Some of Nothing

The Thing That Hillary Supporters Just Don't Get
Monday, March 10, 2008

Amazingly, Hillary Clinton's uber-supporters just don't seem to get what it is about Hillary's most recent campaign statements that the rest of us find so appalling. Tom Watson says:

To be a Clinton blogger in the progressive blogosphere is to be hated, shunned, passed without notice in the street...We're Rovian in our embrace of the monster, closet Bush backers and much worse - Lieberman types! Oh, the pain. The pure pain. I can't stand it. Makes me want to quit, embrace that messianic goodness, and stand down - for the sake of the party, of course - from any pursuit of a Clinton presidency.

And James Wolcott says this about people who claim that they cannot, in good conscience, vote for Hillary in the general, should it come to that:

Look, I understand the knocks against Hillary Clinton, truly I do. There are no flaming arrows fired her way that I haven't seen traverse the air before, no bill of indictment drawn up containing charges with which I'm unfamiliar. Reciting her sins and liabilities has become a familiar refrain, but if it's the Gregorian chant you live by, if you find Hillary Clinton such an insupportable choice for the Democratic nomination that you prefer to suckle your pride and idealism rather than soil your conscience should she be at the top of the ticket, fine, have fun with that...

In spite of the fact that I will probably vote for Hillary in the general (if highly unlikely scenarios come to pass), I definitely empathize with and even approve of the general disdain for her recent campaign trajectory. The fact that Hillary supporters clearly just don't get this disdain says a lot to me. So, for the good of the few, allow me to explain.

While I've mentioned before that I'm not a big Hillary fan, my lack of fandom came in the form of sincere apathy rather than pure, unadulterated loathing. I have never liked the company she keeps or the baggage she carries, but she's a politician, so I figure those are just a couple of the many negatives that comes with having so much "experience" in politics. And as I stated previously, I defaulted to Obama after Edwards bailed because I think Obama has some unique leadership abilities and feel that we, as a country, desperately need to move in a new direction. However, it wasn't until I watched Hillary make this claim, that I ever had a purely visceral negative reaction to her:

Hillary Clinton: I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.

It boggles the mind that any self-respecting liberal Democrat would not revile these words. What she's implying here is that, while she and her buddy McCain were serious experts working hard in 2002 to help GW Bush put us into a war in Iraq, Obama and his frivolous hippie peacenik followers were simply lazing around their coffee shops chatting about how they're just way too cool for war. Hillary's belittling statement utterly ignores the overwhelming support that this idiot war received from the majority of elected officials, news outlets, and American people, and it completely discounts the important judgment and moral courage it took to stand up against these forces at the time--especially as a politician.

So, when Hillary Clinton unabashedly decides to channel GW Bush, Rush Limbaugh, and the New York Times all at once to tell Obama and other war critics that their vocal opposition to deadly stupidity really doesn't mean that much after all, I can only find it within myself to muster one kind of response: pure, unadulterated loathing. I loathe the bizarre fantasy that it takes serious, experienced people to start wars. I loathe the heinous impact that this might-makes-right mindset has on our culture and on our standing in the world. But mostly, I loathe the fact that war gives an incompetent, addle-brained president an opportunity to play dress-up and stand in front of a cheering crowd to blithely declare "Mission Accomplished" as if he had ever performed a single brave, meaningful act in his entire life and as if the dying, maiming, and destroying were even close to being over. And loathing is not the kind of response I want to have to the nation's first female president, thankyouverymuch.

And for the record, here's a video of Obama's silly little 2002 speech as spoken by his silly little supporters:


Go Obama! Kick Hillary Clieberman's ass!

Nothing New byslag at 3:38 PM