liar like Marco Rubio get the best of her. This woman, more than anyone else in America, knows that walking into a room full of Republicans is like being Indiana Jones in the snake pit. Yesterday she showed them just who's brandishing the whip.

Labels: Democrats with balls, Hillary Clinton, Republican id-driven two-year-olds

Last Friday, Rachel Maddow featured Texts from Hillary as the Best New Thing in the World Today:



The best thing about the internet has never been the way it allows everyone to be a writer, or that it lets you have friends all over the world. Those are awesome things, to be sure, but the best thing has been the seemingly endless supply of memes. Whether it's LOLCats and their many imitators, babies who love Betty White and laugh at dogs, awareness of all internet traditions, or Cats That Look Like Hitler, the internet has for the last fifteen years provided us with an every-more-necessary dose of silly.

Hillary Clinton would seem to be an odd choice for an internet meme, but Texts From Hillary spread so quickly that its creators found themselves with an invitation from the Secretary of State herself:

Two gays walk into a bar ...

... and out they walk, less than a week later, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office, laughing all the way.

It's an "only in D.C." story, but for Stacy Lambe, Adam Smith and Texts From Hillary, that's how it happened.

The two communications professionals -- Lambe works on clean energy and Smith on campaign finance reform -- went for drinks a week back. It was that recent? Yes. "We were on the rooftop of Nellie's last Wednesday," Smith tells Metro Weekly.

The photo of Clinton looking tough, calm and in charge "in a military C-17 plane from Malta bound for Tripoli, Libya October 18, 2011," as the original Reuters story captions it, became the topic of discussion. 

Once Lambe returned home and launched the Tumblr site, the meme was born. Diana Walker's black-and-white photo shot for Time and Kevin Lamarque's photo for Reuters became the underlying foundation of an internet laugh that has outlasted many others. Besides cats.

Looking at the many Anna Wintour, Meryl Streep (below, left), Rachel Maddow and Arianna Huffington posts on the Tumblr, one can't help but notice a bit of a pattern.

"I just kept coming up with perfect results of people like Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep on their phones, and there's just this natural alignment. I think a lot of people associate those three women in similar circles," Lambe says by phone this afternoon. "Having seen a couple of videos of Meryl Streep introducing Hillary Clinton at the women's summit, there's just this camaraderie there. There's just so much respect between those two women, you can't help but have this awesome little exchange that you think might happen.

"I may be only speaking for me, but I'm sure a lot of gay men, gay women too, have a lot of respect for them."

Talking with Smith today after he and Lambe left their meeting with Clinton, he laughs.

"It was sort of unbelievable. Her staff had emailed us yesterday, said that they liked the site and that the Secretary wanted to meet us. They asked if we could come over to the State Department, and we of course said, 'Sure, we'd love to!'"

And now even the Secretary of State herself has decided to get in on the fun.

Maureen Dowd thinks it may mean something for 2016. I'm not so sure, but if Hillary is not the heir apparent to the White House, she's at least in the running to be the next Betty White.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, memes, sheer awesomeness, Teh Silly

It doesn't matter what the ultimate outcome is...as long as you can damage the incumbent Democratic president at the time, it doesn't matter if the whole thing is horsepuckey:

"Filegate" is a term that always deserved scare quotes, because the putative scandal concerning the misuse of FBI files in the Clinton White House was so clearly, from its very beginning in 1996, no scandal at all. But the obvious absence of any credible evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton or any of their employees or associates had ordered up such files, or committed any abuse of them, did nothing to dissuade mainstream media, right-wing outlets, or Republican politicians from hysterically promoting the pseudo-scandal.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

And before you ask, Royce C. Lamberth was named to the bench in 1987 by Saint Ronnie himself.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, utter horseshit, Washington scandals, wingnuttia

Classy! VERY classy:



Fast forward to about 6 minutes in.

Thank you, Hillary. You done good today.

Labels: Hillary Clinton

So...was it enough?

I'm not sure. My gut tells me no. It's never enough when you're dealing with people who have become unhinged; people who have become so entwined with their grievances that they can't see straight. This is how we get women who can come up with the conclusion that the way to make a feminist statement is to vote for a misogynist who thinks jokes about wife-beating and rape are funny, whose wife seems to be injured a lot (just sayin'...) and with his support for overturning Roe v. Wade and his silence on the Bush Administration's upcoming HHS rule that would define many methods of contraception as abortion, WILL set women's rights back forty years. This is how we get people like Alex Jones, hardly a leftist, in Denver to stir up trouble by baiting another grievance-crazed nut, Michelle Malkin.

But some people are determined to cut off their noses to spite their faces no matter what, and I still believe that Hillary created this monster that has now spiralled out of her control. The speech was good, but I don't think she was emphatic enough that a) she is OVER IT; b) this election should NOT be about HER; and c) that she vehemently opposes so-called supporters who do not fall into line. She left just enough of a crack in the door for her own ego to sneak through, and that's enough to keep her grievance-crazed supporters foaming at the mouth. Today's New York Times is reporting that a number of Clinton fundraisers are still angry and unlikely to help Barack Obama. And check out one of the reasons why:

The lingering rancor between the sides appears to have intensified at the Democratic convention, with grousing from some Clinton fund-raisers about the way they are being treated by the Obama campaign in terms of hotel rooms, credentials and the like. Tensions were already high, particularly in the wake of revelations that Mr. Obama did not vet Mrs. Clinton or ask her advice on his vice-presidential pick.

Many major Clinton fund-raisers skipped the convention; others are leaving Wednesday, before Mr. Obama’s speech.

More broadly, a consensus appears to have emerged among many major Clinton donors that the Obama campaign did not do enough to enlist their support, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen Clinton fund-raisers.

“I’ve had more contact from the McCain campaign since the nomination than from the Obama campaign,” said Calvin Fayard, a New Orleans lawyer, major Clinton fund-raiser and longtime Democratic donor who is not in Denver this week.

