Oh, Come On People. Is This the Best Thing We Can Find to Talk About? Seriously?
Much, and I mean much, is being made
of this comment by Hillary Clinton today.
“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
Most of what’s being said it highly critical. Byron York called it “unhinged”. Kathryn Jean Lopez said, “There is something deeply wrong with the Clintons”. Even the left, mostly those in the bag for the Obamessiah already, are on her like a pack of hyenas on a limping gazelle. She has, of course, apologized profusely after sending forth her campaign minions to explain English to the folks who were having trouble with it.
It’s all really overblown. It doesn’t take much to realize that the point of her remarks wasn’t that Barack Obama was going to be assassinated or even that she wanted him to be. That’s just dumb.
Look at what she said again and see if you can find the most important word in the paragraph. Here’s a hint. It’s capitalized, she says it twice, and it’s particularly germane to the subject of her dropping out of the race at this point in time.
You have to work really hard to see her saying anything except she doesn’t see it as out of line for her to keep going with her campaign into June (Look! There’s that word again!) since it’s been done a couple times pretty recently. It’s not like she hasn’t made exactly the same reference before either. Even Michelle Malkin, who has never been known for going easy on leftists who say stupid things, cut her a break.
How weak are John McCain and Barack Obama as candidates that their supporters have to really twist her words to make them into something scandalous? If Barack Obama weren’t such an empty shell, if he had anything of substance to bring to the table, if his past weren’t chock-full of disgusting bigots and corrupt political back-slappers, no one would care because Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be darned near dead-even in the primary popular vote. She’d be the Democratic Mike Huckabee, running in the hopes of picking up some table scraps in the Obama administration.
And if John McCain weren’t spending all his energy spitting in the faces of the backbone of his party, if he wasn’t such a popularity-hungry media suck-up, if he hadn’t flushed his integrity down the toilet just to buy a few more Hispanic votes, then his backers wouldn’t be banging on Clinton in the hopes of buying a few more points in November if she happens to be the opponent. She’d be just another Walter Mondale or Mike Dukakis, waiting obliviously for the coming electoral beat down.
But they are what they are and so we get this silly story. The shame of it is that there are serious matters we need to be discussing. We need to be figuring out what to do about Iran, which just picked up a shiny new client state from which to launch terrorist attacks. We need to take a good, long look at the Social Security system and see what we can do to keep it from completely imploding. We need to talk about why, exactly, health care is so expensive and whether we want yet more government control of a system that government has not helped any. This is serious stuff.
But no. Because we have the worst slate of Presidential candidates I’ve seen in my entire life, we’re knifing the other guys in the kidneys just to get our guy a few more points ahead. Great, huh?
Other Posts of Interest:
- Is John McCain Conservative? Show Me.
- Ideas? Who Needs Ideas?
- NC Repubs to John McCain: You’re Not the Boss of Me!
Category: Hillary!, Johnny Mac, The 2008 Horse Race, The Obamessiah
I'm no fan of Hillary, but I agree with you 100%.
Here's the full context:
She was asked if it was true that arrangements are being made for her to be obama's VP
"Neither of us has the number of delegates needed to be the nominee, and every time they declare it doesn't make it so. Neither of us do. And I've never seen anything like this. I have, perhaps, a long enough memory that many people who finished a rather distant second behind nominees go all the way to the convention. I remember very well 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, where some who had contested in the primaries, you know, were determined to carry their case to the convention. I'm ahead in the popular vote. Less than 200 delegates separate us out of 4,400. Michigan and Florida are not resolved. No one has the nomination, so I would look to the camp of my opponent for the source of those stories."
she was then asked if she bought the party unity argument.
"I don't," Clinton said. "And again, I've been around long enough. You know, my husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary sometime in the middle of June. Right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just– I don't understand it. And you know, there's lots of speculation about why it is, but uh…"
I feel it wasn't a misspeak and she certainly wasn't taken out of context. She was aware of the campaigns in 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992 so why go back to 1968? The only motive for that is to suggest things like assassinations can happen so she wants to be in the race in case it does happen. There is absolutely no excuse to go back to 1968 when you have plenty of other more resent instances in history to use. She is pathetic for wishing death on Obama and those that defend her are just as pathetic.
How about because the name Kennedy was weighing a little more heavily on her mind in the past few days?
Let's think this through a little. Let's say she suspends her campaign tomorrow and two weeks later the unthinkable happens. Don't you think that the party just might call the second-place candidate – the one who has a ton of pledged delegates, has won the majority of primaries, and who is within a hair's breadth of having more popular votes?
If for any reason Barack Obama can't carry through to November, Hillary is getting the call, whether she campaigns into June or not.
Or how about primaries don't especially imprint themselves on the brain unless something momentous happens – like RFK winning the primary in _June_ in California, and then being shot which makes the memory of that particular primary indelible?
<blockquoteBut no. Because we have the worst slate of Presidential candidates I’ve seen in my entire life, we’re knifing the other guys in the kidneys just to get our guy a few more points ahead. Great, huh?
A lot of people would say mentioning RFK's assassination to prove campaigns run late (as bad as an example as she could find) is knifing people in the kidneys just to get a few points ahead. Political gaffes are important because they don't stop after January 20, 2009.
[...] the blogosphere are pushing the insane memes that it’s either UNIMPORTANT (a sort of ‘How DARE you be offended!‘), or that since she said it in March to TIME Magazine, and nobody complained then, it MUST [...]