So, yeah, the Clinton camp, after earning some goodwill coming off a reasonably classy performance in the last debate (the Xerox line notwithstanding), goes right ahead and wastes it by once again playing off of racial and ethnic tensions with their most recent "Obama's kinda Muslim-y" stunt. I have simply lost patience with Hillary Clinton. I can no longer stomach her tactics, her limitless ambition, and her lack of decency. I do feel some sympathy for her--that's just who she is, after all, and she can't help clawing her way to the top, even (perhaps especially) after it has merely become an exercise in self-humiliation--but I'm looking forward to the day when she's not around and I can have new demons at which to glower.
I hate having to say it, but I'm beginning to think the right wing wasn't entirely wrong about the Clintons. They were just mostly wrong. All the conspiracy theories aside, it has become difficult to dispute the thesis that the Clintons are too eager to destroy adversaries, too eager to smear while playing fast and loose with the facts, and too focused on maintaining their own power. Now, if I believed that they disliked the Clintons for these reasons I'd grant them their point, but there's a difference between believing these things and believing that the Clintons whacked a bunch of people and were going to take away everyone's guns with black helicopters. In other words, these concepts were merely incidental to the Clinton-hating going on with the right wing. Still, the Limbaughs of the world did see this stuff (though they took it to ridiculous extremes) while we Democrats insisted they couldn't be right, since they were wrong about everything else. Well, they're still wrong about most things, but I simply can no longer in good conscience deny that Billary don't deserve to be anywhere near the White House in the near future.
All this aside, I think she should not only stay in the race, but I think she ought to get as negative as possible. Toss the kitchen sink at Obama, I say. And I say this as a strong supporter of Barack Obama. Clinton's progressively deranged attacks on Obama merely discredit these lines of attack for the Republicans later on, although it should be admitted that I doubt the GOP will be suffering from a lack of lines of attack. Toss out Rezko again, why don't you? These attacks have an added bonus, too--they will completely poison the well of support for the Clintons within the Democratic Party. Again, I hate to admit it, but I find myself agreeing more and more with Andrew Sullivan these days with respect to the Clintons. Some of the stuff they trotted out this election cycle has been enough to make even my own cynical head spin. And now another Clinton surrogate has compared Obama to Jesse Jackson? Enough already! You lost! Texas is even up, and Ohio is closing rapidly with a week to go. It's over. Life, of course, goes on. To the Clintons I say, good riddance.
