Goodbye, cruel Kossacks, I fold. You win, Obama wins, my candidate has not, cannot, and will not get a fair hearing here, and I'm done.
It has been what seems like weeks since anything positive has been said about my candidate for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is one of the most accomplished, respected and admired women of the 20th century, and yet you people have not stopped baying for her head on a spike since she announced a year ago. A few things I have to get off my chest:
- I don't care that her husband cheated on her, or that she took him back afterwards. I really don't.
- I don't care that her husband made some calculated political decisions that ultimately didn't work out. Kossacks seem to forget what he was up against during his entire Administration. The legislative branch was not giving an inch, out of nothing but pure spite.
- I actually don't care that she won't apologize for her AUMF vote. Wait, I take that back. I do care, because to apologize for something she thought long and hard about shows a lack of courage of her convictions. In fact, I defend her vote for what it was, in the starkest possible terms: a WOMAN that wants to run for President in sexist America cannot be seen to flinch from the use of force, period. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. To me, the vote was intended to be saber-rattling done on the cheap, only the President was out to show that he has a bigger dick than his father. Crude, yes, but I think accurate.
- I don't care that she is rather unimpressive as a speaker. We're not electing the president of Toastmasters here.
- I don't even care that she is a creature of the Washington establishment. I used to live in DC, so I know how things work there. It takes an insider to make the whole mess function at all, let alone accomplish any good for the country.
I do care that she cares about this country. Her entire life has been one of nonstop public service, from law school onward to today. Her personal story inspires me more than I can describe. Her desire to improve the quality of life for all Americans is genuine, and it's a shame that she has difficulty articulating that desire publicly.
She's been horribly burned, almost disfigured, you see, by the media. She has been maligned as a militant feminist that didn't know her place since Bill was governor of AR. Much of the bile was due to animosity towards her husband, a man that has always engendered strong emotions among his followers as well as detractors. A lie machine has been in place to attempt to bring down the Clintons for almost 20 years - its existence is well documented, and frankly I am shocked into silence that all of you have forgotten how effective it has been at poisoning the well in America against the two of them. Indeed, many, many of you here spout the filth that Richard Mellon Scaife paid so much to have created in order to smear them.
None of that should matter now, you say. Let's talk about the campaign. I actually thought running a virtual GE campaign from the beginning was a good idea. It eliminated the need for pandering to special interests on the left, which always comes back to bite the candidate on the ass later as "flip-flopping." She was not prepared for Barack Obama. Actually, many of his own now fanatic supporters say they really werent' prepared for him either. Anyhoo, the campaign. She was doing great until the fateful October debate, when she was tripped up on a REPUBLICAN issue, immigration. A colossal blunder from which she never fully recovered. And the Obamaniacs pounced, nevermore to let up.
The thing that has finally sent me running for cover is the mean-spirited hostility that is all over here now. I guess it's true that we need an enemy after all. Bashing Bush has clearly gotten boring, and Lord knows you guys all resemble screaming girls in 1964 awaiting the arrival of the Beatles (I lifted that one from something I read here yesterday) at the mention of your candidate's name, so it might as well be Clinton that is demonized. For you people, it is not enough that Barack wins, Hillary must lose, and lose completely, crushingly, humiliatingly badly. You obviously want her face down on the ground, destroyed, ruined, run out of town on a rail. I cannot describe what I read on these posts as anything other than pure hatred. Scaife and the Arkansas Project have finally won.
(Whew!) I do not reciprocate this animus. Even though Barack Obama, a committed supporter of GLBT rights, gave the floor to a committed homophobe (exgay homophobe, no less - you have no clue how insulting and offensive that is unless you're gay), thereby displaying shameless pandering to SC's black evangelicals, I ultimately agreed that I would vote for him rather than abandon the party, as have most Clinton supporters. Even though I personaly feel that Sen. Obama is an empty suit that talks pretty, full of platitudes one can probably find stitched on a pillow at Grandma's somewhere, I recognize that he has tapped into something that Sen. Clinton, for all her capability and good intent has not - the sense that our government is too far gone to simply put in reverse and make some repairs (I obviously disagree with this sentiment). I feel that the kind of change that Obamaniacs envision will be too much, too soon, and the people will rebel at that much disruption and uncertainty in their lives. My opinion is that Hillary Clinton's presidency would be a season of rest and recovery, followed by the quiet, peaceful revolution of Barack Obama in 2016.
In any case, Hillary may yet win (although Kossacks will insist with their dying breaths that she had to cheat to do it. Hillary can't possibly succeed at anything without cheating, you know.). If she does, this website may become radically transformed in ways yet unforseen. The country, however, will be fine. She has made some errors in her campaign, to be sure. Her husband has inexplicably run off his mouth in the most unfortunate ways. She has thus far proven unable to turn her enormous campaign machine on a dime and relaunch her campaign once it became clear that Obama was not going away, but again this may change. She has managed to overcome crushing negatives to battle the nomination contest to a virtual draw, and that's not nuthin'. She came into this with those negatives, and they explain the amorphous, undefinable distaste you may feel for her. Throw in a couple of policy disagreements and voila! she is NOT your candidate and never will be.
Hillary is MY candidate, however. I agree with her on 98% of her choices, and support for marriage equality will come to her one day, I am sure. She may not get the chance because the Democratic Party has managed to in one year what the Republican Party could not after over 20 years of trying - destroy Hillary Clinton.