Just the other day the thought crossed my mind: a year from right now, we’ll be ass-deep in the presidential primary debates — the seemingly countless televised cattle-calls in which each of the five-dozen-or-so hopefuls from each party will take their best cheap-shots at Hillary Clinton. We’ll circle back to Clinton in a second.
Indeed, we’re still three months shy of the 2014 midterms and it feels like the 2016 presidential election has already begun. Not that I’m complaining necessarily. In and of itself, I’m a hopeless enthusiast when it comes to presidential politics — even sharing Rachel Maddow’s affection for the triumphant MSNBC election theme song. But one of the things I’m not looking forward to is the premeditated, misogyny-driven flagellation of the Clinton campaign by the usual suspects.
Frankly, it’s been a rough week for Clinton, and if you’re a supporter of her pre-candidacy, you’d better hunker down because her campaign will have many more weeks just like this one. It’s the nature of Clintonian politics: an endless roller-coaster of victories, losses and generally sustained chaos. For those of us who follow politics professionally, it’s what we live for, but if you’re an activist, it’s nothing but stomach-churning.
One way or another, anything that peaks or troughs outside the trendline of normal Clinton campaign behavior will surely be attacked by the GOP as having something to do with either her age or womanhood. We’ve already witnessed the opening salvo of age/brain-damage speculation, and it definitely won’t be the last time that one gurgles to the surface. And yesterday we heard the first serious “Because She’s A Chick” attack. No, it wasn’t expressed precisely like that, but that’s the general message, and it’ll continue that way for at least the next two years.
Naturally the first real shot came from Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters, better known as the unfunny stooge who stalks Normals for the easily-entertained delight of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers. While discussing Clinton’s apparently war-hawkish criticisms of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, Watters said… CONTINUE READING
(ht Edward Tayter)