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Sulking in the tent

By Michael J. Smith on Thursday August 7, 2008 09:08 PM

Mike Flugennock passed along this wonderful tidbit from Time magazine:

... if Hillary Clinton's feelings are still bruised, her husband's are positively raw. The former President is particularly resentful of suggestions—which he believes were fueled by the Obama camp—that he attempted to play upon racial fears during the primaries.... a friend of Bill Clinton's [says] "...the race stuff really left a bad taste in his mouth."

Bill Clinton's resentment came through in an interview with ABC News during his recent trip to Africa. Asked what regrets he might have about his role in his wife's campaign, he bristled and then shot back, "I am not a racist. I never made a racist comment."

He struggled to render [sc. "make" -- ed.] a positive comment about Obama's qualifications for his old job. "You could argue that nobody is ever ready to be President.... I never said he wasn't qualified. The Constitution sets qualification for the President. And then the people decide who they think would be the better President. I think we have two choices. I think he should win, and I think he will win."

Wonderful stuff. Bill espouses the lesser-evil theory -- Obama is clearly a son of a bitch, as far as he's concerned, but marginally better than the other son of a bitch. Sorta. Kinda. Maybe.

But that's as much as Bill can say! Jeez, man, any Kosnik could do that! You're a leader of the Party, aren't you, dude? You're not supposed to be reluctantly yielding to the spell -- you're supposed to be casting it! As Prosperos go, you're being strangely half-hearted. Abra. Cadabra. I guess. Or... whatever.

Bill has inadvertently shown us -- not that he could care, any more, what we know or what we don't(*) -- that the Democratic Party is all about jobs. I don't of course mean jobs for regular folks with a mortgage or a rent bill; I mean jobs for high-flying overachievers like Bill and Hill....

...Or Barack and Michelle, if it comes to that.

Much has been made of Michelle's unguarded comment last winter that "for the first time in her adult life", she was "proud of America."

Qiute apart from its tactlessness -- for a Presidential candidate's consort -- one has to ask, was there nothing to be proud of before? Like, for example, the Emancipation Proclamation, or the Selma march? On the other hand -- is there still not a great deal to be ashamed of?

But what matters is none of that. Michelle and Barack now have a shot at the top job -- so now they can be proud.

Michelle, poor dear, spoke from the heart. She will learn, like Hillary, not to do that any more. The last time Hillary did it was the famous "bake cookies" comment.

One couple has more experience than the other. But they're siblings under the skin. Michelle is finally "proud" because her man is almost at the top of the heap -- and Bill is all bummed and truculent because his lady isn't.

-------------

(*) "I got mine. You get yours." -- Richard Pryor, RIP.

Comments (6)

Mike Hunt:

Sure Bill
http://www.swans.com/library/art10/lproy18.html
For Gray, other images loom larger:

"In his first presidential race Governor Clinton ran for office supporting the death penalty at a time when the country was split almost down the middle on the issue. Then for good measure, he rushed back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of convicted killer Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged black man. For years after his first election, I kept a picture of Clinton and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn posing in front of a phalanx of black inmates in white prison suits taken at Stone Mountain, Georgia. Historians generally give Pulaski, Tennessee, the dubious honor as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. But Stone Mountain is hailed as the Klan's second home. The picture appeared in newspapers all across the south the day of the southern primaries in 1992. That picture is what Clinton has always represented to me."

However, the real indictment against Clinton must be based on what happened in the prison system during his two terms. Blacks were incarcerated at a rate even higher than in Reagan's terms. Discriminating between powdered and crack cocaine had a disproportionate impact on Blacks, as did the "three strikes and you're out" provision of the Crime Bill that passed when he was president. When he first came into office, one in four black men was in the criminal justice system. When he left, the number had increased to one in three. Ironically, when black felons were denied the right to vote in Florida, this had the effect of abetting George W. Bush's theft of the presidency.
http://www.counterpunch.org/reed01142008.html
Both CNN and Carl Bernstein said that Clinton, in the midst of giving this uppity black the required flogging (Clinton's a Jeffersonian. Flogging blacks was Jefferson's idea of recreation), had misrepresented Barack's record. Also, those who commented about Hillary Clinton's tearful breakdown missed the commentary that accompanied this calculated attempt at seeming human and personal, which occurred, as Jesse Jackson, Jr. noted, in The Daily News, when her advisors told her that she appear to be more human. "Why didn't she cry for the victims of Katrina?" he added.

She said that she didn't want to see the country "go backwards," or "spin out of control," the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W.Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and Neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full." (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post election violence in Kenya where Barack's father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton's Willie Horton moment.
http://www.counterpunch.org/reed06242008.html
It’s obvious by now that Barack Obama is treating black Americans like one treats a demented uncle, brought out from his room to be ridiculed and scolded before company from time to time, the old Clinton Sistah Souljah strategy borrowed from Clinton’s first presidential campaign when he traveled the country criticizing the personal morality of blacks and wooing white voters by objecting to what he considered anti -white lyrics sung by rapper Sistah Souljah.

I don't think the Emancipation Proclamation is an example that makes your case vs. Michelle. "Freeing the slaves" was a cold, calculated political and economic move designed to bring the Confederacy down. Lincoln hoped that, once freed, the slaves would all return to Africa. The legend of Abraham Lincoln is one of several enormous frauds perpetrated by the ubiquitous myth-makers on the Potomac swamp.

op:

mr hunt

seems by your lights
the bill hill camp and the barbama camp
are both trying to out race card each other
while at the same time
accuse each other of the very same dirty deed

now that's some furious if not fast
card sharping


op:

how many comment threads can trash lincoln and jefferson in such apple pie oder

come on mates
ain't ya proud of yer cuntree and her heros

op writes:
how many comment threads can trash lincoln and jefferson in such apple pie oder

come on mates
ain't ya proud of yer cuntree and her heros

Uhmmm...no, now that you mention it -- unless by "heroes" you mean Abbie Hoffman, Eldridge Cleaver, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Georgia O'Keefe, Amiri Baraka, Jerry Garcia...

Oh, and btw, gang, am I the only one here who's starting to be more than a little bit annoyed by Michelle Obama?

On top of the excellent points that Smiff makes about how many things should've made her proud of this country that happened long before her husband finally made it to within striking distance of the Top Of The Heap, there's also the fact that, somehow, she's just go goddamned generic, dry, and flat-out boring – basically, she annoys the shit out of me just as much as Hillary, except for pretty much the opposite reasons. At least Hillary had some color, some personality, a distinct vibe that she put out that said "I'm a goddamned grating, annoying bitch" – as opposed to Michelle Obama, who reminds me of nothing if not those boring-assed, generically normal, totally lacking in any distinguishing qualities, absolutely forgettable Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters at my old college, the girls who were in training to become the boring-assed "buppies" of the '80s and '90s.

Seriously, it's like she's got no personality, no "vibe", no nothing to her, like she's wooden or something. At least Hillary has a kind of real, substantial, deep-down wholesome vileness about her that I can really sink my teeth into, but Michelle Obama's, like... I don't know, man; it's like she's made out of friggin' plastic or something. I mean, check out the foto of her that Smiff's posted here. You can tell she's really trying to come across all fiery and forceful and shit, but you can tell she's just not into it, like she just doesn't have the touch.

At least Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, Laura Bush, and Hillary had qualities about them that you could really get into hating them for, but Michelle Obama... there's just nothing to her. I saw her interviewed on NBC Today one morning, and she was just so dry and cold, it just made her even more annoying somehow.

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