Matt Taibbi: Hillary Clinton: The New Nixon?

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/12502

Hillary Clinton: The New Nixon?
by Matt Taibbi | January 30, 2008



I'm in Las vegas, at yet another stiflingly full-of-shit Democratic debate, just breaking up now. The show tonight was a new low, with a suddenly cuddlesome troika of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spending two hours giving each other friendly establishment back rubs while NBC played the Big Brother role, going to court to keep that meddling Dennis Kucinich off the stage. Afterward, the first flack to waddle into the spin cave is Mark Penn, Clinton's chief mouthpiece, one of Washington's most depraved and expensive lobbyist-whores.

Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture.

After Obama's win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.

snip//

Right, that. The whole prose-not-poetry deal. It's working for Hillary, just like her tears gambit worked. After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted for.

That was where it all came rushing back. Hillary's stunning victory had been in the books for mere minutes before we were all suddenly reminded of all the reasons we came to hate the Clintons over the years -- why there were scores of very smart people who by November 2000 were actually willing to pull a lever for Ralph Nader rather than go anywhere near a Democratic Party ticket. Seven years is, it turns out, a long time, just long enough to forget that Clinton fatigue was what saddled us with George Bush in the first place.

The crying incident was Hillary's own personal Checkers speech, a painful bit of self-mutilation tossed off on the last step before the political gallows -- a pure sea-cucumber tactic, scaring us off with a display of vulnerable green guts. We missed the chance to finish her off, and now she's back in charge, setting the tone for a campaign that gets dumber and meaner and dirtier by the day. Thanks to you, New Hampshire, the Clintons still have us to kick around.