Mr. Fayard said he was considering supporting Senator John McCain, the Republican, citing what he perceived as Mr. Obama’s inexperience.

With all due respect, Mr. Fayard, if you do this, then I would argue that not only should you turn in your Democratic credentials, but I would question whether you are smart enough to even vote. I mean, getting pissy about where your hotel rooms are? Is there anything more indicative of the screwed-up priorities of the so-called Feminism of Affluent White Women than thinking that the Obama campaign isn't bowing and scraping and genuflecting before you quite enough?

I remember early feminism. I remember the feminism of the affluent suburbs during the early 1970's, when women whose husbands had high-powered jobs or had inherited money, who in the stately colonials of Westfield, New Jersey, held consciousness-raising groups about how oppressed they were. Early-stage feminism had little common cause with the women slinging eggs over easy at the diner, or cleaning the bedpans in the hospitals and nursing homes, or the ones teaching their children. It was about restrictive country clubs and examining their own vaginas. You could almost understand this in the early stages of a movement. Those who need it the most are too busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and don't have time for activism. But even after all this time, these women are willing to sell their daughters' right to control their own bodies and the lives of their sons who will become cannon fodder. They're willing to do this just because they're pissed off that an affluent white woman who was able to jump directly into the Senate without having to be so much as a County committeewoman because her husband was president; an affluent white woman who was humiliated by said husband on a national stage, isn't going to get to be president.

Clinton alluded to this disconnect last night, but I think she wasn't emphatic enough that these WATBs who are clinging to their anger as if it were the most cherished of possessions should just grow the hell up. She talked about the woman who adopted two autistic children and had no health insurance and was dealing with cancer. She talked about the young boy whose mother was on minimum wage. But she assumed that a bunch of people who think that they were dissed on their hotel rooms and to what lobbyist parties they were given passes, even care about these people. Because these Clinton fundraisers, and the PUMA crazies, and the rest of these self-involved, self-indulgent, narcissistic people, don't care about the woman working two part-time jobs with no health insurance. They don't care about the woman who goes into people's homes and takes care of the elderly and the sick, being paid minimum wage while the agencies for which they work charge the clients four and five times that. They don't care about the woman emptying the bedpans in the hospital, or the one cleaning the room in the very hotel where they're bitching about the rooms. They don't care about the fourteen-year-old impregnated by her father who can't get an abortion because that father would have to give permission. They don't care about the lunch lady at their child's school whose husband was just laid off in his fifties and they have a disabled adult child at home and continued health coverage under COBRA is $1200 a month -- which is almost her entire take-home pay.

No, all that matters is that they feel Hillary Clinton -- a woman who will be able to back to the Senate and perhaps be the successor to Ted Kennedy, who can go home weekends to her nice house in Chappaqua, who never really HAS to work again -- didn't get the nomination for president.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

Labels: batshit crazies, faux feminism, Hillary Clinton

About.com has a page dealing with the "Obama is a secret Muslim" e-mails and other rumors, along with a poll. Here are the poll results:



That is an astounding percentage of ignorant people being swayed by e-mails appealing to the reptilian brain.

And speaking of reptilian brain, Hillarion Larry Johnson, whom I used to respect when he was defending Valerie Plame but has become, like this woman:



... a bigger ally to the GOP than any Republican, promises some kind of Obama bombshell tomorrow involving a speech by Michelle Obama. I refuse to link to No Quarter, but now you know where to go.

Say hello to President McCain, America. And may God have mercy on our souls.

And as for Harriet Christian...when your granddaughter asks you why you didn't prevent a Supreme Court full of Samuel Alitos and John Robertses, I hope you have a good answer. You're going to need one.

Labels: 2008 election, Hillary Clinton, icepick meet forehead

If you thought that Hillary Clinton was going to settle for anything less than the nomination; if you thought that this was going to be settled after this weekend's Rules Committee meeting; if you thought this was going to be over after the June 3rd primaries, guess again. Wesley Clark last night said that Clinton will settle for nothing less than giving Hillary Clinton all the delegates from Florida and Michigan:



As usual, Jon Swift puts it all into perspective.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, narcissism

Today's honoree: Arianna Huffington (of all people) for pointing out how silly, self-defeating, and just plain dumbass it would be for progressive women angry that Hillary Clinton isn't nominated to show their anger for voting for John McCain.

Money quote:

The only way John McCain can win is if his reactionary views on choice and women's health issues remain obscured by his faux maverick reputation and the blinding disappointment of Clinton die-hards.

Exactly. And why would women believe John McCain is pro-choice? Because Chris Matthews told them that John McCain is a maverick? There's about as much excuse for not knowing that John McCain is as much a reactionary neanderthal wingnut as the guy he's hoping to replace as there is to, well, not know that there are no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, nor is there an active nuclear program, in Iraq.

So if you're a Hillary supporter, or you know any, who are thinking that voting for John McCain is somehow going to be a way to get revenge on those mean old Obama supporters, well, you and they are going to have to live with yourselves. Or you could click on over and read about McCain's real record and decide if cutting off your nose to spite your face is such a good idea.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, tantrums, wingnuttia

Thank the Gods for Drifty, who rose up from his hiding place in that toddling town, and once again nailed it on the head so exactly, so precisely, that not only is he talking about our...ahem...party problem, but about the bigger problem here; magical thinking that is really actually mental illness permeating the power hungry human psyche these days. Call it unrestrained id, if you must... until common sense is completely replaced with illogic, and smiling Terry McAulliffe is all that's left; nodding, smiling, nodding, smiling.....

Click the Guardian of Forever portal below, brought to you by Drifty's fantastic art department, to visit his world, where things start to connect and make sense... unfortunately, we are still lost, but at least we know why....


...and away we go:

The terrible moment when you are looked straight in the eye and lied to, and you realize that what makes the moment terrible isn't the lie, but that she damn well knows its a lie, damn well knows that you know, and just doesn't give a shit anymore.

snip...

Inventing absurd and/or wildly improbably scenarios in which your indefensible behavior is somehow vindicated. Even noble.

snip...

