I'm not going to predict that Obama sweeps the rest of the states as
surely as he has in Iowa's Democratic primary, especially on the eve
of New Hampshire's tally. But I am going to say that Hillary Clinton
continues to bark up the wrong tree. And the reason is very simple:
She's not a viable candidate for change. She style="font-style:italic;">is the Establishment. And that
sucks.
As David Morris of target="blank">AlterNet posted today, the distasteful reign of
Bush and Cheney has made well-meaning change agents in this country,
and the world, forget what it was like under the Clintons. As a
Berkeley leftist, I couldn't believe what was happening myself, as
Bill and Hillary set about dismantling the New Deal with the help of
the losers on the Right they were so busy capitulating to. It was,
after all, their mantra: Reach across the aisle, shake the hand of
those who disagree with you, find common ground. Which is a nice
enough sentiment, if you're living in a fantasy. But in the real
world, dreaming up something as stupid as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or
repealing the Glass-Steagall Act and laying the foundation for the
2007 subprime screw-over, things don't work that way. You reach across
the aisle and you end up with a world where Pat Robertson has his own
TV show and Al Gore loses a presidency he won because, as the dope
lamented in An Inconvenient
Truth, "What can you do?"
Uh, something? Anything?
The problem with the Clintons, and the Gores, and every other
so-called Democrat who thinks the best way to gain and retain power is
to sell out their base to their enemies who believe in insane
stratagems like intelligent design and economic deregulation, is that
they make it easier for those backwards power-mongers to not only sink
knives into our backs, but to argue that we had it coming all along.
Let me put it this way: If you hate Bush, you should hate Clinton. It
is the Clintons' spirit of capitulation that has led us to this
momentous crossroads, where the dollar is in freefall and the
Gulf-of-Tonkin rewind plays itself out href="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/07/6223"
target="blank">in Iran's Strait of Hormuz. Sure, the Bush regime
has been a loaded gun ever since it planted its sick roots in Texas --
my vote for the worst state in America -- but that doesn't mean it
needed to be taken off the shelf. Shopped around like it was something
worthwhile.
But at almost every stop in her last several years of senatorial
service, target="blank">Hillary Clinton has polished Bush's gun with
aplomb, hoping for some kind of reverse capitalization she could
use to build her own regime. A third-grader with access to the
internet could have told you that voting for a war authorization
against Saddam and Iraq based on pure speculation with no substantial
evidence would end up becoming a political death sentence when the
world woke up from its consensual hallucination and realized it had
been sleeping with the enemy. That third-grader could have told you
the same thing about allowing telcos to data-mine Americans within an
inch of their lives and liberties, or designating the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Or suspending habeus
corpus. Or...you get the point.
So when Hillary, according to href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/06/AR2008010602534.html"
target="blank">the knobs at the Washington Post, seizes the reins
of her own campaign in hopes of stopping Obama's runaway train, see
that for what it is: A failure of leadership, not its opposite. Like
her husband did during the 90s, she's capitulated too much to too many
dumbasses, and now it's too late to look like someone you would want
running the country. Can you imagine the headlines a few years from
now if she won the White House? "Hillary Seizes Reins as War in Iran
Goes Badly." Wonderful. Where do I style="font-style:italic;">not sign up?
Look, no one with any sense that I know of is arguing that Obama is
not wired tightly with hedge funders and lobbyists and all the other
poisonous elements of American society that help those in his position
land the highest-profile job in the nation. There is zero way of
escaping those influences if you want to become president. That, too,
is reality. But Obama is not Clinton, just as Clinton is not Bush. He
is new to us, and a reminder that the White House isn't a mere
timeshare to be handed off to two political dynasties once every eight
years. In other words, Obama is change, if only by virtue of the fact
that he shares a different last name than the slackers who have ruined
America over the last two decades. (Fucking A, has it been that long?)
So when Hillary gets on the stump and argues "That's not change!"
after blasting one of Obama's missed or non-declarative votes, she
might be right. Until one looks at her own voting record, that is, or
what she has done, or more importantly, hasn't done during a crucial
period in American history where the country really, really needed
someone to do something. Anything. Whatever could be done, rather than
floating a Gore-like defeatism ("Well, what can you do?") while
actually emboldening those who shove razors beneath her, and our,
fingernails.
So yeah, Hillary, it is much too little too late. We needed a change
agent when your husband was president, or when Bush ran amok over the
Bill of Rights. But you slept on the job, played it safe, and went
along with the pillage. And now you're going to pay for it by losing
the one job you thought someone should have just handed you, because
of your last name.
That might have been your last mistake.