Get it? All benefits to the Clintons. All expenses externalized, including to loyal allies and the soldiers of their little army. All of which leaves me with just one question: Why in the world is anyone even remotely surprised that they are now absolutely willing to wreck the party, wreck its chances in November, wreck Obama, wreck the country by giving us a third Bush term under McCain, and use tactics as sick as racism to pursue their incredibly selfish goals? Man, I would have been shocked if they hadn’t. I’ll tell you one thing. In actuality, this ain’t nothin’. If it wasn’t for their (now rather stale) desire to preserve some (bogus) legacy, but especially for their desire to keep alive a possible run four or eight years from now, you’d actually be seeing a lot worse than even this garbage. This is the Alpha Family of the Me Generation, on irradiated steroids, my friends, and they don’t take prisoners. You’d have to go hang with the junta in Myanmar to find folks more willing to sacrifice others in order to serve their own interests. Or, of course, you could save the airfare and just join your local Republican Club.

Given this combination of failures, sell-outs and nonexistent successes, how do we account for the degree to which the Clintons have been lionized by otherwise relatively sane Democratic voters? This may be the saddest part of all, but it is reflective of how deep go the roots of the American political tragedy of our time. Just one glance at the gossip rags in the supermarket checkout lines and their headlines (celebrities, sex, weight loss, celebrities, sex, weight loss) gives you a pretty quick reading of the intellectual state of the electorate. Why do we vote for dynastic idiots to lead the world’s only superpower for eight years, based on the criterion of who would be most fun to have a beer with? Because we’re seriously stupid, and we’re functional illiterates when it comes to reading politics. For the same reason, people love (or, for the right, hate) Bill Clinton on the basis of his personality, without any clue as to what he really did in office. And his wife is one step removed from even that.

We’re a society that can no longer distinguish between substance and celebrity – indeed, there may no longer actually be a difference remaining anymore – and Hillary Clinton is the perfect candidate for our era. She is to American politics what Madonna has been to rock-and-roll.

And, yeah, I know that there was Wayne Newton well before there was John Lennon. And that the same folks in Jefferson Airplane who gave us "Volunteers" were not many years later selling glossy pop-rock to stadium-size crowds in their new corporate guise as Jefferson Starship. Trust me, my expectations aren’t that high here.

But it’s still disappointing to look at rock-and-roll and see what is, and what it once was. And I blame Madonna for this. Of course, she’s hardly the only culprit. But no one, in my mind, so personifies the corporatization, the trivialization and the faux controversialization of the genre, and no one brought so much of this to bear on a vulnerable medium as early as she did. Madonna’s malefic skill was to turn rock music in to a profit-making center by substituting fake controversy for real political and social content. "Ooooooohhh, look, there she is pretending to kiss a woman!!" "Oooooooohhh, now she’s fooling with religious iconography!!" Oh, and by the way, there she is also selling millions of disks. And selling out an art form that once meant something.

And so it is with the politics of our time. We’re so far from getting the right answers that we’ve long ago stopped even asking the right questions. Plastic Hillary is the complete personification of that sad state, though of course, her emoticon husband Bill was the master of all time. But it’s absolutely the same with either of them. They wouldn’t know a principle if it fell on their house like meteor full of molten heavy metals. They will be whatever you want them to be, whatever you need them to be, as long as they can get what they need – which is power and, especially, psychological validation, via your vote. Do you need her to be tough? Fine, she’ll vote for the war. Do you need her to be wise and prudent? Fine, then she’ll turn around and oppose your freakin’ war. Should we beat up on the poor by killing welfare, or the gays with the Defense of Marriage Act, or the blacks when they vote for Obama? Just what is it you need, ladies and gentlemen? An irresponsible gas tax holiday? No problem! Want fries with that? Can do! She’s a fighter!

I truly hope this is the last column I ever write about the Clintons, though I doubt it, knowing them. They’re just not going away. And yes, as a matter of fact, that is grossly irresponsible of them, now that you ask, because, no, she doesn’t have a prayer at winning the nomination, and, yes, she is tearing down the presumptive nominee and therefore assisting the forces of darkness at obtaining another four years of destructive power. For some reason, with the Clintons, we suspend all the normal rules of the political sandbox, and give them all kinds of free passes. But imagine if someone else were doing this? Imagine if Obama was hanging in there when he could no longer win, trash talking her and effectively dragging down Clinton? Perhaps reminding voters about how she can’t seem to attract black voters, a vital Democratic Party constituency? The hue and cry from the Clinton camp would be deafening, and he would be ostracized from the party.

We also suspend our common sense when it comes to these people, for some reason. Why is Hillary doing this? What greater cause is she serving by staying in this race? She talks all the time about fighting for healthcare and ending the war and all the other things that are important to do for all those fine little people out there. But there’s hardly a nickel’s worth of difference between her positions and Obama’s. Which means, since he’d be pushing essentially the same policy agenda she would, she’s really only fighting for herself and her need to be president. And, worse, the truth is that by doing this, she is actually quite literally fighting against those very principles, because she is helping to hand the election to the GOP, which has rather different ideas altogether.

Yeah, I really hope this is the last column I ever have to write on the Clintons, because I’m sick of them, and I’m angry about the damage they’ve done and continue to do to American politics, especially by eviscerating our progressive national agenda as well as the former electoral vehicle (before Bill crashed it) of what little progressivism there actually is in America, namely, the Democratic Party. I blame them, above all, for turning the party of FDR into Republican Lite, just as I blame Madonna, above all, for trivializing rock-and-roll. The Clintons are truly DINOs (Democrats In Name Only), and they are truly political dinosaurs as well – so 1990s in every way. Sorry to break the news to you, kids: The era of small politics is over.

I take pleasure in their comeuppance not because I’m mean-spirited, but because they are so amoral. I’m delighted that their dream has been denied, their name ruined, and their bank account deflated, because it’s about time we had some modicum of justice in this country for those who would lie to us, use us, and abuse us, in order to further their own personal agenda.

All of that is playing right now at a theater near you, and I couldn’t be happier. One disaster of American politics down, one more to go.

I like 2008.

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