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Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream
The Nation ^ | April 23rd, 2008 | Tom Hayden

Posted on 04/23/2008 12:55:48 PM PDT by The_Republican

My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior, since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack Obama's transformational appeal.

For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.

It's getting to me as well. Last year, I was somewhat reconciled to the prospect of supporting and pressuring Hillary as the nominee amidst the rising tide of my friends who already hated her, irrationally I thought. I was one of those people Barack accuses of being willing to settle. I even had framed a flattering autographed message from Hillary. But as the campaign has gone on and on, her signed portrait still leans against the wall in my study. I don't know where she belongs anymore.

At least Hillary was a known quantity in my life. I knew of the danger of her becoming more and more hawkish as she tried to break the ultimate glass ceiling. I also knew that she could be forced to change course if public opinion was fiercely opposed to the war. And I knew she was familiar with radical social causes from her own life experience in the sixties. So my progressive task seemed clear: help build an antiwar force powerful enough to make it politically necessary to end the war. Been there, done that. And in the process, finally put a woman in the White House. A soothing bonus.

But as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Hillary began morphing into the persona that has my pacifist wife screaming at the television set.

Going negative doesn't begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person, who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville, whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don't recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "Our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?"

She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.

Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American right over the decades.

She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as "unelectable" to Democratic superdelegates.

It is also clear that the campaign of defamation against Obama has resulted in higher negative ratings for Hillary Clinton. She therefore is threatening the Democratic Party's chances for the White House, whether or not she is the nominee.

Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can't hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn't immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That's not a threat, that's the reality she is creating.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 2008election; arkancide; chicago68; election2008; eremiahwright; georgestephanopoulos; hildabeast; hillary; marxists; mediawingofthednc; pa2008; partisanmediashills; presstitutes; radicalleft; smearmachine; thenation; tomhayden; vexing; womensvote
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....like the Kiki person.....LOL! This probably is the reason NATIONALLY Obama has opened bigger lead amongst Liberal Dems.....however, they are helpless.....because the Battles are being waged in PA, IA, WV and KY.

Liberal Free Territories.

1 posted on 04/23/2008 12:55:49 PM PDT by The_Republican
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To: The_Republican

Mr. SDS Tom Hayden should be listened to exactly why?


2 posted on 04/23/2008 12:58:44 PM PDT by sauropod (Forgive me Gore, for I have emitted.)
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To: sauropod

I figured, from the headline, that this was written by Huma Abedin’s husband.


3 posted on 04/23/2008 1:01:11 PM PDT by ArrogantBustard (Western Civilization is Aborting, Buggering, and Contracepting itself out of existence.)
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To: sauropod

Common hatred of Hildabeast! What’s SDS?


4 posted on 04/23/2008 1:01:35 PM PDT by The_Republican (Ovaries of the World Unite! Rush, Laura, Ann, Greta - Time for the Ovulation!)
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To: The_Republican

I have been rooting for Hillary for the last few weeks, just because almost every “Hollywood-type” liberal, plus the Kennedys, are supporting Obama and have shown disdain for Hillary. Now I see Tom Hayden is against her, as is his former wife Jane Fonda. I love it!

Of course no dem will get my vote come November, but it’s sure fun watching them go at it now.


5 posted on 04/23/2008 1:02:33 PM PDT by Joann37
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To: The_Republican
It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as "unelectable" to Democratic superdelegates.

Hillary has joined forces with the vast right wing conspiracy.

6 posted on 04/23/2008 1:02:49 PM PDT by Timocrat (I Emanate on your Auras and Penumbras Mr Blackmun)
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To: The_Republican
It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News...

BWAHAHAHAHA!

7 posted on 04/23/2008 1:03:15 PM PDT by facedown (Armed in the Heartland)
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To: The_Republican

“It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News”

I suggest a new rule. First to invoke “Fox News” loses. Like the “first to invoke Hitler rule” against opponents.

Otherwise, an interesting read.


8 posted on 04/23/2008 1:03:55 PM PDT by Shermy (These are the waffles we have been waiting for)
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To: ArrogantBustard

LOL - same here.


9 posted on 04/23/2008 1:06:34 PM PDT by reagan_fanatic (feh)
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To: The_Republican

Hillary has morphed into Nixson-—enemies list and all (well she really always had one excpet that now some democrats are on it too).

Gotta love this RAT Liberal remorse about the Clintonetas.


10 posted on 04/23/2008 1:07:31 PM PDT by rod1 (uestion)
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To: The_Republican

Ok who is Barbara “SDS” Hayden. I can’t keep track of his wives.


11 posted on 04/23/2008 1:09:16 PM PDT by rod1 (uestion)
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To: sauropod
Exactly... Tom "ex-husband of Jane Fonda" Hayden is as Marxist as they come.. Obama and Hillary are both Marxists but John McLaim is only a Socialist.. cousin to Marxists..

The word for the day children is "SCREWED"..
America seems to have screwed itself into knots..

12 posted on 04/23/2008 1:10:17 PM PDT by hosepipe (CAUTION: This propaganda is laced with hyperbole....)
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To: ArrogantBustard

I didn’t know Huma had a beard.


13 posted on 04/23/2008 1:10:36 PM PDT by razorback-bert (If yer gunna regret this in the mornin, we kin sleep til afternoon.)
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To: The_Republican
My wife is a Clinton Democrat (it's ok because I balance the force). I listen to her to get the average democratic point of view. She's a Hitlery supporter but I think it's because she's a woman. My goal is to talk her over to the right side someday. It may take another 20 years. These people are not that smart.
14 posted on 04/23/2008 1:11:38 PM PDT by McGruff
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To: The_Republican
If they can't hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn't immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That's not a threat, that's the reality she is creating.
Q: What happens when you run with a rule-or-ruin coalition strategy, and you find out that you don't actually like the person who is determined to rule "for" you?

A: Chaos!


15 posted on 04/23/2008 1:13:10 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The Democratic Party is only a front for the political establishment in America - Big Journalism.)
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To: razorback-bert

I’d make some sort of remark about a bearded clam ...
...
...
but it would be unnecessarily crude.


16 posted on 04/23/2008 1:13:10 PM PDT by ArrogantBustard (Western Civilization is Aborting, Buggering, and Contracepting itself out of existence.)
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To: All

I must confess I get a tingly feeling running up my leg when the MSM starts criticizing the Clintons. Who woulda thunk we would ever see the fall of the Clinton Dynasty like we are witnessing right now?


17 posted on 04/23/2008 1:15:52 PM PDT by McGruff
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To: The_Republican

I agree with him about Kiki McLean (formerly Kiki Moore) and add Terry McAulliffe with the list of arrogant snobs who are Hillary's spokespeople.

18 posted on 04/23/2008 1:17:48 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Sew: Decades of training people to think as groups and as victims.

Reap: dhimmirat primary 2008, DNC convention 2008

The dhimmirats CHICKENZZZZZ
are coming HOOOOOOOOME
to ROOOOOOZZZZT!


19 posted on 04/23/2008 1:19:40 PM PDT by MrB (You can't reason people out of a position that they didn't use reason to get into in the first place)
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To: The_Republican
She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

She lost her Lenin-like idealism and has become a cynical Stalin. It is so sad when that happens.

20 posted on 04/23/2008 1:19:43 PM PDT by KarlInOhio (Pray for Rattendaemmerung: the final mutually destructive battle between Obama and Hillary in Denver)
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