The Big C

Now here's the kind of talk we blues staters don't like to hear from Chappaqua cowboys:

"[We should] make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but those who in any way give any aid or comfort whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country…You are either with America in our time of need or you are not.”

That that was then, when Manichean worldviews sold better on Madison Avenue (even if they had trouble being peddled on 1st). This is now. But there can be no question that Hilary Clinton, for all her poll-tested prefabrication, gives good soundbite when she wants to. In six short years, she's proved a quick study in existential fear and loathing and their attendant global hellspots. Jewcy paterfamilias Jeffrey Goldberg reports on the troika of Dems running in '08. For those arriving late to the show, that'd be Hilary, Barack and John, the first sounding the most (quick question: does a conceptual novelty cancel a verbal cliche?) presidential:

“You know, if you look around the world, Islamists have had to be defeated by internal military forces, in such places as Algeria and the Philippines, or by external military forces, in places like Afghanistan. We want to be able to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible packages. We want to be smart about this. Take the Palestinians, where we had an election. Don’t you think it would have been smart to make sure that the election was run in such a way that everyone knew how to compete? Hamas certainly knew how to compete. They ran a modern election. They knew enough to run only one person in each constituency, unlike Fatah, which we apparently didn’t tell. Hamas had a cell-phone system to get everyone to the polls. It’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s have an election.’ If you’re going to do it and install democracy, democracy means rule of law, it means democracy education, democracy means opening up the media.”

She went on, “That’s what we did during the Cold War. We had a multi-pronged agenda against Communism and the Soviet Union, we worked with candidates and parties in Europe, we worked to persuade people to be part of our alliance, we used every tool at our disposal.” Clinton seemed just moments away from naming individual Hamas precinct captains.

"'Nasirya's a pimp,' Suha Arafat told me once when we went shopping for minks in Calais…"

The trouble is, she's a divider not a uniter. And I'm still not convinced the moral turpitude she made chief accessory of those Chanel suits in and out of the White House hasn't been overwhelmed by current events. There is some evidence Hilary's just as calculating and on-demand in her politics as ever.

For starters, she's made Robert Byrd, he of the ex-Klan bona fides, her mentor in senatorial pomp and procedure simply for no other reason than he's the backward-looking good ole boy to see about learning how to fit in quickly in that august chamber. Also, Clinton's rhetoric about being "deceived" by the president on prewar intelligence on Iraq is laughable given that most of that intelligence came from former officials in her husband's administration, and we all know she didn't spend eight years crotcheting Roger mittens. John Edwards candidly admits the assumptions of Saddam's WMD guilt were universal in this article — good to hear, too, since he comes off sounding a grown-up twelve everywhere else. (Gravitas sprouts as slowly and patchily as chest hair, apparently.)

Anyway, it may all end tomorrow with ice cap meltage, my upstairs neighbor telling me to turn down the T-Rex at 3 a.m., or nuclear annihilation or whatever. But is it too much to ask that we stick around long enough to see Hilary pronounce "Obama" as sibilantly as New Hampshire microphones can register?