www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights159.htm

May 15, 2008

Strakon Lights Up
 

Dept. of  I Never Thought I'd Live to See It
 
     Hillary as "right-winger"
 

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If the Clinton Mafia doesn't pull off a well-timed Arkanacide, this column may well be Strakon's final 155mm blast against the Wicked Witch. Even here, the Rev. Dr. Obama sustains some collateral damage.
 
I'm still trying to get my poor abused brain around the idea of Hillary Clinton's being the right-wing candidate in a Democrat race. And now, upon her crushing of Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, commentators are arguing that Comrade Big Nurse represents the "core values" and "traditions" of folks in the Mountain State better than Comrade Mulatto Leprechaun does. Even if it's true, on the margins, it's certainly disorienting.

True enough, "Clintonism," like Marxism or conservatism, is not an ideological monolith. Analytical precision depends on which Clintonista one is talking about. In 1996, I summed up Bill Clinton thus:

Clinton himself is no Dark Suit; and although he emerged from the New Left milieu of the '60s, he isn't a real Red Guard, either. I will leave the diagnosis of sociopathology to the psychologists; but it certainly seems clear that Clinton is motivated only by the most primitive urges for wealth, fornication, and the outward trappings of power. If opposing NAFTA, corporate subsidies, and bank bailouts — or opposing socialist medicine, civil disarmament, and environmental tyranny — were the surest means of maximizing his wealth, access to whores, and imperial regalia, can anyone really doubt that he would oppose them, all hoarse-voiced and teary-eyed?

Clinton represents no system of values or even antivalues; he symbolizes nothing important; he personifies nothing important. He is only the current political focal point of the Suit-Guard alliance: think of him as a vicious, beetle-browed thug-for-hire who, so long as he turns over to his masters their share of the spoils, is left free to "have hisse'f some fun" with his helpless victims. He is chief "executive" only in the sense of "executioner." And from the standpoint of the ruling class, all of that makes him the perfect president. (The Last Ditch, Whole Number 14, October 28, 1996, p. 21)

My assessment of Hillary Clinton was always a little different. She seemed more of a genuine Red Guard, unsurprisingly so in view of the fact that woman-the-nurturer is somewhat more likely to fall for Red Guardism as her ideological "besetting sin" than man-the-hunter, who is somewhat more likely to fall for Dark Suitism in either its "liberal" or "conservative" form. At the same time, Hillary rang her own changes on the Red Guard category. She was no "revolutionary ascetic," at least not after she hooked up with Big Bill. I thought of her — and still do — as cladding the bones of Robespierre in the flesh of stinking corruption. But that Jacobin skeleton was always visible through the odorous smog, or so I thought.

Some opiners point out that the Young Imam and Madame Guillotine are really almost indistinguishable in their policy prescriptions, except perhaps with respect to health-socialism (and free-marketeers are unlikely to be impressed by any purported differences there). But policy is just the steak — or rat filet garnished with insect parts — and not the sizzle. The sizzle is what appears to be attracting this year's political starvelings on the Democrat side, and that sizzle includes excitement over race, class, and sex.

If Hillary is successfully wafting sizzle and smoke at white ethnics and unionist "Reagan Democrats," that oxymoronism isn't unprecedented. In 1968, the "leftist peacenik" Bobby Kennedy tussled with George Wallace for many of the same primary voters, and if it hadn't been for Wallace's independent run in the general election, most of them would have voted for the classic FDR Commie-liberal Hubert Humphrey, making him president.
 

It's the sizzle, I suppose, that misled West Virginia Democrats — insofar as they really are down-home types — into believing that Hillary, once in the Palace, would be less likely to disarm them than Obama would. Less likely to settle thousands of HIV-positive double-amputee cannibals from Oogaboogaland in their hamlets and hollers, less likely to promote sodomism and fornication in the state schools, less likely to send the DEA after tobacco smokers, and less likely to strengthen official anti-white discrimination. It's true that Hillary might be too busy supporting Israel to push Negro "reparations," but on the other hand if elected she would have some important socialist fences to repair with blacks, looking forward to 2012. I don't know whether the West Virginia voters care about taxes, but if they do and they thought Hillary would tax them less savagely than Obama would — well, in voting for her they just plummeted to new depths of cognitive vanity.

Perhaps Mountaineer Democrats voted for Hillary in order to "support our boys" (and wymyn) in Mesopotamia. In that connection, I note that Bush War Heroine Lynndie England is an honored daughter of West Virginia, and she is certainly not the only such daughter to involve herself with the Bush war cimes. (I will restrain myself from speculating about what "core values" Miss England represents or how widely her fellow Mountaineers share them.) As well, Mountaineers may have voted against Obama in an attempt to bash what they consider the "Hate America" and "crypto-Muslim" crowd. In fact, however, Obama is as much of an imperialist as Hillary, and he has loudly proclaimed what a big, big fan of Israel he is. At the same time, on the anti-Israel side, both candidates have pledged to end Bush's War, though Hillary's plan for doing so is somewhat foggier than Obama's.

If we are to take one candidate's policy declarations seriously, we must take both candidates' declarations seriously — unless we already have good reason to suspect that one is a more obsessive liar than another. But that consideration does not redound to Hillary's benefit. Though Obama is a pretty fair deceiver himself, few would try to deny that Hillary is the very mistress of lies. Choosing Hillary over Obama as the Great Paladin of America and The Flag keeps the juicy rat-steak in the kitchen and leaves only that aromatic rodent sizzle in the dining room.

It's possible to argue, or hope, at least, that Hillary would try to protect unions and coal-mining jobs more energetically than Obama, but if we are to take candidate declarations seriously, we must note that Field Marshal Bombs Away has already boarded the Global Warming bus, and Hillary cannot allow herself to remain standing on the sidewalk. Betrayal is inevitable on all sides, of course, but the betrayal factor complicates rather than simplifies the down-home choice between Hillary and Obama. In fact, rational calculation is inherently impossible when choosing among political candidates; but now I'm just repeating myself.
 

The epistemological chaos of politics made "Hillary as right-winger" conceivable, but that specific result has emerged from the totalitarian tilt of the political playing field. I suppose that should Trotsky and Stalin be reincarnated a few years from now, and compete in an American election, millions of down-homers would march out and vote for Stalin as the "right-winger" who more consistently shared their "core values."

May 15, 2008

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