In a Perfect World, We’d Never Let Her Run

Hillary Clinton stepped way over the line yesterday in a fundraising speech.

Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big deal. Hillary’s an ideologue and you expect barnburning speeches out of ideologues. I yawn them off and pretty much forget them. I suspect that most of us do the very same. This speech, though, I don’t know that I can’t yawn off, because of the accusations she’s made.

Let me give you a touch of what she said, courtesy of the New York Times:

“There has never been an administration, I don’t believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda,” Mrs. Clinton told the gathering.

“I know it’s frustrating for many of you, it’s frustrating for me. Why can’t the Democrats do more to stop them?” she continued to growing applause. “I can tell you this: It’s very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they’re doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don’t care. .”

This is more than just political snark. It’s red meat to people who don’t just believe that the President or the Republican Party is hungry for political power but that they are trying to destroy our democratic system of government.

Think about that for a moment. One of our Senators – someone who is running for President – openly accused the President of violating his oath of office. Moreso, she’s accused him, his party, and over half the voters of this country who support them, of treason.

Is that extreme? Here’s a definition of the word from Mirriam-Webster:

…the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign’s family”

This is not the Constitutional definition of the word, but to most Americans, it need not be. She has said that the Republicans in our government are overtly destroying the Senate, are undermining the system of checks and balances our Constitution, and have replaced te House of Representatives with “a dictatorship of the Republican leadership”. If that doesn’t meet the dictionary definition of treason, I don’t know what does.

This is dangerous stuff – dynamite handed to people who have demonstrated in the last election alone that they have no problem committing violence in the middle of an election. It’s purposefully inflammatory and it ought to be called out from within her own party. Stuff like this ought to make her a pariah.

But it won’t because that’s the level that the Democratic Party has reached. Major figures in the party can openly call their opponents “a liar”, have compared them directly to the Nazi party from the Senate floor, and can call their supporters “brownshirts” without a single serious criticism from within the party.

It’s time to pull back. It’s time to inject some reality into the situation.

Let’s look at that “dictatorship” comment. You know how ridiculous it is. I know how ridiculous it is. But will most people know that? Maybe and maybe not. Maybe they’ll listen to the speeches and the news reports and the op-ed pieces in the major newspapers that say exactly that and they’ll wonder. They won’t hear from any of those places one simple fact that destroys the “dictatorship” argument now and forever.

Dictatorships do not come with expiration dates.

No matter how terrible you think the Bush Presidency is, you know that it will end. It is limited to two terms and that can not change unless 2/3 of the voters of this country agree that it should. That’s not going to happen in any of our lifetimes, if ever. You may hate the Republicans in the House or the Senate but you also know that every single one of them face regular popular elections where they people may, if they wish, replace them.

Counter that with Fidel Castro. He took over the nation of Cuba in 1959 and has ruled there, without serious opposition, ever since. His elections are shams where voters are intimitated by Castro’s own governmental goons and where those who speak out against them are thrown into prison indefinitely.

By contrast, there is only one Senator who was a Senator when Castro took over Cuba: Robert Byrd. We have had ten Presidents and 11 Vice Presidents since 1959. The majority party in the House of Representatives has changed at least four times.

None of that happens in a dicatatorship. None. The suggestion that it does is not only a foolish claim but spits in the face of everyone who has ever given their lives – or risked everything – to create this country and keep it safe from real dictators. It’s an accusation that no one in this country should ever make or ever tolerate.

Does that make me intolerant? Damn right it does. I’m very intolerant of people who can’t tell the difference between George Bush and Fidel Castro, Adolph Hitler, or Josef Stalin. I wish I could make a time machine and drag them back to hear the screams of children gassed to death, to see women raped and slaughtered, to witness the last minutes of human beings worked to death in labor camps just so they’d never, ever forget what a real dictatorship is.

I’m serious about this. The speech Hillary Clinton made ought to disqualify her from ever running for elected office in this country ever again. And I’m not talking about a legal prohibition either, so just settle down and put away your “fascist” signs. I’m saying that we, the people, ought to shout down that sort of dangerous and idiotic nonsense the very moment it’s uttered and vote them down so hard that their ears ring.

I’m tired of this. I’m tired of the moral equivalency, the endless whinging when a Republican so much as looks cross-eyed at a Democrat even as that Democrat is waving a “Bush=Hitler” sign and wearing a Che Guevara shirt, the rhetoric that in any other age would have never even been thought much less given voice….

I’m just tired of this.

Yeah, I know I’m picking on the Democrats here. I don’t care. I don’t see Republican Presidential candidates giving speeches like this. Hell, Rick Santorum made a Nazi reference in passing and he got bounced so hard by Republicans and conservatives that his teeth rattled. He couldn’t get his retraction out fast enough.

Anything from the Democrats yet? Anything? Anywhere?

Not yet. And don’t wait for it to happen unless you like long years of abject frustration.

So if they won’t say it, I will. The Republican majority in tihs country is nothing even remotely close to a dictatorship – not literaly, not figuratively, not even in your wildest progressive dreams. Anyone who says they are is not only lying to your face but should never, ever get the vote of any rational, thinking American.

On this, you’re never going to change my mind.