Not from the FoxNews transcript:

McAuliffe: Now that we have access to the “Guardian of Forever”, this thing is not over. In fact, it hasn’t even started yet!

Wallace: Meaning what…?

McAuliffe: Meaning that we’re Inevitable again! We’re gonna travel back in time to before Iowa, and dump 20 million dollars into that fucking state. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go back further and rewrite the party rules about caucuses and proportional representation.

Wallace: But that’s insane.

McAuliffe: You mean insanely…brilliant. We’ll stop ourselves from ever signing that stupid pledge about Florida and Michigan. If we have to, we’ll ring the god damned Bosnia airport with snipers ourselves! We’ll go back and suffocate that floozy Lewinski in her cradle!

Wallace: But that will destroy everything.

McAuliffe: Says who?

Wallace: Every physicist ever. Real and fictional. What you’re proposing would create an unsupportable temporal paradox that would collapse the time/space continuum and obliterate the Universe.

McAuliffe: Well, we feel that it would be worth it to insure that Every Vote Counts.

Wallace: Did you even hear what I just said?

McAuliffe: Well what do you expect from a bunch of elitist, woman-hating “scientists” who live only to thwart Our Gal's rightful destiny as the apotheosis of feminism!

And there it is...replace any part with any part and it still comes out the same...
its all magic unless you erase the numbers and start again...or, as Hillary says, something awful should happen.

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: bloggers, Hillary Clinton, wingnuttia

It is the season of Over the Top, and from moment to moment the most adept speakers edge each other out in the ad lib and the prepared statements of the moment...With the off the cuff, exhausted remark being the most revealing, its clear who is planning what.
Personally, I think the Over the Top Award goes hands down to Hillary.
In a world where people openly talk about being afraid for Obama's health should he get the nomination, wouldn't it have been wiser for Hillary to apologize to both the Kennedy's and the Obama's and then say that in her exhaustion she merely mentioned something that comes up all the time. The American public would get it. Its not something to be spoken of by the inexplicably ongoing opposition within the party, who has taken to bending the truth and numbers, to the point that it seems like maybe she IS just waiting around for the slot to open because Obama will surely be vacating it one way or another...
I dunno what to think about any of whats going on...it smacks of someone telling us that they know what is better for the American people than the American people themselves.
Its the "look! Shiny, shiny!" of Joe Lieberman politics that changes only to get into office and then goes on about its business...I don't like it.
Here, Keith Olbermann again, because YouTube seems to be pulling these videos as quickly as they can be put up. Within this clip is Hillary's clip and transcript.



I think that he is spot on...exasperated...and I agree with him completely.
This is where Hillary supporters say, "Well, you have to forgive her because she is A) tired as hell, and B) wants whats best for the country and truly believes that she knows better than we do, and C) she probably DOES know something more than we do, being in such a powerful position and all....so it follows that D) she knows that Obama will be taken out because she is on some security committee, so we'd better hold onto the devil we have...she really cares about us and will be the Hillary that we know she is, under the tough-girl act, again once she is in office...
and daddy wont hit me anymore because he says he's sorry....you know the drill.
This is the definition of insanity!!
Look for Hillary next to try to break all laws to make a Hillary for Hillary party and run independent...I'll bet she's looked into it!

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, Kennedys

Oh, yes she did:



You know, I never put any stock in all the stories about Clinton Body Counts and stuff like that. I remember the whole shooting-watermelons-in-the-yard thing and all the raving about how the Clintons were responsible for everything from the crucifixion of Jesus to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby to the fixing of the 1919 World Series to Steve Bartman catching that home run ball in game six of the 2003 NLCS. But holy moly, when she pulls shit like this you almost have to wonder.

She "clarified" later on...



...but note how she ONLY apologizes to the Kennedy family, not for the obvious reference that if the presumptive nominee has someone, say, someone who attended an NRA conference at which Mike Huckabee joked about it, take a shot at him, then she'd be the logical choice.

As always, you can rely on Rachel Maddow to strip away the bullshit and get right to the point:



There's something about the idea of Barack Obama in the White House, constantly watching his back while Bill and Hillary conspire in the hallway, that makes me think about Papa Boleyn and son George talking about how if Henry VIII dies from his jousting wounds and Elizabeth becomes the heir apparent, then Papa Boleyn gets to run the country until she comes of age. And remarks like this don't help. Either Hillary is mind-bogglingly tone-deaf, or she knew damn well what she was saying.

I'm not ascribing any murderous intentions to her, but this sure doesn't look like what you want to say if you're hoping to be picked for the Vice President slot. At BEST it's another example of the kind of sloppy, off-the-cuff remark that brought us news of her plan to "obliterate" Iran.

And no, this isn't about smacking her around for saying this because she's a woman. It's smacking her around for saying this because she's smart enough to know better.

UPDATE: I should have figured that some of those reading this would latch onto my mention of the wingnut Clinton Derangement Syndrome that characterized the years 1992 through 2000 and musing on perhaps this kind of remark is why they escalated these people into Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. I don't believe for one minute that Hillary Clinton is going to assassinate or hire someone to assassinate Barack Obama. She may be ruthless and utterly convinced that she deserves this nomination, but she's not a monster. But as Keith Olbermann just mentioned in his special comment tonight (which was both accurate AND over-the-top), there are other examples of a campaign going on into June without invoking assassination that she could have used in a year when a black candidate is the, or a, front-runner for the nomination, one who had Secret Service protection early on because of death threats, one whose candidacy has had people telling pollsters to hang him from a tree.

We're finishing up eight years of someone who doesn't think before speaking, who says "Bring it on" and shoots (if you'll pardon the expression) first and deals with the press later. Throughout this campaign, Hillary Clinton has shown the same alarming tendency, along with an ominous inability to admit to mistakes. Whether it's the Iraq War vote, or her Bosnia tales, or drawing this unfortunate analogy, she refuses to admit to being wrong. She could have defused this with a public statement acknowledging how awful it sounded and how she didn't mean it to sound the way it did. She should have called the Obama campaign and apologized not "if they were offended", but for how it sounded. But instead she did what she always does -- dug in her heels, apologized for something completely different from what the problem was, and so the story goes on.

