Ed Rendell and Mayor Nutter are good guys and the Pennsylvania Machine held up. Barack erased more than half the gap between himself and Hillary Clinton, but there he stopped. Nutter and Rendell smiled happily as Hillary, a consummate actress, sought to make the low road look like what America wants and needs. She happily filched script from Barack and, with rank impunity, melded it with a reiteration of her fear politics ad. Get comfy with it. It squares with the foggy hypocrisy which is the penumbra of our benumbed lives under the sign of Clinton-Bush.In Indiana, benumbed by a worse defeat than had been anticipated, Barack gave a stolid speech and we learned that the vaunted John Mellencamp was preparing to do another rally in Indiana -- for Clinton.
Nothing seemed right about this, unless we were willing to close our eyes and concede that we don't really mind. The jaws of hell have opened and just now we too are benumbed, yet again, to do more than sit and wonder if there remains any point in trying, still to combat the the demons.
The fracture in our consciousness is real, just as real as the consonance between Clinton and McCain and the prospect that the Obama Miracle will sink into a cesspool of manufactured and relentlessly processed instances of guilt by association. It has worked in the past. Why not now?
Ironically, we still have everything we had before this deed got done.
What we have lost is the result of the machine win in Pennsylvania, of the willing complicity of Nutter and Rendell and the 100 mayors to deliver the extra ten points Clinton needed to declare a decisive win. We have lost our confidence in the new reality we were seeking to launch.
Do Nutter and Rendell believe that Hillary means it when she says she will obliterate Iran in a Strangeloveian flourish, no less ominous than the militarism of the soft-spoken specter of John McCain in thrall to the Neo-Cons?
To them it is all rock and roll.
Do Nutter and Rendell subscribe to the politics of fear? Oh, no. They are supporting a great lady. A great family.
The disjuncture is complete.
She doesn't mean any of the things she says if they do not comport with the happy workings of the Pennsy Machine.
Meanwhile Murdoch is buying Newsday and the New York Times, which endorsed Hillary at the behest of their management, editorializes that Hillary ran a campaign in PA that was worse than the "mean, vacuous, desperate, pandering contests that preceded it."
The editorial weakly concludes that Hillary has to "call off the dogs". It's one of those, Is the Pope Catholic? moments.
Hillary has a snarfy smile-sneer that speaks volumes about whether she will call off the dogs. She can no more do that than she could be gracious about Barack's religious faith on 60 Minutes. Hillary occupies the pantheon reserved for Dick Nixon -- these are politicians we know will somehow injure us, but, Hey that's OK, because the alternative would be --
c h a n g e
This is the choice that is still available today. But with no illusions about the challenge we face.
What we need is a MEASURED RESPONSE. One that speaks the truth about Hillary but cannot be construed as an attack, even by the mentally-challenged media chorus.
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