No Way Out

Hillary has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives.

Andrew Sullivan wrote these striking words late last year. The flailing, the jokes, the mad, red-faced finger-pointing of President Bill ... it's all here.

And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

The beauty of small sentences. Beauty and terror, I suppose ... depending on who you are.

Kiss It, He Said

I don't know, Bill, but what if I had your past—and of course, as a woman, I never could—I'd be thinking seriously on shutting up right about now.

Which, I understand, would be the exact point where you really get started, but my god, has your presidential aura ever worn thin. That statesman thing? So over.

Once there was good feeling; I remember '92. What people like you don't understand is, That is capital you done spent.

All by your little self. Pissed away our goodwill.

Hitched her wagon to a low-rent star, poor Hillary did. Became, over the years, as women will, too much like her husband.

You can't skip over great chunks of trauma in the national life, dude, like they never even happened. 

She worked so hard as a girl. Teaching, helping. Such a social conscience.

She's not going to make it, Bill, and in no small part, because of you.


footnote 

 You and Mark Penn. What are you, in cahoots?

Et Tu, Geraldine?

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept ...

No I don't know where I got that, it's all over everywhere and you don't need the goddamn link anyway. I am so pissed.

You told me a few decades ago these women would turn out to be more than a disappointment, I would have jumped down your little sexist throat.

Course, the fact that Geraldine Ferraro happened to be very lucky to have been in her position—one that thrilled the bejesus out of us, I do recall that. You cannot imagine, if you are a man—or if you're one of the pups that do seem to becloud this Interwebs thing—what it was like. Sea after sea of male faces ... and for the first time, my god, there was a woman up there on the platform, running, as it were, for Vice President!

I think that was the moment that unlocked it, for America. The avalanche of feminine faces where the world had only seen men. Oh yes. The first female news anchors were an amazing sight. And we all gained authority. Why, it made me how I am today! (No remarks please.)

Sometimes this blog seems like nothing but questions. Why do people ... I'm sure there's a name for this, um, conversion reaction. (I didn't quite become a therapist. Is it obvious?) Where people cannot wait to accuse someone else of what they benefited from. Another goddamn sentence ending in a preposition. The world is going to hell, I tell you.

The good news: Intrade has Obama taking Hil and poor John McCain. Like I always say, Follow the money. This time, though, seems it just might have a happy ending.

Simply Irresistible

Reuters: “Campaigning on Saturday, in Mississippi, the former president was quoted as saying his wife and Obama would be a dynamic duo, 'an almost unstoppable force.'”

Hm, yes. Especially since they will be running against a man in a (well-deserved) coma. (Has anyone the sense that John McCain wants to be President? Lusts after four years of epic work and nothing but hassle? I see the word Retirement writ large on his face.)

The question for today is, How screwed up are Hill and Billary—I mean, Bill and Hillary—really.

We're looking for signs of grace, folks. Humility. What have you done with that grotesque ambition of yours, and can a beast like that ever be whapped down to size. Does it happen.

Can Bill and Hil even conceive of themselves as vice-president of anything.

It's clear he was a spoiled-rotten kid, the kind who deploy their considerable charm and charisma in the interest of just plain survival. Has Bill gotten a grip on himself—or is he still in addiction's grip.

A glib little sentence, but no small question. For make no mistake, Monica-gate was total addict behavior. Something Bill Clinton absorbed at his mama's knee. The belief that people are objects, to be arranged at will. A deeply mechanistic view that cannot, by definition, ever approach the Moral, which is so Golden Rule: treat others as you would be treated. Far too fluid—and rather rules out that primary drive, to get.

My guess is that their lives, that family, are shot through with ordinary lies ... that they are nice folks, but are textbook Dysfunctional  I mean, Where the fork are her tax returns? Things like that.

It's a Shakespearean drama, unfolding on the national stage. What does the woman do when the Unstoppable is not her queenly, entitled self, but this Dark Prince out of nowhere, with all this Honesty crap, and you really cannot grasp the attraction. And people are watching.

Hillary genuinely strikes me as a born Vice-President. Just saying.

Cry If I Want To

“I certainly hope not, and if that is the dreary case, how the hell does she think she's going to keep Bill Clinton from horning in on everything (NPI.) Honestly, has the nation gone to sleep on ... oops, not my blog? 'KTHXBYE!”

... I was busily ranting away at Frank's place when I realized, tis only right, mete and just to confine one's rant to one's own blog. Especially when you exceed the comment box.

