Your faith in the Hillary Clinton candidacy for President is admirable. That is, we admire your pluck and your recognition of this chance for a woman to be President. But, we wonder, do you really think that Hillary Clinton is really an "on-her-own female" candidate, or isn't her candidacy really the result of a convenient marriage to a former President? How did she get to this position in politics? Did she win her spurs the hard way by getting elected to a school board, then the city council, then the state legislature, then Washington, or did she instead ride into town on the coattails of her husband. Isn't a fact that Hillary is what she is because of Bill Clinton?
Okay, your argument is that Hillary is the major factor in Bill Clinton's life and that he would not be a former President of the United States if it were not for the solid advice Hillary gave him as he scrambled up the heap in Arkansas and then inside the national Democratic Party. You can hold on to that illusion, because every First Lady could claim that, but no First Lady has ever attempted the audacious assertion that she was part of the Constitutional government.
It is impossible, in fact, for a First Lady to know anything about half the government when she does not have a security clearance. Or, are you saying that Bill Clinton, in addition to his philandering defied his own government and disclosed top secret information to his bedtime partner. If he gave such information to Hillary, then to whom else did he impart state secrets?
Okay, yes, Hillary did head up the Health Care initiative. What happened to that? Yes, we know that it did not get off the ground. Whose fault was it that it did not? Was that Bill's fault for entrusting to Hillary or was it that some big mean Republicans on the Hill beat her up and Bill could not protect her? You see, we do not understand which part of the coattails Hillary rode in on are quality experience. Certainly her imaginings of sniper fire are not real. We are suggesting that most of it—all but name recognition—are unreal, false, and illusory.
If Hillary is not an authentic bootstraps femme candidate—and clearly she is not—then what does she represent. Are all you fans centrist, DLC, triangulating, opportunists? We believe you might be slightly confused, but not all centrists. We believe you are holding on to the false illusion of Hillary's authentic female candidacy and in the back of your minds you are telling yourself that a centrist candidacy is a safe candidacy, likely to pick up the stray independent vote. But this is another illusion, a falsehood carefully disseminated by the Clinton campaign.
Hillary is constitutionally a conservative. She belongs to a fundamentalist religious group that preached a form of Christofascism in its early days. Hillary and Bill (and they are inseparable, you know—a twofer that won't stop with pillow talk). She was born and raised a conservative Republican. She became a Democrat only in the Arkansas sense which, folks, is not the mainstream of the Democratic Party by any means. The truth is that Clinton centrism is plain old down home opportunism, lusty and barren of the things that Progressives and Liberals hold dear, such as helping social programs, the rule of law, ethical behavior, promotion of liberty for all, and progress!
Hillary is not a safe centrist, she is a political opportunist and a very cheap-shot mud-slinging one at that. Independents know this and they are appalled. They are more likely to vote Green this year in disgust over the tactics and mean-spirited stuff coming out of both Clinton mouths.
But down (or up) at the level of policy is where Hill and Bill fail utterly. Despite Hillary's back-pedaling on NAFTA, Bill remains steadfastly a global free-trader. He has to because he was bought and sold by corporate interests long, long ago. If you think that Hillary's talk about revising NAFTA is pure campaign feldergarb, you are as smart as I think you are. There isn't a chance in hell of a new Clinton regime standing up to the do-nothing politics of the global free-traders. The consequences to you Clinton fans will be a deep recession that scrapes the bottom and feels like a great depression among the poor and the less fortunate in the middle classes.
You can take the road you are following, which is the road through the Pennsylvania primary to see if your candidate has the grit to mount a surge. When you think "surge" remember that Hillary was in favor of this war in Iraq even though there were many voices, including Barack Obama's, against it. She was not tricked or lied to. She made a decision to look tough for her own political purposes and it has cost 4,000 American lives and 30,000 American maimed and disabled, not to mention hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives in Iraq.
You are supporting a candidacy that is built on fallacy and coattails and illusion. You need to wake up to the reality of your situation and understand that the struggle is not to elect the first female President but to cleanse the Democratic Party of its opportunist centrists. If you do not abandon your idealistic illusions the result will be an out-of-office house-cleaning, and believe us, the Progressive and Liberal body of the party will remove the opportunists completely. You should understand now that these centrists will easily become the liberal wing of the Republican Party as it was for most of the twentieth century. So, are you really Republicans or do you have the good reflexes of the real Democratic Party? Tell Hillary. We will hear it.
