Hillary: No

She’d be better than McCain, but that’s not a good reason to support her

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
5/4/08

If there is one advantage to the protracted campaign of this strangest of elections, it’s that we’ve gotten to see how either of the Democratic candidates perform under fire.

This is particularly true of Barack Obama, who has had to face hostile fire, not only from the far right, but from the sad joke that is known as “the mainstream media” and the Clinton campaign. So far, it’s been harsh, but not beyond the normal boundaries of roughhouse presidential politics. Later this summer, when the right wing smear-and-hate machine kicks in with the cheerful acquiescence of the mainstream media, acting as an echo chamber, it will get far worse. But both Democratic candidates have demonstrated that they can fight.

One sneer from the right that we’ve heard since the early days of the Clinton presidency is that if they can’t handle the Republicans then they can’t handle the demands of the presidency. Actually, the opposite is true; Bill Clinton never had to endure as much animosity, treachery and savagery from al Qaida, China, or North Korea as he did from the Republican party.

It was during the Clinton years that we learned that Republicans will cheerfully destroy their own country in the name of more power and money. During the Putsch years, they’ve gone a long way toward doing just that.

If Bill Clinton had one big mistake that hurt his presidency, it wasn’t Monica Lewinsky or gays in the military. It was that he tried to accommodate the far right in the first year of his presidency. He wanted to reach out and embrace them, and pull them into his grand vision for the country.

The right, seeing this as weakness, whipped around and smashed him, destroying his plans for universal health care and forcing him to back off on issues such as gay rights. Had Newt Gingrich not badly misstepped with his ham-handed efforts to seize total control of the budget from the White House with his “train wreck” shutdown of the government, Clinton’s presidency would certainly have been a failed single term, and the social and national carnage of the Putsch years would have started four years earlier. If you assume that Republicans really didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, they would have come up with some other way of getting their tax cuts which so empowered them, and their stacked judicial system and “homeland security” in place.

They did everything in their power to try and destroy Clinton, and did so in the name of “conservatism,” despite the fact that Clinton was, in fact, the most conservative president America had seen since Coolidge. The extremists of the GOP are not conservatives; you can barely even call them Americans. They are contemptuous of most values America stands for, particularly decency and fair play.

There’s no guarantee that Obama knows this, or that he can really face it if he does know. He might turn out to be a weak, vacillating mistake like Thomas Jefferson. Or he could turn out to be a brilliant, strong leader like Lincoln or FDR, and face down enemies, both home and abroad.

But with Hillary, it’s become impossible to give her that benefit of the doubt. In her eagerness to take support wherever she can get it, she’s gone to some of the leading figures of what she once named the “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” in order to try and curry favor.

Soliciting, and getting, the endorsement of Rupert Murdoch was disturbing enough. Kangarupe, head of the far-flung News Corp media empire which includes Faux News, was no friend to the Clintons during the 1990s, cheerleading the efforts to politically assassinate Clinton through a junked-up impeachment case from a pipe dream of the crack-brained right into a political reality.

Still, it’s possible to see such an arrangement. Murdoch personally is a pragmatist, often out of step with the far-right bias of his “news” network. By way of example, even as his blow-dried whores on Faux assure their teleprompters that global warming is just a socialist conspiracy, he has become one of Al Gore’s strongest supporters in his efforts to address climate change.

It’s a miserable coalition, but going by the ancient law of stained bedsheets that “politics makes for strange bedfellows” it’s feasible.

But when Hillary decided to cozy up to Richard Scaife, that went beyond what my own cynicism about politics was prepared to accept.

If Murdoch’s Faux News was the mouthpiece for the VRWC, Scaife was one of the main creators of it. He poured millions into private investigations of such ginned up scandals as Paula Jones, “Arkicides” and cocaine running. None of them turned out to have any merit at all; the only one to even reach trial was the Paula Jones fiasco, and it was summarily dismissed.

Above all he pursued, with lunatic determination, the notion that Hillary Clinton murdered her good friend Vince Foster. He contributed lavishly to a magazine, American Spectator, and used that to bully the editor into running ever more ludicrous stories supporting this and his other hallucinatory conspiracy theories about the Clintons.

Vince Foster committed suicide. Scaife used it to try and hurt the Clintons, particularly Hillary.

He’s a pig, and worse than a pig. A pig, after all, acts according to his nature. Sciafe was simply a vicious sociopath with power and money. Indeed, given that there have been a couple of odd deaths around him, he may have been projecting a bit when he tried to portray Hillary as a harridan who murdered one of her best friends.

This is the man Hillary decided to cozy up to by giving his newspaper a nice, friendly interview. She used it to blast Obama and Reverend Wright, of course. The right wing, sensing a new Clinton weakness, was ecstatic.

That goes beyond pragmatic political expedience. That is a willingness to sell her dignity and honor in an effort to curry favor with people who have no dignity and honor to begin with, and who view “reaching out” as a weakness.

It’s the same mistake Bill made, only unlike Bill, you can’t simply say that she had good intentions or underestimated the viciousness and dishonesty of people like Scaife. She knows. Much of that trial by fire she went through came, not from Putin or Ahmadinejad or Osama bin Laden, but from the likes of Murdoch, Scaife, and “Reverend Moon.” At least, unlike the disgraceful Bushes, she hasn’t tried kissing up to Moon yet. Maybe if she loses Indiana this week.

If she’ll sell herself out like that as she did in March when she sat down to talk to Scaife’s minions, then I don’t have much hope that she won’t do the same once in office, only on a far larger scale, selling America to her enemies on the right.

I can’t support her.