If Barack Obama loses the general election to John McCain this fall, it will not be the fault of Hillary Clinton. Just the same, if Hillary pulls off a miracle and wins the nomination, her defeat in the fall would not be the fault of Barack Obama. Rather, the blame should fall exactly where it belongs: the American people.
A couple weeks ago on his show, Bill Maher captured my thinking on this perfectly when he said, "I'm sick of politicians saying, 'the American people are smarter than that.' No they're not." He's absolutely right because if the American people were smart, then why the hell is John McCain either tied with or ahead of Obama and Clinton in most polls?
The American people overwhelmingly oppose the Iraq war, they think we never should've been there, they want our troops to start coming home ASAP, and they largely blame the Republicans for this mess. Yet McCain, a Republican who has supported this war every step of the way, still has a good shot at winning the presidency. Let me just stipulate this by saying that I still think it's likely that either Obama or Clinton will beat McCain - after all, they haven't begun attacking the guy full-time yet and the polls are still basically tied.
But as we saw in 2004, never underestimate the American people's capacity for stupidity. What else can explain why McCain is even within butt-sniffing distance of either Obama or Clinton? Just think about it for a second: nobody should be paying attention to anything McCain says about Iraq. No one in Congress pushed us into this war harder than McCain. He said the war would be easy, that Saddam and al Qaeda were connected, that we'd be greeted as liberators, blah, blah, blah. All of it was bullshit. McCain and his ilk should have absolutely zero credibility at this point.
Not to mention, the stuff he's saying today should be dismissed as no more credible than the rantings of a schizophrenic crackhead screaming on a streetcorner about the end of the world. Just look at his reasoning. He says that we had the wrong strategy in the bad old days of 2005. Violence today in Iraq is, on average, higher than it was in 2005. Yet somehow McCain thinks that we're winning now?
Or take another example. McCain says he doesn't mind if we occupy Iraq for 100 years so long as they're not killing Americans and each other. So he basically wants to keep our troops there until 1) they decide to stop hating and killing us, and 2) they decide to stop hating and killing each other. In other words, his strategy is to keep our troops there until a miracle happens. Wishing for good things to happen is great, but as a wise man once told me, "Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first."
It's not just McCain's reasoning and strategy that are faulty. The guy doesn't even know who the players are in Iraq and what side they're on. The guy repeatedly said last month that al Qaeda was being trained by Iran. Does McCain even know that al Qaeda and Iran, like, you know, hate each other's guts since one's Sunni and the other's Shiite? Maybe he could've taken a hint from al Qaeda's number 2 who just last week said that Iran was on their list of places to attack. Hell, yesterday he got his Sunnis and Shiites confused again, so maybe he is going senile. Also last week McCain said that this Shiite on Shiite violence that's broken out is a sign that we're making progress. Right, and getting herpes is a sign that you're a ladies man.
Plus McCain's bed buddies, the two numbnuts, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, wrote an op-ed in the Wall St. Journal the other day in which they claimed, astonishingly, that "Iran also continues to wage a vicious and escalating proxy war against the Iraqi government". And David Broder considers these guys to be the grown-ups? The Iranians are not fighting the Iraqi government. They are partners with the Iraqi government. Are McCain and his doofuses even aware that Iranian president Ahmedinjad got the red carpet treatment when he visited Baghdad last month, that he had a jolly meeting/photo-op with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, and he didn't even need to sneak into the country unannounced in the middle of the night the way President Bush has to? Strange way to greet somebody who's supposed to be the enemy.
Yet despite overwhelming and voluminous evidence of McCain's idiocy, according to opinion polls, he still has a good shot at winning the presidency. That is why I've come to the conclusion that if McCain wins, it won't be because of anything Hillary or Barack did. The blame will lie solely with the American people for being so dumb as to excuse all the stupidity we've seen from McCain and Co.
This includes not only those who are dumb enough to buy what McCain's selling, but whichever Obama or Clinton supporters decide to stay home or vote for McCain in November because their candidate didn't get the nomination. Let me add that I wouldn't blame either Obama or Clinton for the actions of their supporters because they've both encouraged their supporters to support the Democratic nominee, whoever that may be. Nor would I blame a rough primary fight or nastiness between the candidates and their supporters. As bad as the infighting has been, based on what I saw from the three candidates at yesterday's hearings, both Clinton and Obama seemed presidential while McCain sounded like one of those half-literate Republican callers on C-Span, which should be enough motivation for any Clinton or Obama supporter to get over their bitterness and vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is.
Frankly, there's nothing either Obama or Clinton can possibly say about or do to each other that would justify any of their supporters enabling McCain to become president, short of Obama saying that women have smaller brains or Hillary making a speech in black-face. So if you give a rat's ass about not only the welfare of the Democratic party and progressivism but the welfare of our country, put your personal animosities aside and recognize that as much as you might dislike or even hate Obama or Clinton, remember that McCain's even worse.
I'll put it in even more stark terms: If, depending on who you support, voting for Obama or Hillary would be akin to eating dogshit, keep in mind that voting for McCain would be like eating dogshit at every meal every day for the next 4 years.