Friday, May 09, 2008

Swimming with Sharks

There’s an old joke that suggests that the reason why it’s safe for lawyers to swim with sharks is due to professional courtesy. And it’s funny because it’s true: Sharks don’t eat lawyers.

But I wonder if this is at least partly why conservatives have become so enamored with Hillary. I mean sure, they like the fact that she’s helping to injure our next President, but it’s not like they had similar feelings for any other Dem back when they thought Hillary was going to be president. They were already talking about Hillary being the Dem nominee as far back as 2004, and none of them seemed interested in supporting a Democratic challenger to hurt her. They assumed Hills would be our default nominee, and couldn’t wait to attack her in the general election.

So while I’m sure this new admiration of her is somewhat self-serving, particularly as even they know that she doesn’t have any chance of winning; I don’t think that explains it all. I wonder if a big part of it is a professional courtesy of sorts, where they’re finally appreciating the fact that Hillary’s really not so different from them after all. While they finally seem to have learned the lesson that the Big Dog had teeth and respected him the way a lab rat learns to “respect” the cheese that keeps shocking them; they always despised Hillary. But now…well, now it just seems like maybe Hills is really just one of them.

And again, I’m sure this is partly due to them having a common enemy. But I think that really just gave them the opening to finally let down their guard and reevaluate their opinion of her. Because she really is just like them, particularly with their fantasyland attitude towards life. She’s whatever she wants to be, at any given time, and feels no sense of shame or realization of how obviously disgraceful she’s behaving. There’s just this attitude that, as long as you act like you’ve gotten away with something, you have. Sure, the whole world might consider you a fraud, but as long as you act like you believe in yourself, they can never defeat you. And they convince themselves that, as long as they keep their charade going, they’ve won and the only people who say otherwise are “haters” trying to tear them down; and that defeat can only happen if they admit that it happened. These people really are that self-delusional, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing in Hillary.

And so I wonder if that’s a bit of this. Without a doubt, any enemy of their enemy is a friend, and it’s quite possible that their hatred of liberals has gotten them more interested in her, as they’ll embrace anything we dislike; but there’s definitely more here than just that. I think they’ve finally had a reason to reevaluate their opinion of Hillary, and dammit, they see someone who’s just like them. And they kind of like it.

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