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.
Years ago, in Sacramento, I was introduced to Tom Hayden when he was in the legislature. When I shook his hand, I said, “Pleased to meet you Mr. Fonda”.
Boy, did that piss him off.
Hahahaahaha! A real loss!
Me too, although I shudder to admit it!
But I still have to mute the tv when she starts to talk since that seems to dampen my enthusiasm for some reason :)
It's very amusing to see the press out to get her and BillyJeff but it's getting almost pathetic that they don't seem to grasp that if the lie now, they will be exposed. I thought Bill's "race card" statements reported yesterday, one blatently contradicting the other, were hilarious - but also kind of sadly pathetic at the same time.
marinamuffy
This is the most interesting part for me. So the expectation is that someone who eats organic food will be a serene person.
I suspect any statement that begins with the words “It is absolutely clear”.
It usually means: My opinions should be taken as absolute fact.
And Obama says: "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
All this metaphysical stuff confuses me.
Students for a Democratic Society.
During the 1960's, they were a radically left group, primarily composed of college students at places like UC Berkeley.
Al Capp, in his comic strip Li'l Abner, parodied them with another group he called "Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything", or SWINE.
Hillary imagines things. Hillary lies about things.The Bill Ayers thingy IS NOT a figment of the witch's imagination.
Thanks for dropping the “SDS” info!
This sideshow gets better every day. You couldn’t make up this stuff. I can’t wait until the main attraction—Denver in August.
It’s O.K, Tom. You and your ex, Hanoi Jane make me scream.
Grounds for divorce right there!
This woman is so incredibly terrible even her side can't stand her. I don't often bother to email Fox or any other stations, but Brian Wilson had her on with a Republican counterpart and it was so horrid and nasty I emailed him and asked him never to allow her into my living room again.
With Amnesty on all their agendas, their differences now don’t matter much at all. After Amnesty the US will be totally given over to the Democrat Dream. The Constitution will be understood as supreme Marxist Document full of hidden meanings or bypassed altogether by a duly ratified Treaty with Vanuatu.
Some are. Lots of others are petulant and priggish.
SDS was taken over by the The Weathermen (Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd).
Anyone who has forgotten those times or wants to know more about Ayers and the Weathermen (Weather Underground) should watch this 90-minute documentary from 2002. It combines news footage and recent interviews. They are unrepentant.
(Obama MUST know Ayers’ history. All of this is public knowledge.)
WARNING! Graphic language and images.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6078589535743610981&q=Dohrn&ei=NA8MSIqjDpLMrAKxutCpBA&hl=en
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.