Just say no to Hillary Clinton

January 9th, 2008 – 9:03 pm
Tagged as: Politics

Whatever the reason for Hillary Clinton’s “surprising” victory in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, I have to say I’m disappointed. I had some hope that after losing both Iowa and New Hampshire, the way would be paved for someone other than her to be the Democratic nominee. Someone I could actually vote for in the general election. As the always cutting Lenin of Lenin’s Tomb puts it:

Now, Hillary. Oh dear. I don’t know who likes her, or why, but she seems to have a reputation for liberal politics simply because the right-wing characterises her that way and subjects her to sexist attacks. A recent poll of voters found that 54% of them consider her a liberal. More hawkish than the other Democratic candidates (she seems to be competing with John McCain for the “nuts and proud of it” vote), more stridently pro-Israel than Ariel Sharon, an advocate of ‘humanitarian intervention’ who claims to have stiffened her husband’s spine over Kosovo, fiercely hostile to Iran, Clinton has nothing to recommend her as ‘liberal’. She has consistently defended her vote for the invasion of Iraq, and shows no sign of being willing to end the occupation. Her domestic policies include some rollback of the tax-breaks for the rich, a few reforms in healthcare (but not single-payer, an option she has always hated), support for the giant 700km fence construction on the US border, and support for the Patriot Act (twice). She also supports the death penalty, and has led the charge to make flag-burning punishable by a year in jail and a $100,000 fine in 2005. On education, she supports Bush’s policy of ‘No Child Left Behind’. If she is reputed as some kind of “feminist” (a “shit-kicking” one at that, according to Michael Moore), she also upholds the Genghis Khan principle, and knows when to rally round family values – no gay marriage under a Hillary Clinton imperium. They say she is disliked by Republican voters and conservative men because of her relentless liberal assault on the American way of life. The trouble is, she is disliked by almost everyone else as well. The only people who really like her are those poor, sad people who think that she and they alike are meaningfully on the liberal-left. (You should see the nauseating video on Youtube where ‘Code Pink’ antiwar women explain to a stern Hillary that ‘we know you really agree with us…’, as if). Quite how she was the ‘default’ Democrat for so long is utterly mysterious to me, because she has neither charm nor policies to offer anyone, and doesn’t even appear to have sufficient flexibility to back off the themes that most repel potential voters. Once a Goldwater Republican, her instincts always seem to take her back to that luminous era. And, poor thing, she cannot really rely on happy memories of the 1990s, since anyone who has been fucked over by Enron capitalism will recall a bit that it was fully nurtured by the same Clinton regime that was busily torturing Iraq with a genocidal sanctions campaign.

Not that he thinks much better of either Obama or Edwards, as he considers all three of the major candidates to be frauds. I can’t say that I at all disagree with that assessment either, but at least neither of the other two reaches quite the level of champion of the status-quo as the woman who still pushes DLC talking points. At least with the other two I can pretend that they might actually do some good.

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