People say unthinkingly thoughtless things sometimes. I recently went on a rant about parents who don't discipline their kids and then wonder why their kids are using drugs in their teens in front of someone who lost her child to drugs. After I realized how it must have sounded, I called her and apologized, saying I hadn't been impugning her parenting and acknowledging that it must have sounded terrible to her, that it was thoughtless and I was sorry. It's hard to do, but not that hard -- and it's mandatory in a presidential candidate. I'm sure that being reminded of that day in 1968 is painful to the Kennedy family, especially now. But being reminded that a man who's a father of two young children has to deal with the reality that there are people who would rather see him dead than president is painful too. And Barack Obama deserved an apology too -- not "if he was offended", but for the remarks made. Because if Hillary Clinton can't acknowledge a mistake, she's no different from what we have now.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, You can't make this shit up

Rachel speak, you listen:



(h/t: JedReport)

Labels: Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow

Well, it doesn't look so good for Anne Boleyn, now, does it.

I don't know what it is about the short-lived Tudor dynasty so compelling. After all, Henry VIII wasn't the only European king who fooled around with women to whom he wasn't married. Queen Victoria's son Albert, who became King Edward VI, had an extended affair with Lillie Langtry, after all. It's tempting to think that the story of Henry VIII and his wives is about the sex -- especially when the series currently running on Showtime is populated with so many relentlessly gorgeous people and more flesh than we've seen in any other treatment of this story. But there's so much packed into this particular piece of history -- the Reformation, Henry's break with Rome, the tragedies of the various women unfortunate enough to catch his eye and his interest, the relentless stream of pride goingeth before a fall. But one of the most compelling aspects of this story has always been Henry's moral relativism in the face of the intense religiosity that characterized the age in which he lived, and how that moral relativism led him to the heinous acts that books and movies and television have retold over and over and over again.

For all the fine dramatizations that have been done in the past depicting this story, and for all that this one plays so ridiculously fast and loose with certain historical details, there's a kind of raw immediacy that this series has. Once you suspend disbelief enough to buy that a slightly-built young man with cheekbones you could grate cheese on, impossibly perfect teeth and an Elvisish curl of the lip is the large, hearty king we know from the Hans Holbein portraits, and if you can avoid ticking off the many historical liberties taken in this series in the name of narrative, there's a palpable intensity here that sucks you into the emotional lives of these people.

In last Sunday's episode, we saw quite graphically the miscarriage that was literally the final nail in the coffin of Anne Boleyn's marriage to Henry. Anne has always been portrayed as this strong, defiant creature that has often made it difficult to find her sympathetic. We forget how she was pimped out by her family to curry favor with the king and expected to somehow hold onto his interest when her own sister had failed to do so. Imagine what it must have been like for an intelligent young woman to try to balance the headiness of attracting the attention and gifts of a king, one's obligation to one's family, and at the same time be witness to your own sister's plight as a discarded mistress. Imagine watching your male fetuses bleed out of you knowing that you only have so many tries to produce a male heir. We've always seen Anne Boleyn as a schemer, fully complicit in her own fate, a homewrecker who on some level we always felt got what she deserved. Natalie Dormer's interpretation of the character is just as self-assured as those that have preceded hers, but she finds the human part of Anne that we've so often missed:



Life for women in Tudor England just have been horrible:

Young girls were given hardly any personal freedom.

Religion was at the very center of life in Tudor England. And girls were raised to obey their parents without question.

Girls were taught their only function in life was to marry and bear children.

They learned they were commanded by God to render unquestioning obedience to their husband and to learn in silence from him in all subjection, the same way they behaved at home to their parents.

[snip]

Most people in the first half of the 16th century didn't believe in education for women. They held the medieval belief that teaching girls to read and write would cause them to waste their time and skills on love letters.

[snip]

Husbands of upper class girls were chosen for them by their fathers or other male relatives. Very few men and women of noble birth chose their own partners.

Marriages were arranged for political reasons, to cement alliances, for riches, land, or status, and to forge bonds between two families. The idea of marrying for love was considered bizarre and foolish.

Royal marriages were contracted largely for political, military, or trade advantages. It sometimes happened that the couple never saw each other until the day of their wedding.

[snip]

A girl's chances of marriage depended more on the wealth and social position of her family than on her beauty or accomplishments (though a comely appearance and a pleasing demeanor never hurt).

The Pre contract would contain a clause calling out the terms of the bride's Dower Rights; the amount settled by her husband or father for her living expenses in case of widowhood.

Even if she was widowed, she didn't gain and keep control of those funds unless she didn't return to her father's house or remarry.

[snip]

The Tudor concept of marriage fit into what they believed was the divine order. God ruled the universe, the King ruled the country, and a husband ruled his family.

Like subjects to a King, wives were bound in obedience to their husbands and masters.

Men expected to rule their wives and thereby gain their love and reverence. They believed a man could make, shape and form the woman to his will. They thought a loving, virtuous, and obedient wife was a gift from God.

For the woman, even queens, that meant total subjection to and domination by her husband, who was often a domestic tyrant.

Marriage was a period of upheaval and adjustment for any woman. Even more so for a Queen. Often she had to face a dangerous journey to a new land and a stranger, leaving her home, family, and native land never to see them again.

Royal wives could come to enjoy considerable power and influence as did both Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. But all such power emanated from her husband. She had no authority or freedoms except those he allowed her. Without him she was nothing.

Queen consorts were housewives on a grand scale with nominal charge of vast households and many estates which produced huge revenues.

They had a battalion of officials to administer the estates for them. The Queen only controlled the income allowed to her by the King. No major transactions of any kind could even be considered without his consent.

As a matter of fact, any decisions made, from financial matters to domestic issues, were subject to his approval. Usually the Queen had a privy council appointed by the King to oversee and advise him about her affairs.

