For the second time this debate season, meaning since the 20th Century in my head, the first one being a GOP debate so not really counting, I fell asleep during the “big” debate last night.
Oddly, mysteriously, even cosmically, I woke up just in time to see Hillary’s last comments. It’s disconcerting to wake up and get an immediate adrenaline rush and chill over something someone says on the Great Tube of Learning. It doesn’t happen often.
But she touched me, she really did, despite clearly plagiarizing the comment from Edwards. (Apologies to Taylor Marsh.) Somehow in all of our recent political discussion, the truth has become lost. (I’m not sure exactly why, but I tend to blame Media Man.) What Edwards said, and what Hillary said are undeniably TRUE. They WILL be all right. It ISN’T about them. It’s about us, and if McCain wins the election this will be the most depressed country on the planet.
It doesn’t matter anymore if it is objectively true that McCain has lobbyists coming out his campaign staff’s ass, it only matters that the “Straight Talk” theme is ingrained, and God forbid we deviate from it.
It doesn’t matter if The War on Drugs is an abject failure. It doesn’t matter that the tax code is indecipherable to even tax professionals, and wildly skewed towards the mega-wealthy. It doesn’t matter that abstinence education has proven to be a failure. It doesn’t matter that war with guns and lots of dead people is a failure. The power is all in the emotion, the promise, the hope, the Faith.
For any institution to survive, it must rely on some level of objectivity; reason, if you will. Faith doth not a country outside tin-horn dictatorships make. There has to be some reality behind all the ideas, or they will fail.
Exhibit A?: George W. Bush.
Anyway, Hillary was spot on in that close; classy, beautiful, loyal, and in this rapt viewer’s opinion, sincere.
It doesn’t matter to most of us that she is a real person; it matters only that Media Man and Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson have for years been telling us she’s an animotronic Machiavelli with only her own interests at heart. I don’t believe it, and never have.
She lost this primary because of forces beyond her control. She lost this primary because Dubya disgusted so many people that voters couldn’t stand anyone even REMOTELY resembling Bush the Lesser, right down to just, “experience.” Or any resemblance to fights long ago irrelevant.
She lost, not because of Mark Penn the moron, though he helped, but because Dubya turned so much of the electorate against the status quo her campaign was simply overwhelmed. And that’s all there is to it. She didn’t deserve much of it, but Phil Mickelson can’t help he’s roughly the same age as Tiger Woods, either.
I hope Barack finds good use for both Hillary and Bill and Chuck Hagel and Joe Lieberman (Israel Outreach Association?) because they all have a lot to offer after the train-wreck that is the Bush Administration.
That is all.
Update: I was kidding about Lieberman, and I just don’t write kidding well. If the Dems get even 57 Senators this fall, they should just declare Lieberman a Republican. Give up the seat. Humiliate him, as Lieberman deserves. That’s good, entertaining (key!) politics.