Sincerely,
JB
http://americanliberalism.org
James R. Brett, Ph.D. taught Russian History in several universities before becoming an academic administrator in curriculum and faculty research administration. His academic interests have been in the history of science and the history of ideas, particularly Marxism and classical liberalism, but also psychology and consciousness studies. He is a frequent contributor to liberal and progressive blogs and is the founder and publisher of The American Liberalism Project.
Sir, you are not only showing male-chauvinist immaturity, you are doing the old condescending, pat-on-the-head dwaddle reserved for the family dog after he goes to fetch a skillful Frisby toss.
Please, save your sophomoric pandering for your drinking buddies. Since Hillary is not here to defend herself, all we supporters can do is set the record straight from the straight-jacket mentality you wear so self-importantly.
All you ascribe to Hillary's campaign and record can also be assigned to Obama's report card--in spades (and that is not a double entendre, so please refrain from braying about color). With one exception, when noting international policy experience, be gracious enough to admit Hillary's Democratic competitor has none--nada--zilch.
When discussing the relative merits of her religious background, please emphasize that any preacher she may have run across is nowhere in the league with Rev. Wright and his colleague, the Black Muslim demogogue and egomaniac, Louis Farrakhan. How far the debate has strayed from any semblance of fundamental civility. And how low the sniping and blog-bashing of a viable candidate for president has become--the best and brightest in many decades.
Have the courtesy to refrain from lumping all Hillary Clinton voters into some monolithic mass because your mind is so inflexible, you cannot possible stretch reason to encompass diversity or multi-culturalism. Both men and women from all walks of life, ethnicity and economic levels embrace Hillary and her candidacy; obviously they reject Obama, his pilfered past, his tendency to free-associate, not to mention the way he has run from his own statements. Fortunately for HIllary, she is not carrying around all that unsavory baggage. (When she makes a glitch, she is immediately called on it; Barack gets clemency.) We smart political watchers have come to view this oversight as a case of male arrested development. And there goes the neighborhood....
by
Marilyn Frith (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 191 comments)
on Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 3:01:21 PM
You're definitely a fan, Marilyn. Was I married to you once? One think I have noticed about Clintonistas is that they like the ad hominem argument. I will admit that I do poke ad hominem at Bill Clinton because he is such a sleeze, a liar, an immoral boychild.
You obviously cannot see the forest, Ms. Gump, so I will make it very plain to you. If the Clintons by whatever means get the nomination ... which I doubt will happen, btw, but just if ... the victory will go to McCain, because ... and now cross your legs and listen ... we are going to bury both of the Clintons in the rubble of the Party. We have to.
JB
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James Brett (74 articles, 94 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 63 comments)
on Thursday, March 27, 2008 at 8:05:36 PM
Mr. Brett, (and the cross your legs and listen dictum is case in point) you give yourself away unconsciously. I could rest my case on that Freudian slip alone, but I will go on because perhaps, just perhaps, someone out there is the vast wasteland of American social discourse can be touched. It is a slim possibility, however, I thrive on playing against the odds. As a woman, that has been my lot.
My first choice in both '04 and in '08 was John Edwards--a man. When his candidacy faltered due to a juggernaut emphemistically referred to as Obama's campaign, I took another look at Hillary. She at least is not weighted down with omnipresent male ego. And your lengthy treatise on Clinton misconduct is almost amusing, if it weren't so dangerously slanted.
We all have an agenda. Everyone is selling something, pushing an idea, pursuing a goal, advancing some proposition or other; I am honest enough to admit it. But it isn't to put the first woman in the White House, it is to put the first, hopefully, thinking president there in many, many decades. In the name of brevity, I skipped over dissecting every point in your argument; my mindset at the time was to debunk it as reasoned debate. You have your opinion and God bless your right to express it. But for me to take it as Holy Writ would be both naive and encouraging skewed information be widely disseminated on the World Wide Web. Somehow, that doesn't seem quite right and offends my sense of fair play.
You are obviously coming from the far-left wing of the political spectrum. I had the opportunity to join that philosophical group and rejected it. My independence is too precious to get nailed down by ideologies. I like the latitude to decide my own path. That, too, is an important element in the pursuit of happiness; anything that stiffles individual expression is an anathema to my personal vision of freedom. Academia is rife with those who instruct students in political directions that aren't always in the best interest of the country; social movements go in phases and are subject to many outside political/economic influences. The pendulum is swinging back to the left, but that momentum diminishes with each swing.