The chief duty of the Queen was to produce heirs for the succession. She was also to set a high moral tone for the court and kingdom by being the model wife, full of dignity and virtue.

[snip]

The chief function of Queens and of wives of lesser status as well, was to produce sons to ensure continuation of her husband's dynasty.

Pregnancy was usually an annual event.

Many women and babies died in the childbed. Pregnancy and birth were extremely hazardous.

The expectant mother not only prepared a layette and the nursery for her new baby, but also made arrangements for someone to care for her child if she died during childbirth.

Even if she did survive the birth she could be physically scarred for life.

There was such a lack of medical knowledge even doctors, who were usually only called in if there were complications, had no real idea of how to treat or even diagnose.

Couple that with their almost total lack of understanding of even basic hygiene, and you begin to see why so many women died.

Anne Boleyn got caught up in power games played by men, was a pawn in her own family's ambition, succumbed to the headiness of being able to get a king to make her a queen, and then failed to remember what her function was.

Today we are once again hearing the rumblings of religious fundamentalism. That fundamentalism has worked its way into our government, where the judicial branch of government is one retirement away from the addition of another Samuel Alito to the Court. This breed of justice believes that because the word "privacy" is not seen in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, there is no right to privacy. There are people in this country who would return women to their place in Tudor England -- whose role is solely that of wife, mother, breeder. They would not only make abortion a crime, but they would also turn back the clock and overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, thereby allowing states to outlaw contraception the way some states outlaw sex toys today.

While some so-called feminists have obsessed about how Hillary Clinton has been treated by the media, and whether Barack Obama has been condescending, and have been threatening to stay home or vote for John McCain in November, they're forgetting how much of the progress women have made in the last four decades is because they are no longer slaves to reproduction. I have no doubt that Anne Boleyn wanted to have a male child as much as Henry did, and her inability to do so -- perhaps caused by Henry VIII having syphilis, as one theory has it -- cost her her life. Not so long ago, NOT wanting a child one had conceived could cost a woman her life.

A John McCain presidency means an end to the reproductive freedom we've all come to take for granted. I'm hearing women say that we should allow McCain to be president so Hillary can come back triumphant in 2012. John Paul Stevens is not likely to stay on the Court another four years. 2012 is too late. The march of the Court and of this country's attitude towards women cannot afford anothe four years of a Republican president in service to the descendants of those in the early 16th century who accused intelligent women of witchcraft, and behaded women on trumped-up adultery charges because their own Y chromosomes were too weak to turn a human egg into a healthy male child, and treated women as possessions and pawns in their power games and who twisted religion and their God to justify the most heinous of crimes against humanity.

These women claim to want their daughters to live in a world where nothing is off limits to them. We've come so far since Anne Boleyn lost her head because she didn't produce a male heir. Yes, there's more progress to be had. But the road we've been on for my entire adult life comes to an end with more conservative Supreme Court justices -- justices who will rule against pay equity and the right to self-determination. So if you're a Hillary Clinton supporter who is tempted to stay home just because you believe that a woman "deserves" the chance this year, just think about what you'll have to tell your daughters about how you helped the retrogressive aims of the Christofascist Zombie Brigade make sure that the world you envisioned and hoped for never comes to pass.

Labels: 2008 election, Hillary Clinton, The Tudors

As late as the beginning of this year, Hillary Clinton was presumed to be the Democratic nominee for president; assumed by most Democrats, assumed even by the media that have treated her so shabbily. Now it seems clear that the nomination will instead go to the upstart Senator from Illinois.

So what went wrong? Is it, as many feminists are saying, because she's a woman?

It's no secret that I don't share the focus on the minutiae of language that many feminists do. My view is that for three generations now, while women have been parsing the meaning of words and looking only at the corporate glass ceiling, the Democrats have been rubber-stamping Supreme Court nominees like John Roberts and Samuel Alito, more women than ever are working without benefits and without job security, women are still trapped in abusive relationships from which they have difficulty escaping because they have no skills, or being raped on the street and by their dates, or sexually harassed by their bosses. And it's not because Barack Obama called a reporter "sweetie." While you can make the argument that comments deemed dismissive of women are part of the same continuum that leads to rape and discrimination, they aren't the same, and to equate them is to make the mistake that Andrea Dworkin made when she opined that penetrative sex is, by definition, violent. It's hyperbole in the service of a cause that negates the worthiness of that cause.

It's the politics of victimization that have been the most troubling part of this election campaign, a contest of Who's Suffered More that does little to advance the cause of any aggrieved group making claims of comparative suffering, and a great deal to make very real issues seem trivial. You can't be empowered if you frame yourself solely in the context of being a rape survivor. You can't be empowered if you take to your fainting couch every time a man says something you think is dismissive or cruel.

I tend to suffer from a great deal of free-floating anxiety, and I also tend to be hypersensitive to people's moods. If someone had a bad day, it's my fault. If someone is curt because she didn't get enough sleep last night, it must be something I did. For decades I framed myself solely in terms of what people thought and what they said. And believe me, there is nothing LESS empowering than giving other people this kind of power over you. If I learned nothing else from the excellent-but-tough therapists I've had in my life, it's that you cannot control what other people do, you can only control what you do. And to put your life, your definition of yourself in the hands of those who because of their own psychological baggage, hate women, can't accept women in a powerful role, have issues with their mothers, whatever -- you perpetuate the idea that women just can't handle the stresses of life, that we really ARE fragile creatures who can't play on the same field.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't point out when Chris Matthews opines on national television that the only reason Hillary Clinton is a Senator is because her husband cheated on her. It doesn't mean we shouldn't point out what Hillary nutcrackers really mean, or the comparisons to the Alex Forrest character in Fatal Attraction. But I think there's a way to do this, and it isn't to have the vapors every time a man on television says something mind-bogglingly stupid, but to amass a group of them into a pattern, and THEN say, "See? THIS is what I'm talking about." You must amass evidence if you want to make a case.

