Hillary Clinton has titles, but few achievements, to her name. Her campaign is built on hype. People are more into what she would symbolize if she won — a first woman president — than what she would do. Sound familiar?
Ladies Next
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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It’s still worth it to me and I’d love it if she got elected. Symbolic? Yes, but so is everything else about human life, Ted. Just relax and enjoy the revulsion it breeds among older white men who don’t recognize their own country anymore. Sometimes I actually wonder how much of an impact it has on you, as a privileged white male in American society at the tail end of white male domination.
I’d be a lot more impressive to have a CAPABLE, concerned woman president than just have a president that happens to have a vagina.
It’d*
Also I detest this dynastic trend. Being related to someone who was once POTUS does not somehow make you more qualified to be so yourself. And this tendency to run candidates who have already lost once is kind of dynastic too, as if they were indeed all waiting in some kind of assigned line.
While I am pessimistic about any change coming from the top, I’d at least like not to be pressured to pretend to be excited about a failure to even try. And being reduced to symbolic victories is reminiscent of bread and circuses, except without the bread.
Indeed. Our ‘first families’ are royalty. Well it’s name recognition, right? In a land where so few people have more to go on when stepping into the voting booth…
This identity politics…a pol shouldn’t get a bunch of credit just for belonging to a group. He should have to do something for that group! Obviously there are more than enough people who can’t see past tokenism to make it easy for our masters to roll out their dastardly plans with the support of a woman or minority.
Well, wait just a minute … let’s look at the upside of a Hilary ascendancy – we’d get Bill back in the White House and another go-around with his penchant for crazy antics. Maybe this time the cigar tube will be on the other foot, metaphorically speaking, and we will get to hear Hilary’s disclaiming “I did not have sexual relations with that man, Mordechai Cheronski.” Imagine a tasteful Smithsonian exhibit of his and her historical presidential evidentiary garments as a soiled blue suit joins that infamous blue dress on display. What’s more, she could draft Bill to re-revolutionize healthcare after the ACA debacle, and he could snippishly refuse to bake cookies and to stand by his woman like in some CW song.
Ted, you’d gain a virtually unlimited supply of idiocy for cartoons and the possibility of astonishing events to pillory with Hilary. Of course, we all understand that her being selected would mark another huge step downward for democracy, but, hey, seeing Bill peeping our from behind the press room curtains, eager for some action is almost worth the sacrifice.
Hillary is a far cry from “inept”!
I believe that she was the driving force behind Bill’s political success.
I had the privilege of meeting them both, and while driving in the motorcade to the North Little Rock celebration of Bill’s election, I had the opportunity to listen in on the conversation among her press corps.
There was an anecdote about her having told the staff to place the campaign posters anywhere they could, but they were to place ALL OF THEM somewhere. They laughed about the fact that when they were down to one poster, they hung it over a cow in the pasture.
Don’t underestimate this woman. She deserves, and has earned, respect.
She was the driving force behind NAFTA? Next.
Not only NAFTA, but also America’s decision to support the original WTO.
Hey, did y’all overlook the qualifier “success”????
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I’m quite certain she wasn’t giving advice to Monica Lewinski on how to do it the right way!
😀
The funny thing is, everybody always hears these stories about how Hillary Clinton is super intelligent. But all the rest of us – those of us who have never met her – see are the results of her long career. Where are the big accomplishments?
As far as I can tell, she’s not even much of a campaigner. She’s not very charming as a speaker. I guess this is one of those cases where perhaps she’s a supersmart lawyer who never should have become a politician.
“What difference at this point does it make?”
😀
So, when do we get the first Trisexual Gypsy President? And what about Lucy Bird Johnson, Trisha Nixon, and Amy Carter – these things must be done in some kind of logical dynastic order. Otherwise it’s all just chaos.
Somebody told me once that NAFTA is a good thing because that way people in other countries can get a piece of the pie, albeit a lower-paid piece.
This is complete and utter crap. The more corporate interests are restrained, the less likely they are to farm out into countries where protections are poor. NAFTA has helped to engender obscene corporate profits because it has greased the wheels of exploitation.
Are we really supposed to believe it’s a better gig to be effectively enslaved into some sweatshop gig, than it is to be living on your own landbase and working it the best you can?
In an ideal world, we would have free trade and equal protections. We don’t have that. NAFTA opened the door to endless rapacious exploitation, because once it becomes cost-effective to enslave people, efforts will be made to do so. And it was all sold in the name of Freedomz.
What sort of freedom does a young brown-skinned woman have when she’s been boxed in like that? The freedom to make pocket change an hour, the freedom to be fired if she gets pregnant or has the temerity to call out abuse.
And those are the people whose backs our culture rides upon, the people who make all this stuff we are so attached to.
When I think Bill Clinton, I don’t think about his blowjobs. I think of the young women in the sweatshops, and how they cannot report their rapes, for fear of starving to death.
And like Ted said, the WTO. This was all set up by bribery and setting up puppet governments funded by these international banking organizations.
It’s so hard trying to talk to people who haven’t read The Shock Doctrine. Please go read that now, everybody. It’s good journalism, well written, and Klein explains so much in this seminal work. And it’s far from over, because it works so well…
Hillary could have easily been elected in 2000, but the Clintons figured then she’d have been another Ma Ferguson, First Woman Governor of Texas*.
So they figured they’d let Al (or Bush, jr, no matter) be president for four or eight years, and maybe the * would not be there (it always would have, but maybe a bit smaller in ’08 than in ’00).
But now just look at the Clintons. And I mean LOOK.
Beginning in ’60, the winner was the person who looked most presidential on TV. The majority of the few who listened to the Nixon-Kennedy debates on the radio said Nixon won, that he SOUNDED the most presidential. But Kennedy LOOKED the most presidential, and the final vote in ’60 isn’t absolute proof, but was the first in a long line of data points that strongly imply: the secret to winning the election is LOOKING the most presidential on TV (getting nominated is another story).
And it’s too late for the Clintons. They both look old and feeble.
Plus, the group that helped Bill get elected twice are hopelessly out of the current loop, as we saw in ’08 when Obama’s team knew how to use IT to figure out exactly where to deploy their resources to win the nomination, while the Clinton team squandered their (much larger) war chest.
So it’s much too late for Hillary to even get the Democratic nomination in ’16.
Leaving historians to wonder what 16 years of Billary would have been like, and write endless what-might-have-been articles.
Okay, it’s gonna be Palin. We are hereby well and truly fucked.
«People are more into what she would symbolize if she won — a first woman president — than what she would do. Sound familiar?» Sounds very familiar, but with the added advantage that Ms Clinton might just set off a major – and by major I mean thermonuclear – war were she to come to power….
Henri