Pennsylvania Cheese-steak (Does it matter who wins?)
April 21st, 2008 — LiamScrapple in the (little, greasy) apple:
Does it matter who wins? After all, the country isn’t run by its king, it’s run by its ruling cabal; that is, its senate/ congress/ militiary/ internationalist business investments and manufacturing infra- and outer-structure…
So, does it matter?
Barack likes to play the open-minded intellectual (which he is). Hillary likes to play the ruthless, self-appointed (but oppositionally defiant) righteous inheritor of all things beer and bratwurst (ie - “American”) (which she isn’t).
Barack is the lefty’s lefty, at least in the public imagination, which means that he’s more likely to lose in a general election, when looking at recent voting history. (Dean, McGovern, Dukakis - those who appeal to the semi-socialist, or ‘better world’ utopists, take an early lead, seem to invigorate the youngest voters, and then take a hard nose-dive when they meet the red states, and the youngest voters all sleep in).
Hillary is an opportunist like history has never seen; Nicolo Machievelli could take notes and pass them on to Cesare Borgia. Whichever way the popular wind - from the Senate floor - blows, so goes (but not blows) Hillary. (Blame her husband for our suppositional insight into her sex life).
She’s a more comfortable position for the business end of the Democratic party, but she’s so widely and roundly disliked and mistrusted … she’s a hard, hard bet to win, at least, without years of bile spilt on and over her (which is, maybe, just how we like politics!)
So, Barack or Hillary? Who wins? And what’s the difference?
The reality we’d wake to is right where we live. The country is still run by Wall Street, and Wall Street is still being pummeled by our uncertain relationship with oil reserves, with internationalism in outsourcing jobs, with the massive hole in our economy known as ‘the war’…
…with the overabundance of news and noise coupled with the vague sense that American identity consists mostly of buying pieces of electronic plastic from China, and voting for teenaged wedding singers on American Idol.
So… does it matter?
Did it matter that G.B.2 was elected (or promoted) to president? What would the world have looked like under Gore? Under Kerry? Under Dean? Under…Billary? Under Barack? Under John McCain?
Tell me the difference to the country…
…in two years? … Four years?
At this point, shouldn’t we just let the senate appoint a Prime Minister? (And vote her (or him) out with a no-confidence vote?)) Or am I confusing us with someone else…
April 21st, 2008 at 4:42 pm
No, it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all.
Big business will be taken care of, whether it’s Hillary, Obama or McCain.
Americans just don’t want to wake up to this fact. Our denial is pathological.
It’s comi-tragic listening to the Air America types getting all bent out of shape over Hillary and Obama. Both sides seem to think that their candidate is going to come riding in on a white horse to save us all. Not going to happen.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I’ll give it to McCain.
Every win for Hillary is a loss - she can’t promise to pull anybody into the congress - she’s so roundly hated and mistrusted by the general populace, the Nascar nation, that the minute she looks promising to the Dems, the Repubs come out in force to kill any movement, never mind momentum (b/c there isn’t any).
If I were a Dem, devoted to Barry O’Bama, and he was squashed by the Clinton machine, (on the backs of the confused hard-core bedrock conservative Pennsylvanians, who should be voting Republican, but who still vote Dem because only because they think that they should, because their grand-pappy did (to bolster the Unions))…
If I were a liberal Dem, voting Obama, and he got squashed, I’d be damned before I gave my vote to the “democrat” neo-con - Hillary Clinton.
Was she ever a ‘hippy lefty liberal,’ like in the pictures, or was it just a passing fancy? A pose for fashion’s sake….
Well, doesn’t matter. She’s as conservative-centrist, as hawkish, as anybody who ever ran for the office. At least, she’s willing to play that role for perpetuity, if it gets her the Wellesley wet-dream - “first woman president.”
Sometimes - no, often - watching her walk through the steps, I get a feeling I’m watching the daydreams of a little girl who just dreamed and dreamed of being asked to the prom by the most handsome guy, or being the most popular girl in class… and then, when those dreams faded, unrealized, the dream was channeled into a new dream - that of being the most powerful man in the room.
She looks so hamstrung by so many internal ropes and strings, when she moves, it’s like she’s her own puppeteer - there’s something that looks so awkward, and give her away, every time. She seems to want it because she wants it. And the only thing she’ll know how to do with it, is to do what makes her - what gives her the illusion - of continued spotlight, and (sort-of) popularity.
If I were an Obama voter, I’d vote for McCain, before I voted for her, because she’s such a goddamned phony, and she’ll do the Dems one worse than McCain will -
If we get a president Popeye McCain, (come on, he looks like the mighty little sailor!), then we can play oppositional politics - he can lose the congress and senate, and it can go more naturally to those who oppose him - anti-mid-east-war dems and repubs.
If Hillary gets it, the people will stack the seats of the house with hard-core repubs. And she’ll do what they say, over and over and over and over - and whether the result will be different, one to the other, I really don’t know.
But the process of watching a pseudo-democrat revile and betray her constituents, every day of every year, for four years, well, that’d be too much for me to take, and I’m betting for most people.
We’d rather have a guy we can fight on issues, than someone who pretended to agree with us, down to our core convictions - and then stabbed us in the heart of these very same convictions -while denying it and then lying about it, (and then cracking jokes about how she was accused of lying about it).
April 21st, 2008 at 7:58 pm
these look fun:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/04/01/hillary-fired-for-lies-unethical-behavior-from-senate-job-former-boss/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article3510778.ece
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:26 am
“In the overall race for the nomination, Obama led with 1,705.5 delegates, including separately chosen party and elected officials known as superdelegates. Clinton had 1,575.5 delegates, according to the AP tally.”
A party divided, no? (”Cannot stand”, is the end of that line).
And the AP/Yahoo says that many white Pennsylvanians won’t elect a Black man. Not so brotherly love, but I could’ve told you that, having lived there. They’re “old-fashioned” democrats, really old fashioned.
April 25th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Dean says superdelegates are free agents
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-superdelegates2apr02,0,1542205.story