Discussing the same point in
Washington, Jackson said, "We campaigned across the South . . . without a single catcall or boo. It was not until we got North to New York that we began to hear this from Koch, President Reagan and then Mrs. Ferraro . . . . Some people are making hysteria while I'm making history." (Politico.com)
A few weeks back Bill Clinton detonated an almost identical Jesse Jackson IED. Coincidence? No way...
BOOM!
Can you imagine! I never thought I'd see a leading Democrat dip back to the tactics of the dark days when racist Democrats ruled the segregated South, playing the fears of whites against the hopes of blacks. Disgusting.
But insurgencies are, by necessity, ugly business. Inevitably there will be collateral damage. Innocents will be hurt. The means are ugly, but the ends will make amends -- we are assured. Once they win, the insurgents promise, they will get rid of the bad and the ugly and herald in the good.
Hillary holds up her role as First Lady as the reason she's "ready to lead from day one," and there may be some truth in that. Among the things she learned during those days was how run parallel political and insurgent actions. She learned this when husband Bill helped negotiate a settlement in Northern Ireland. While the Irish Republican Army conducted the ugly part of their insurgency the leader of its political arm, Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams,
stayed above it all making nice in Parliament. When his IRA fighters blew something, (or someone) up, Adams would bemoan the violence, even condemn it. Then he'd offer his political solutions/demands.
Likewise, each time one of her campaigner sets off an IED aimed at Obama, Hillary denies her campaign is behind it. If the uproar is loud enough, she even condemns it. Then she makes nice, assuring everyone that all she really wants is peace and reconciliation -- on her terms, of course.
Will she stop these IED attacks? Well, she'd just love to stop that kind of stuff, but -- she quickly adds -- she can't because, "you know, it's a free country and people have a right to say what ever they want."
But does she agree with the things people speaking on her behalf are saying? Well, of course not. "Well, I certainly don't agree with everything people who say the support me say," she demurely adds.
In other words, stop the IEDs -- "no way, Jose." Because this is all she's got left. Obama has already won the hearts and minds of the majority of Democratic voters. If she stops the IEDs now Obama would have a nearly unobstructed path to the nomination. She's can no longer count on just slowing him down, she's got to stop him. She needs to wound him so badly he can no longer win.
There's two ways to get this nomination: win it fair and square, or finagle it. Since she can no longer win, she's now onto finagling. Which means encouraging her surrogates to keep planting IEDs while she works the political angles -- Super-delegates, seating Michigan and Florida delegates, etc.
Meanwhile out on the field of battle her surrogates have turned to the nuclear option -- or as her own spokesmanr and snake turned snake charmer, Howard Wolfson describe it, "the kitchen sink strategy."
Call it what you like, boiled down to its essence it can be summed up as, "an IED a day keeps the nomination away" -- from Obama.
Sure it's dirty fighting. And sure, if successful it will leave the Democratic Party looking like Beirut on a bad day. And sure her victory would only reinforce the very kind of politics that have torn the nation apart since Newt Gingrich and his kind marched to power. And sure an ugly Clinton victory risks outraging Obama supporters to such an extent many will not even show up to vote in November, virtually guaranteeing another four years of GOP rule.
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