I'll give Hillary Clinton credit for this: For the most part, it hasn't been Clinton herself who's played the poor-me-victim-of-sexism card. She isn't entirely blameless, but it's largely been grievance feminists who have chosen to blame the failure of Clinton's campaign solely at the feet of sexist males and hapless dupes like me who've managed to be able to earn a living, yes, even once being fired from a retail job after rebuffing my supervisor in the stockroom, who don't see male oppression around every corner and haven't let sexism define me or my life.

If there's a message that we HAVEN'T heard from the polls during this primary race, it hasn't been a great deal of concern about having a woman president. There's been concern about dynasty, and there's been a fair amount of lynching metaphor used from people who have said they just couldn't vote for a black man, but I haven't heard concern that Hillary isn't "tough enough to be a wartime president." For one thing, it's hard to make that argument when you're talking about a woman who refuses to say that her Iraq war vote was wrong, who voted for Kyl-Lieberman, and who has blithely talked about her intention to obliterate Iran during her presidency. So those who want to chalk up Hillary Clinton's apparent (at this point) failure to win the nomination to sexism don't want to look at:

1) Her crappy campaign organization and refusal to realize that the nature of campaigning has changed. Howard Dean may not have succeeded with a 50-state strategy in his own run, and the DLC of which Hillary is a member has fought it tooth and nail, preferring the old model of pouring money into "sure-win" races. But if the Obama campaign is anything, it's a triumph of the 50-state, campaign-by-the-people strategy. Hillary Clinton put together a conventional top-down, big-donor, big-state apparatus, led by Mark Penn -- a man of dubious connections who didn't even know how Democratic delegates were apportioned. Her campaign burned through money early, assuming inevitability and a bottomless pit of big-money donors. Her campaign focused on traditional Democratic constituencies, which have been insufficient to create a victory for anyone but her husband, who was a far more talented pure politician than she is. Meanwhile, the Obama camp went after expanding the pool of voters and reaching out to the $25 donor, realizing that if you can tap a million donors for ten $25 donations spread out over time, you have a more consistent cash flow and you have more people with actual skin in the game.

2) She ran up against a more charismatic candidate. If we should have learned anything from the Democratic races in the last 28 years, it's that television image matters. Charisma matters. In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, and 2004, the Democratic Party nominated intelligent, capable, competent men -- men whose campaigns made them as dull as dishwater. These men were also highly conventional candidates who underestimated the power of the televised image and the impact of media narrative, hence Jimmy Carter's sweater, Walter Mondale pledging to raise taxes, Michael Dukakis in the tank, Al Gore's sighs, and John Kerry's windsurfing. That all of these men would have been better national stewards than the men who occupied the White House instead is immaterial. The media are going to Go For the Story. And if the candidate can't create his or her own story or narrative, the media will create one. Perhaps if this primary race had been Hillary against a bunch of white men, the fact that she was the first viable woman candidate would have been a bigger story. Perhaps if she had not been the wife of a former president, her presence would have been more compelling. But frankly, she never had a chance against a rock star like Obama, who also happened to have a more compelling backstory and represent even MORE of a harbinger of change.

3) She wasn't prepared for a long campaign, and it showed. The worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton's campaign was a long hard slog. In 2000, there were voters who voted for George W. Bush either because they were confused and thought they were voting for his father, or who assumed that the old man would be the one actually running things so it wouldn't be so bad. Hillary Clinton ran on "It'll be Bill all over again." And at one time, that idea didn't seem like a bad one, until things started to go wrong and the Clinton campaign sent Bill out on the campaign trail, hoping to remind voters of that old Clinton magic. Instead, his presence reminded us less of the Clinton magic than the Clinton narcissism. And that made many of us question what it was we ever saw in him in the first place. Once that particular door opened, it was an easy step to "Now I understand why they hated him." And if you weren't inclined to vote for Hillary on gender grounds, and you were no longer looking at a return to the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, but instead, a return to the Clinton drama and uproar of the 1990's, the case for Hillary became far less compelling.

4) The shifting message. Last year at Yearly Kos, Hillary Clinton stood up in front of around 2500 assembled people in response to John Edwards' challenge of a pledge to kick out the lobbyists, and made an impassioned statement that lobbyists are Americans too. The rest of America may not carry the loathing of K Street the way the netroots does, but they have a sense that their government no longer belongs to them, that it belongs to the money interests. I don't think Clinton realized back then, and I don't think she realized until it was too late, that there is a real hunger in this country for Something Different; that the change for which Democrats thirsted wasn't a restoration, but a leap into something unknown. Because when the last seven years had been spent being led by fear and corruption and incompetence, a leap into the unknown seemed somehow better than anything that smacks of more of the same -- no matter what that "same" might be. And so we started to see Populist Hillary, Good Old Boy Hillary, drop-yer-g's Hillary. And as soon as she became Leonard Zelig, the strong lioness, stalwart in the face of adversity, began to seem panicky and desperate -- and inauthentic.

Of course it's still possible, though increasingly unlikely every day, that something may yet happen to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination. But if it doesn't, and Barack Obama ends up giving the acceptance speech in Denver this summer, it won't be because a sexist society conspired against her. It will be because she and her campaign misread the mood of the nation, and that this party realized that change doesn't mean going back in time.

Labels: feminism, Hillary Clinton

I don't believe for one minute that Hillary Clinton is herself racist, at least not any more than the average American.

On Tuesday, Marc Maron was back in fine form in the black hole that is Air Americas afternoon timeslot, taking the race bull by the horns and forcing us to look it right in the eye. He described the kind of casual racism many Americans have as not hate, or even prejudice, but nervousness. He challenged listeners, next time they lose something of value in the house, to see how long it takes them to envision a Black or Hispanic guy in a sweatsuit breaking into their homes before they find the item underneath the couch cushions. Of course this is why Maron belongs back on radio -- because he's able to strip aside all the niceties and the delicacy and get down to that mean, scared place in all of us and make us look at it. But the larger issue is the point he made -- that the "nervousness" which is part of the human condition when dealing with "otherness" is sitting right there on the racism spectrum. It might not be snuggling up cozily with wearing a white hood and burning crosses, but it's racism.