Intellectuals are particulary sensitive to these winds of change. I agree that the U.S. is faltering and needs restructuring on all levels and in all major institutions. Your Clinton bashing, however, will not hasten the results you seek. In doing so, you only position Barack Obama to take the nomination. And he will be president; we are a silly, spoiled, self-gratifying society, but we aren't stupid and we will not reelect another Republican in November. That is to say, if the elections are not again rigged. Even if they are to be manipulated, I think the vote will be skewed to Obama. Why?
Because, he, contrary to his Madison Avenue marketing, which is touting him as an "outsider" and purer in character (a contrived public persona), is just another ambitious politician; if you dig into his past and recent endorsements (I hear NYC mayor Bloomberg may endorse him), you will find he is a "player" who will be easily manipulated by the usual suspects. His advisors come from the Chicago School of "free market," as opposed to "fair market," radical and exploitive capitalistic views of economics. Does Goolsbee ring a bell?
So, when we throw out opinions for public consumption, we should be careful to get the facts straight. No one knows what impact any president will have on our future; but it does seem encumbent upon us as free moral agents with information available at the touch of a button online to be attentive to documented evidence. The dissembling by the Clintons is no more egregious than by the McCain or Obama camps. Which brings me to wonder why Hillary remains the target of so much verbal and literary abuse. She has more time in service. Give others a long resume and their hands would not be so clean either; politics is not pretty.
In my estimation, triangulation and unethical behavior aside, she still is the more viable candidate with experience in how politics works at the highest levels of government. I think she can be quite disarming and comes prepared to do battle. Given the opportunity to govern, without the constant threat of Scaife or Buchanan or Limbaugh (with marching orders straight from the RNC) breathing down her back, she can make it work.
Time to put aside all the rancor and gender bias and elect a woman. Not because she is WOMAN but because she is effective.
by
Marilyn Frith (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 191 comments)
on Friday, March 28, 2008 at 3:37:56 PM
I regret the "cross your legs" thing. I was thinking of the common reflex of people to cross their legs and arms when confronted with unpleasant information. I guess there is more to it than that, and I apologize.
I too was for John Edwards and hope that he either declares for one or the other of the two candidates, preferably Obama as I see it. I think, though, that he might be waiting in the wings, so to speak, since Al Gore pretty clearly is not behind the curtain ready to jump out and save us. If Hill and Barack cannot settle this in Pennsylvania and if the the Party sees too much turmoil, maybe John's candidacy will look better than it did when the corporate press was ignoring him in favor of the novel gender and race candidates.
As for left and far left, I see myself as a Liberal first and a Progressive second, and that's because I see Liberalism as containing the main impulses of Progressivism. I don't think that Progressivism is illiberal or can even exist without Liberal underpinnings. So, when I answer Zogby polls I come out on their nearly linear schema as "far left." But, of course, that is nonsense.
We are no more on a linear scale of politics--left to right--than were the French in the Assembly National. "Across the aisle" is real enough; it is a physical fact, but the stationing of people on either side is a figment of the paltry imaginations of mediocre reporters and pundits. The media are afraid to break the real politics down into its real components because the arrangements people have made inside coalitions are both rational and irrational. They cannot be described in soundbytes; they require a little thought and skill to describe.
Going your own way politically is fine. Most people think that is what they are doing. In fact, politics is a coalition building process that eventually boils down to subscribing to some basic tenets. It is unavoidable that this be so. You build coalitions for years and when you look around you notice that the same or the same sorts of people are in your Health Care coalition that are in your Environment Care coalition and in your Collective Security coalition. You can call these basic tenets an ideology or you can leave it at basic principles, but they do exist.
One thing you learn in politics is that the most ferocious disagreements are between people who, to outsiders, seem to be very closely related in their basic principles, but who disagree about means or the exact nature of ends. Accordingly, socialists and communists are never able to settle their differences, even though to conservatives they are lumped into the same group. Democrats of the Progressive Liberal kind find it very difficult to understand or to abide the centrists who believe that corporations are essentially benign. We just don't think so ... and we will trot out our proof any chance we get.
