Radical Hillary

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, I believe many of her liberal supporters will be in for a horrible surprise: Hillary's not a liberal. This wasn't something I noticed until I started debating them, but apparently some of the more progressive Democrats seem to have this idea that Hillary is a closet radical who is going to nail Republicans once she's in office.

No, I take that back. Now that I think about it, I remember someone at Carpetbagger's saying something to that effect a few months ago and thought it was crazy and told them that I disagreed and thought it'd be foolish for her to go for revenge. But now I see this is a wider spread phenomenum than I had realized, which I've now witnessed directly when I tell people that Hillary is a centrist. To quote Zeitgeist at Carpetbaggers "If you’ve ever read any of her early law reviews or articles about the rights of children she’s beyond liberal - she’s absolutely radical."

Early law reviews. Right. And I used to be a dittohead, and then moved directly from there to being into populist communism, and then finally settled into the track that I'm currently on, which occured sometime before Bill's re-election. But we're supposed to believe that these early law reviews are better indicators than...everything we've seen for the past fifteen years. And apparently, the idea is that all that conservative stuff from the 90's was just Bill's doing. As Jackie commented at TPM Election Central "Obama is probably even right of Mr. "Republican Lite" Bill Clinton."

Have I been missing something? She's been in the Senate for seven years now, and I don't remember her trailblazing any radical agenda. We all remember that she helped authorize some sort of war, as well as rejecting an amendment which would have forced Bush to be more diplomatic and obtain another authorization before war was allowed. She voted for the Patriot Act, as well as a revised renewal of it. In 2005, she was against the immediate withdrawal from Iraq that progressives had been demanding for awhile, and she voted to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, which was part of the neo-con saber rattleing progressives denounced. And I just picked all this up from a look at her Wikipedia page.

Oddly, if you mention any of this stuff to her supporters, you'll be told that other Dems did this stuff too. But I thought the whole point was that she was some sort of fighting radical. Someone who didn't just roll over to their Republican overlords. So what kind of defense is this?

Bizarro Hillary

And now I just feel like I've entered an alternative universe. How is it that people far to the left of me approve of this woman? Is there some secret Hillary chatroom where she's giving them the lowdown on what her true plans are? Is she planning a double-secret retroactive impeachment of Bush and Cheney? Sending them to Gitmo, perhaps? I don't get it. How is she winning them over?

And the best I can come up with is that they're overstating Obama's Nice Guy rhetoric and forgetting that this has been her mantra throughout most of her Senate career. It's like nothing before the presidential season counts and they like the fact that she's now pretending to be tough, even though she still won't take a stand on anything important, like the FISA telecom immunity thing.

Secondly, I think it's perhaps just holdover stuff from the Clinton era. They still have deepdown sympthies with her for what happened in the 90's, as well as the continuing attacks against her, while blaming Bill for all of the conservative stuff. But I can't imagine how this works. She's a Big Money candidate. She's the Queen of the DLC. She's the type of politician they should hate. But somehow, these people hate Obama more, and so Hillary has been turned into some sort of radical hero.

But even the Obama bashing doesn't quite make sense to me. Because it's based loosely on his nice guy rhetoric, and mostly consists of theories of what me might be. He might be more conservative than Bill Clinton. He might have skeletons in his closet which haven't been outed by any political opponents since 1996, including Hillary's own people during this election. But that's really the best attack Hillary has: That Barack is too good to be true and must have some big downside which will doom us all.

And so instead we're supposed to chose the candidate who seems to be exactly as conservative as Bill, and who has no skeletons left in the closet because everyone knows about them and continue to attack her with them. And I don't know why. This makes no sense. Because it just seems like it's the more radical progressives who are doing this, while the mainstream progressives and outright liberals are not. Anyway, I'm willing to listen to theories on this one. I'm usually the one with the answers, but this has me stumped. I'm going to bed.