This week ModFab declared this one of the top 20 moments on Broadway right now. This is from London's West End, but whatever -- you don't get a better commentary on racism than this:



Apologists for Hillary Clinton are claiming she's not REALLY a racist to try to blunt the devastating impact of these words:

Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening.

And Clinton spokeswoman Lisa Caputo talked before Tuesday's primaries about "the white middle-class voter...and that's the people who are most impacted by the economy going into the recession":



Does anyone see a pattern here? Just as the states Clinton isn't winning don't REALLY count (unlike, say, West Virginia, which is mostly likely going to go for her and therefore is an Important State™) but states that held primaries in violation of rules TO WHICH SHE AGREED do count because they went for her, so the many voters -- black voters and young voters -- who have been added to the party's base because of Barack Obama's candidacy -- also don't count. Only white middle-class voters count.

Is this what the Democratic Party wants to be? The party of racial divisiveness, where black voters who have voted over 90% Democratic for decades can be thrown on the scrap heap to pander to low-information white voters who have voted against their own interests time after time after time and who are probably going to continue that pattern in November and pull the lever for McCain?

I don't know what the Clintons have on the superdelegates who are still wavering, though with the steamer trunks o'baggage the Clintons bring to the proceedings, it's hard to imagine they have anything worse on anyone else, but if in fact it's "fear of the Clintons" that's driving the reluctance of the superdelegates, then it's all the more reason to strip this duo of their role as party powerbrokers. If it's some other concern, such as of something coming out about Obama to damage him as the nominee, then why the hell don't they just sit down with him and ask?

The longer they remain silent, the more it looks like tacit approval of the kind of race-baiting we haven't seen directly from the mouth of a presidential candidate since George Wallace in 1968.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, racism

When Hillary Clinton touts herself as more "electable" because she's "won the big states", she's not taking into account two things: The first is that some of those big states are not going to go Republican just because she isn't in the race. New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are going to vote Democratic anyway. And the second is that she's conveniently forgetting Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos, and its Republicans crossing over in open primary states to vote for her.

In Indiana, a sizable percentage of her vote was from people who are not about to vote for her in the fall:

Perhaps the most disturbing indicator for Clinton was the fact that 15% of those who voted for her on Tuesday said they would not back her in November (7% of Obama voters said they would not support him in the general election). Some conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh have urged Republicans in the remaining primary states to prolong the process by casting votes for Clinton, who they think would be an easier opponent for John McCain. Numbers like this, whch some pundits claimed meant that Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" helped put Clinton over the top in Indiana, are watched closely by superdelegates and do not ease their concerns about Clinton's electability.

In close states like Indiana and Texas, where Operation Chaos flourished, she can't claim to be more viable a candidate than Obama. She has clearly benefitted from Rush Limbaugh's exhortations to his mindless minions, but that doesn't mean she will continue to benefit in the general election.

Hillary Clinton's supporters will regard posts like this as questioning her "right" to stay in this race. Of course she has a "right" to stay in as long as she wants to, the same way I have a "right" to run on the Silly Party ticket if I so choose. She even has a "right" to continue to do the Republicans' work of attacking Barack Obama if she so chooses. What she doesn't have a right to is this nomination. And she doesn't have a right to be rewarded in other ways for trying to make it more difficult for the now virtually unstoppable Obama to win in November. She has all the rights this process has to offer, but she doesn't have rights without consequences. I think if she were to concede now, a grateful party might even reward her with a nice consolation prize; perhaps the majority leadership post in the Senate. If she insists in carrying her ego-fest through to the convention, she goes from being a fallen hero to being Joe Lieberman. And I'm not sure that's where she wants to be.

Unless she's planning to team up with Holy Joe in an "Independent Democrat" third party campaign in the fall, thereby cementing her place as Republican Lackey for all eternity.

Labels: Hillary Clinton

Thank you for giving Barack Obama the big night he needed to move beyond Jeremiah Wright and get back to wrapping up this Democratic nomination. As for Indiana, well, nice try, though I (like Brad Friedman) wonder about the impact of at least 43,000 Indiana voters who were robbed by the state government of Indiana and the United States Supreme Court of their right to vote.

If Obama's opponent were anyone but someone named "Clinton", we could wrap this thing up today and get down to the hard work of beating John McCain, a task that shouldn't be underestimated despite the fact that not only does McCain not know the difference between Shia and Sunni, he also isn't aware that the League of Nations was disbanded in 1946, and has forgotten that Czechoslovakia was split into two countries in January 1993. But said opponent IS named Clinton, and while her speech last night was marginally more conciliatory than she's been in the past, she is insisting on changing the rules midstream and allowing the Florida and Michigan delegations to be seated as they are, with no compromise.

What this party needs to do now is to make sure that even if these delegations are seated, this is over. Joe Sudbay is passing along a report this morning that Wesley Clark is doing his part by urging Hillary Clinton to drop out. The math at this point is clear -- Obama will lead the popular vote, he'll lead in pledged delegates, and the super delegates now have to shit or get off the pot.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign in this whole thing is that I have had Morning Joe on on front of me for the last 40 minutes and and the name "Wright" hasn't been mentioned once. But when you look at the breakdown, Obama has his work cut out for him. In North Carolina, fully 52% of Clinton voters say at this moment that they won't vote for him. I suspect the Indiana numbers are similar. The racial divide is tremendous, with seniors, rural white voters, and white voters without college not being sold. I think that if Obama reaches out to those seniors, many of whom are elderly Jews who still think that he's a Muslim or were frightened by the video images of his pastor, he can win them over once they realize he's neither a terrorist nor a Scary Negro™. The rural and low-information voters are another story, largely because these are the voters most susceptible to the media's mad love affair with John McCain and the degree to which the talking heads of cable news get their information from right-wing blogs that focus on everything EXCEPT policy issues.