The Clintons knew about the 20 rich donors to the DCCC sending Nancy Pelosi a threat to stop funding DCCC. In fact the 20 donors declared their interest in the Clinton candidacy and thereby proved the point we Liberal Progressives have been making all along. The Clintons are the handmaidens (no entendre) of the corporate interests ... cause that's how these donors got so rich in the first place. The way we see it the Clintons (and everyone in the DLC from Evan to whomever) are not really Democrats--they are actually Liberal Republicans without Progressive credentials of any importance. That's why, when you strip away the feldergarb from the press and conservative and corporatist propaganda mills, the Liberal Progressive Democrats see the necessity to remove the Clintons and DLCites from Party.
JB
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James Brett (74 articles, 94 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 63 comments)
on Friday, March 28, 2008 at 4:24:50 PM
I find that encouraging. You are not totally unreachable. And since you did apologize for the "crossed leg" thing, I suppose I might for the "sopomoric" bit. (It is hard to admit wrong-thinking, isn't it?)
Let me get right down to where my deepest sentiments were gestating over many years. I didn't even vote until '72, when it became imperative that I should finally take a stand against Richard Nixon and the awful Vietnam War. To that time, as an Air Force wife, we were not encouraged to muddle in partisan politics; however, when I was divorced, my politiical consciousness started to slowly develop. The times gave birth to a flaming liberal stance. Haven't changed much. Suffered through Reagan/Bush and Bush ! and Little Dan; was encouraged that a Dem was finally released from the political hinterlands. Watched is dismay as Bill was crucified daily by the same forces who brought us Nixon, the Bushes, death in the lower Americas, Iran/'Contra, etc.
I read "The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton," by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason. I bill Gene above Joe because his seminal reports on this budding disaster preceded the bigger names, though both, IMO, are credentialed journalists. Then there is "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," by David Brock. Brock wrote for the notorious slander sheet, "The American Spectator," and was funded by the equally nefariouos scoundrel, Richard Mellon Scaife who initiated The Arkansas Project--a full frontal assault on the Clinton state government admistration. Most all reportage was based on rumor, innuendo and in many cases, paid informants.
The term "Conscience of a Conservative" is taken from Barry Goldwater's book written in the '60s and Brock plays on that term. Recently, John Dean penned, "Conservatives Without Conscience," detailing how years of radical conservative rule is destroying the essence of American society.
I think Hillary is being pilloried again by these same rogues. I don't think the term "swiftboated" is too strong as it applies to their most recent attacks. I read the report here at OPEdNews regard Hillary's tenure on the Nixon impeachment board. It is very convincing. What I find pointedly odd, however, is the assertion that she aided the Ted Kennedy faction, advising against a Nixon impeachment...now Kennedy has struck a fatal blow against her in endorsing Obama. Not only endorsing Barack, but using the Kennedy mystique (passing the JFK torch) to add punch to the support.
All this is overblown bravado and cheapens the JFK legacy. Also, supposedly, if Nixon had gone through the impeachment process, he would have outed JFK as a fellow traveler in high crimes re international policy. I can't get my mind around all this broohaha. It is pitiful how the whole electoral process has been hijacked by those whose only purpose is making money. Every icon is falling; we are pulling down virtual statues and things sacred to our history. I took off my rose-colored glasses long ago and now am faced with this baren reality.
As far as labels of conservatives or liberal, et al. go, it is just a manufactured vocabulary defining ideas so to reduce them to simple constructs we can deal with. If we tried to factor in all the subtexts involved in iinterpersonal relationships, we could not function one-on-one. That is the province of the academic or philosopher during conventions or in class-room environments. When we say someone is from California, we immediately conjure an imaginary profile on his basic life style and set of values. From that point of departure, we process more detailed information.
One thing on which we can agree is that over time, coalitions tend to breed internicine power struggles. The plutocracy in any society will emerge to claim a dominant role. Money is power; those with that power will rise to the top of the food chain. Putting this simple proposition into complex ideologies will not produce anything; talk is cheap. Human nature is what it is and it will take more than one man or woman and one or two administrations to change wired signals from our pre-history brain cells.
But we can start the journey. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. We just disagree upon whom is more capable. All I am saying, is give Hill a chance...:) Can't you hear John singing?
by
Marilyn Frith (6 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 191 comments)
on Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 9:29:17 AM
