Daily Kos

NRO's Kahane suggests  "Dump McCain, run Hillary"

by Deoliver47

Tue May 13, 2008 at 02:00:52 PM PDT

While many of you are either avoiding the television today, or counting super delegates, I have been having a bit of fun exploring Republican territory.  Don't usually get the time (or have the interest) in reading much from the right, but today seemed like a good day to browse, since I have turned off my television, done some gardening and have now settled down to see what the other side is doing.  

Much to my surprise I found a humorous read this afternoon (I had no idea the right had a sense of humor - but I digress).

Suggest you take a side trip today to read David Kahane's column Hillary’s Your Gal: Holy Joe Lamont Lieberman sets the trend.

He opens:

O.K., you Wingnuts, listen up. I think I’ve got the solution for what ails you if you really want to win in November: Dump McCain and nominate Hillary.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment. . . .  

This diary is not going to be an olive branch Paean to Hillary; time for that later when she exits stage left; and may perhaps evoke a chuckle for those of you who will force yourselves to sit through her acceptance speech and the next two days of spin.

Right — as I was saying: dump McCain and nominate Hillary for president, running on the Republican ticket. You know you want to. You know you’d love to. So just do it. Si, se puede!

First of all, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. After all, the beautiful, smart, attractive woman you so lovingly refer to as the Beast was, in her youth, a Goldwater girl, so it would just be getting back to her roots anyway. For another, the 2000 Democrat candidate for vice president, Holy Joe Lamont Lieberman, has effectively crossed over already, "morally" voting with Bush on the war and then opposing him on everything else that really matters, including control of the Senate. Of course, that would have required real courage and a willingness to face the consequences, such as never being invited on the Imus in the Morning radio show again.

Second, she’s already running as a Republican. She’s out there every day, hammering away at my guy, BO, doing the work the Republican candidate just won’t do. Why, the just other day she complained that if the party of Slavery, Segregation, Secularism, and Sedition followed the same rules as the party of Lincoln, she’d already have won. How much more GOP can you get? And since she has no principles other than the will to power, it would easy for her to make the switch. Call it Operation Chaos in reverse. How do you like them apples, Rush?!

While reading Kahane's piece on firefox I used the left side of my brain on IE to take in Barbara Ehrenreich's  Hillary's Gift to Women which deconstructs Hillary as a feminist.  Which is a nice add on to Kahane's arguements:

Far from being the stereotypical feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval Office has promised to "obliterate" the toddlers of Tehran -- along, of course, with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk addicts of the species. Watch out -- was her distinctly unladylike message to Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them -- or I'll rip you a new one.

There's a reason why it's been so easy for men to overlook women's capacity for aggression. As every student of Women's Studies 101 knows, what's called aggression in men is usually trivialized as "bitchiness" in women: Men get angry; women suffer from bouts of inexplicable, hormonally-driven, hostility. So give Clinton credit for defying the belittling stereotype: She's been visibly angry for months, if not decades, and it can't all have been PMS.

McCain can't beat Hillary on the angry scale.  And she's younger with more pep.  

He’s old, he’s weird, he’s married to a Stepford Wife who won’t release her tax returns (why — in case America finds out just how profitable beer is?). Plus he’ll nominate some clueless midwestern white guy nobody’s ever heard of as veep, and that will be that. Sure, you Baby Boomers have some vague memory of Vietnam, how you heroically dodged the draft in Canada, smoked dope and had sex for peace, and blew up a townhouse or two in Greenwich Village, but for my generation, "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" is an ancient as "54-40 or fight," whatever that was. By the time this election is over, McCain will be lucky to get Bob Dole’s gig as the senior-citizen vet, hawking Viagra, and the clueless white guy will join the ranks of Henry Cabot Lodge and William E. Miller.

She'd could step right into McCain's bomb Iran mantra, without a blink. And be far more aggressive. Ehrenreich points out, and correctly that we have had quite a few anti-feminist female examples in front of  us:

Any illusions I had about the innate moral superiority of women ended four years ago with Abu Ghraib. Recall that three out of the five prison guards prosecuted for the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners were women. The prison was directed by a woman, Gen. Janis Karpinski, and the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major Gen. Barbara Fast. Not to mention that the U.S. official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq at the time was Condoleezza Rice.

So I concur with Kahane, let's let Hillary follow Lieberman's path and head over to the Repugs, where she really belongs.  

Give it up and embrace your destiny. Go with a proven winner, a gal too dumb to know when she’s beat, a tough broad who takes a licking and keeps on ticking. You think she’s not going to use Obama’s youth, inexperience, Chicago dirt, nutty pastor, and Mad Bomber buddy against him? Hillary Rodham Clinton reminds me of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, about a fighter who refuses to take a dive in a fixed fight and decks his much younger opponent, thus incurring the wrath of a gangster who breaks his hand in retaliation. But so what — he still has his dignity.

And that’s what Hillary has, in spades. So maybe a better comparison is Jake La Motta, in Raging Bull, getting pounded by Sugar Ray Robinson but refusing to quit, taunting Robinson at the end that he never knocked him off his feet: you never got me down, Ray. She’s that kind of girl.

So go ahead: Just do it. You’ll be glad you did. And so will we.

Just needed to clear my own head of too many suggestions from pundits and even posters here who keep pushing the Hillary for Veep theme. Thankfully Ted Kennedy had the sense to openly state "Ix nay" on that one.  

I'll keep reading diaries here; to find out when I can safely watch televison again.  Don't even think I'll risk my nightly KO fix.  Don't think I can listen to Chris Matthew's turning WVA into a smaller version of PA.

To conclude here are my top 10 reasons why Hillary should not be Obama's VP:

  1. She's a closet Republican
  1. She's used Rovian tactics against a fellow Democrat
  1. She's a Washington insider
  1. She voted for the war (that should have been number one)
  1. She used dog whistles and race baiting
  1. She's married to Bill
  1. She hasn't paid the hard working people she owes money to
  1. She's not a feminist
  1. She carpetbagged her way into my home state (NY)
  1. She ran a lousy campaign - imagine how she'd run a government.

Would love to hear yours. And more thoughts on possible Veep picks. I'm leaning towards Kathleen Sebelius at this point but am open to suggestions.

Tags: 2008 Democratic Primary, Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Sebelius, National Review Online, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Kahane (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions

Permalink | 39 comments

Permalink | 39 comments