But for now, this ludicrous show goes on, despite Tim Russert saying it's over:



The question now is just how long the bigwigs in the party are going to be willing to let Hillary Clinton damage the party's nominee. Clinton can still find redemption if she can somehow put her ego back into its cage. She can drop out and put her formidable strength behind Obama, perhaps with a promise of a high-level Cabinet position or the leadership of the Senate. And in no time at all everyone will forget what she's put us through.

But somehow I think that's not going to happen.

Labels: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton

To hear Republicans (and now Hillary Clinton) talk, elitism is a bad thing and should be trounced anywhere we find it:

Hillary Clinton has just started doing an Indiana town-hall meeting being broadcast on ABC, and George Stephanopoulos asked her a direct question:

Could she name a single economist who agrees with her support for the gas tax holiday?

Hillary sidestepped the question, and tried to use the complete dearth of expert support for the idea to her advantage, pointing to it as proof that she's on the side of ordinary folks against "elite opinion" -- a phrase she used twice.

"I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans," she said.

A bit later she added: "It's really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback...Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don't benefit" the vast majority of the American people.

"Elite opinion"? Does she mean the "elite opinions" she listened to when she voted for the Iraq War? Does she mean the people who were in her husband's Cabinet that she plans to recycle for her own? Who are these "elites", anyway?

If you want to argue that "elites" ought not to be regarded as elite, I'd be happy to include the men Bill Moyers quoted on Bill Moyers' Journal last week:

BILL MOYERS: Every year at this time for five years now, we're reminded of the armistice that never happened. On may first, 2003, the White House staged a spectacular photo opportunity for the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

BILL MOYERS: You've been seeing these images all week...our president landing on the USS Lincoln, announcing peace was at hand.

REPORTER: President made history today. It was a historic day.

REPORTER II: This one could be called historic.

REPORTER III: The first sitting president to land on a carrier.

REPORTER IV: Congratulating them on a mission accomplished.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed!

BILL MOYERS: Unfortunately, that was not true. The war had just begun...Once again the official version of reality was false. The experts, remember, had all agreed: there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH ...of uranium from Africa

BILL MOYERS: ....Saddam Hussein had ties to the terrorists...

DONALD RUMSFELD: ...Al Qaeda members.

BILL MOYERS: The war would be a slam dunk...and quickly over.

DONALD RUMSFELD: It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

BILL MOYERS: No one had pushed the war more than vigorously than Vice President Cheney. He said..."I think it'll go relatively quickly...weeks rather than months."

BILL MOYERS: And, said the experts, it won't take many troops or require much sacrifice...Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz...

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: ...we can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark...

BILL MOYERS: And the cost to the taxpayer, the experts assured us -- practically nothing.

PAUL WOLFOWITZ: ...we are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.

BILL MOYERS: Ted Koppel put the question to America's top aid official on Nightline:

TED KOPPEL: ...you're not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is gonna be done for $1.7 billion?

ANDREW NATSIOS: Well, in terms of the American taxpayers' contribution, I do; this is it for the U.S. the rest of the rebuilding of Iraq will be done by other countries who have already made pledges...

BILL MOYERS: And now, mission accomplished, experts savored the triumph. The editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol, "The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably."

BILL MOYERS: The neo-conservative warrior Richard Perle told doubters to get over it. The war, he said "...ended quickly with few civilian casualties and with little damage to Iraq's cities, towns or infrastructure...it ended... without the quagmire [the war's critics] predicted...relax and enjoy it."

BILL MOYERS: Said columnist Mona Charen of the Commander in Chief, "the man who slept through many classes at Yale and partied the nights away stands revealed as a profound and great leader who will reshape the world for the better. The United States is lucky once again."

BILL MOYERS: And columnist Charles Krauthammer said, "The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper West Side liberals and a few people here in Washington."

BILL MOYERS: The Iraqis, said the experts, were sure to rally 'round...

WILLIAM KRISTOL: "I think there's been a certain amount of frankly, Terry, pop sociology in America...that...the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

BILL MOYERS: You'll find these quotes and many others like them in this new book, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! OR HOW WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ. It's an in-depth study and analysis of five years of expert commentary on the Iraq war. The authors have somewhat sadly, if not reluctantly, concluded that the most distinguished cast of experts ever before assembled reached a grand consensus on the Iraq war — and that all of them got it wrong. How did it happen? The whole thing is so tragic perhaps only satire can give us the answer.

But that's not what Hillary is doing. Instead, she's playing for the First Beer Buddy vote by claiming that anyone who knows anything about economics is just the kind of smarty-pants who always sat at the front of the class, wore plaid pants, and was always the first to raise his hand when the teacher asked a question -- when everyone knows that the cool kids sat in the back, passed notes, and didn't do their homework.

For eight years, this country has reaped the consequences of electing Eric Stratton, Rush Chairman, damn glad to meet you. You'd think that after eight years of the kind of mind-boggling short-sightedness, ineptititude, and just plain fuckupery that we've endured when we elect a First Beer Buddy instead of a president, that playing fraternity pledge would have worn thin for Americans and that maybe the Debate Club guys aren't so bad after all.

But when you're talking about depriving the Federal government of needed funds to repair and maintain bridges and tunnels in exchange for no guarantee whatsoever that oil companies won't just raise the prices and pocket the incremental bonanza, that has nothing to do with eschewing elitism, and has everything to do with craven political opportunism.

We don't complain when only the "elites" make it to the major league club. We don't complain when the "elites" win the Super Bowl. We don't complain (though we should) when legacies like George W. Bush are able to get into Ivy League colleges despite having a C average. We don't complain when corporate executives rake in huge compensation packages (though again, we should).

Once upon a time, Hillary Clinton said "It takes a village to raise a child." Today she's telling those very same children that they can go fuck themselves, because her need to be elected outweighs their need to live in a world that doesn't resemble Mad Max and in which they don't risk drowning in their car seats because Mommy's car fell into the river when the bridge over which she was driving collapsed.

Labels: Hillary Clinton, pandering