Never take sides against the family again, Hillary
by doodahman
02/26/2008, 11:21 AM
Hillary's campaign reminds me of an old joke. A man bursts into his bedroom and finds his wife in bed with another man. He pulls out a pistol, and puts it to his own head. "Stop laughing," he snarls, "you're next."
Right now, Hillary's campaign is putting a gun to its own head with its refusal to play nice in the waning days of its campaign. Frankly, like Hitler in the bunker during May '45, they are getting downright irrational. When do the pre-suicide orgies start, I wonder-- after Texas or Pennsylvania?
First, they start attacking, in a personal, specific way, the media. David Shuster was thrown under the bus to appease the Clintons when it was Chris Matthews they were after (kind of like toppling Saddam for what Osama did, ain't it?) Not only was that highly unprofessional, but it was stupid. Now, they have not only FAUX News out there hammering her, but MSNBC as well. Huge mistake. I mean, didn't she figure, after her alleged 35 years of experience, that you can't bully people who have a regular audience of millions (or as Twain said, "buys their ink by the barrel.")
Is that good judgment? Does that demonstrate the calm statesmanship, the ability to handle a punch deftly rather than flail back blindly? Hardly.
Then there is the public in fighting from her campaign. How embarrassing when the Penn faction and the Ickes faction start taking swipes at each other in the press. Does that demonstrate the "ready from Day 1"-ness of Hillary's administration? The fool can't even manage her highly paid consultants. How is she going to handle Congress? The courts? The Pakistanis? The Iranians?
Well, we know-- she'll be childish, vindictive, thin-skinned, and bray about her being "entitled" to this or that-- respect, obedience, what have you. In short, she has done a good job not of destroying the old, limiting stereotypes of women in power, but of fulfilling them. A shame, really. She's in the process of setting back the prospect of a woman president by a decade or more.
Then there's her inability to respect her donors by spending their donations wisely. She eschewed Dean's 50-state strategy, and now has run out of money to compete in the 10 or 15 states that they deemed sufficiently important to run in. She hasn't, even to this date and $120 or so million later, established grass roots offices in key jurisdictions.
Is that how she's going to hear our voice? With no grassroots organization and her command and control structure entirely a top-down model?
How consistent with her fundamental paradigmatic (is that a word?) flaw-- that change flows from the leader down instead of from the grass roots up. She's like Marlon Brando in the Godfather-- a mustache pete stuck in old ways of thinking where we must go, hat in hand, and beg for change from our God-imposed "leadership." Like she's "giving" us a better system, better life and better future instead of simply empowering us to achieve those things.
And like Don Corleone, she relied too much on her Bill "Lucca Brasi" Clinton, who ended up sleeping with the fishes as well as with any number of campaign aides. Hell, the woman's in the process of pulling every cheap trick short of leaving Chris Dodd's severed head in Obama's bed.
Well, barring the unforeseen, Hillary will morph from Don Corleone to Kay, Michael's wife. She'll moan and screech, but in the end, she'll just have to stand by and watch while the PTB kiss Obama's ring, and the door to the Oval Office is slowly closed by Obama's Al Neri.
Men have balls
by doodahman
02/27/2008, 9:38 AM
Favorites Reply
Yes, I know that’s obvious. Some might say gratuitous, even. Except this premise is basic to the thesis I now put forward.
Last night’s debate demonstrated why, in politics, war and perhaps a few other endeavors, having balls is highly beneficial and gives men a slight advantage in the process. Oh, I don’t mean balls in terms of guts or perseverance—anyone can have those, male or female. I mean balls—testicles. Hangers. Nutsacks. Huevos.
You know... balls.
Allow me to explain. For the past several weeks, the Clinton campaign, its top consultants and even Hillary herself have attacked MSNBC and its on air personalities (“journalists is a stretch”). They targeted Chris Matthews, and then when David Shuster made a minor faux pas, had his highly competent ass thrown under the bus. Then in subsequent interviews, press releases and commentary, the campaign insisted that Hillary was being unfairly treated by the media, MSNBC in particular.
Was that smart? Well, last night proved that it was not. If there were any memorable or important moments in last night’s debate, they were two—first, when Tim Russert totally slammed Hillary for lying about her support of NAFTA, and the second when she was finally forced to “apologize” for voting for the Iraq War (or, as Obama accurately analogized, drove the bus into the ditch.)
Now what, I wonder, did those Clinton morons expect? Did they think they were going to intimidate and cow MSNBC (a major part of a mighty conglomerate)? Did they think she was going to get soft balls from them after calling them out? After eight years of catching shit from the public about their kid handling of BushCo, didn’t they pick up on the fact that the media, and MSNBC in particular, was remaking their image as being “tough” on politicians?
They must have. Surely they did not expect Russert to toss off a series of NAFTA supporting quotes from Hillary less than a minute after Hillary lied about not supporting NAFTA. They made her look not only like an utter bullshit artist, but a fool, as well. And this was after Hillary already undermined herself by bitching (and I use that word advisedly) about the format and how poor poor Hillary has to field the first questions. Not that she was complaining about it, mind you. She was just complaining about it (which one might add, is part of the indirectness which does tend to characterize female communications.)
Well, that was a huge tactical mistake. It put Hillary way behind at the start of the debate in a state that has focused on NAFTA. Not only was she wrong for supporting it, but she now lies about it—in effect, admitting that her judgment in that case was wrong. Very wrong.
Which gets us back to balls. See, no male politician would ever have made that mistake—spend weeks personally and emphatically attacking a party (MSNBC) and then participating in an event that basically puts their balls into that party’s hands. And make no mistake—that was not a debate. It was a side by side dual interview, the cruelest of all possible formats. Participating in that “debate” was no less than placing one’s ballsack into the hands of the moderators.
Now men will not make that mistake, or almost never. Why? Because we have balls. We are born to a condition in which a highly vulnerable and extremely important part of our anatomy is hanging right out there. We know that no matter what we are doing, no matter how high we fly or how strong and mighty we appear, one well placed kick in the nuts and it’s about all over. No matter what we do or where we are, there is always, in the back of our reptile brains, a guarding concern for our balls. We would never, never, never, place them in the care of a party that we just spent weeks trashing. Just wouldn’t b prudent, as Bush I famously said.
Women, however, never have such a concern. They are protective of children, the nest, the family. They are strong and courageous and worthy of every praise due any human being. But they don’t have balls. They aren’t raised from infancy with a deep, immutable imperative to protect their single greatest vulnerability. And so, they are more prone to make the mistake that Hillary made.
And so, back to my thesis. The fact that men have balls gives them a slight advantage in processes such as politics. Obama left that stage with his nutsack still firmly attached. Hillary? Her metaphorical balls were ripped off and raised as a trophy in the pudgy fist of Tim Russert.