Based on the results of yesterday’s primaries we may yet see a former President as First Gentleman in the White House ...

Frank had writ (done wrote?) (writed?) and suddenly I was overcome, as if by fumes. So infuriating was the realization—and don't tell me America hasn't thought of this, although it is perfectly obvious it has not—Bill Clinton will no more stay out of the Oval Office than he successfully kept his pants zipped. (That sentence would be better in present tense, but it seemed crude; one does not really know. One did know, however—and however unwillingly—more about presidential ejaculatory matter and other grossities than we, as a nation, ever wanted.) (It stains.)

Did this not carve a deep enough rut in the national neocortex? Are not all, to a man and woman, sick to death of Bill Clinton and his close relations? (Oops, bad choice of words.) If the name Clinton be not anathema enough, take a gander, I dare you, at the worst, most devotedly unhip, glaringly 1995, clunky, unreadable excuse of a website ...

Do you know what youth for Hillary is called? (Hold your barf, please. We have bags.) 

“Hillblazers.” That's right, and anyone under the age of twenty found clicking that link will be promptly sent into treatment. I have monitors.

When the great culture war of the Sixties was over ... oh, sigh. Same old rift, nay, same old ne'er-to-be-bridged chasm. Between, you got it, the normal and Teh Square. 

Which is how she won Ohio.

(I wonder how the vote came down in Winesburg.)

Next up: Watch Barack Obama busta move.

Is It Over Yet?

I don't watch TV news, I don't turn on the radio ... and still I am just so bloody sick of the Clintons as people. Well, and as politicians, too.

Leaflets, FCS. Hillary waving a fistful of leaflets, and accusing Obama of some kind of betrayal, completely a video bite. Seeing as how said leaflets were identical to her own, and not particularly interesting at that.

After her immense graciousness on Monday night. Took, what, forty-eight hours for that to wear off.

We all been wretched, we all been fools when the dream love walked out. Not going to tell you what I've done. But that's what campaign managers are for! Keep you from being foolish on national TV! What the hell are those people doing besides billing her astonishing amounts of money. Truly record-breaking amounts. I smell cross-purposes.

Latest foolishness, circulating this photo of Obama, on a visit to Kenya, wearing Kenyan dress and headwrap.

Oh my god, he's wearing a TURBAN, people! You know what TURBAN means!

The reason I don't watch TV news is because stupidity hurts, and political campaigns are stupidity bronzed.

Drudge : Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams responds: ‘If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed.’

Doin' the double-smack, what, me, swift-boating?

Oh yeah. Way to win superdelegate hearts and minds.

Speaking of heads, mine hurts. Do campaigns have to be this way? Mr. Obama says no, and it's that as much as anything that attracts so many of us. To listen to Barak or Michelle speak is balm to the listening mind. Never mind they so cute to look at. I think my heart would just burst to see them on the stand, taking the oath.

Even with me being so epitome of white. Doesn't matter. It's been along time since that kind of excitement's been around. Since Jack Kennedy's campaign and election, to be exact.The excitement of, Something different's going to happen.

I think we are all excited over the idea of something different, something better, and I think the name of that excitement is Hope.

Eat My Shorts

From the Columbia Journalism Review today:

The press’s simultaneous amplification and shorthanding of Clinton’s display of emotion support Steinem’s point: Clinton’s gender, in a still-sometimes-sexist society like ours, may be more problematic than we allow ourselves to acknowledge or believe. After her emotional event yesterday, Clinton held a rally in Salem, NH. About eleven minutes into it, two men interrupted her speech, shouting at Clinton and hoisting handmade signs. The signs, and the hecklers, screamed, “Iron–My–Shirt.”

Which is pretty damn funny—too funny, now that I think of it, these guys were some kind of ironists (yes) on the loose. Students, smarty asses. Bloggers.

No, I take that back. Most male bloggers are too tensed up—from being on the A list, or on no list at all—hey, it's a dog-eat-link out there—to take time off just to be funny.

Seriously? A male friend with talents and jobs across the bio-spectrum reflected on what had happened to his own adolescent savagery in the years since. “I still compare myself at every moment, just not to the other guy anymore, but ... with my own goals.”

They gauge performance, they never stop gauging performance; keep this in mind, ladies.

And CJR? I got a journalistic bone (yes) to pick with you.

“Still sometimes”?

“May be”?

Stop pussy-footing (yes) around and write the simple truth.