None of the Above

I'm the yellowest, yellow dog dingo of a democrat ever but even I'm having my head spun like a scene from the exorcist over the latest round of "I will never, ever, vote for my previously ok candidate and will vote for your sucky candidate now" and its nutty respones from the hawklike observers of the wall posters and the eternal critics of who everyone else is voting for. I mean for g-d's sake Steve Soto at The Left Coaster He Man Hillary Supporter's Club came out today with "Peddle It Somewhere Else, Hillary" and took back all his original defences of her. Obama's fans, with their usual acumen and good grace, then piled on to remind us all that a Hillary Presidency would of course be worse than a McCain presidency and that Hillary's voters are too inconsequential to matter and also really all going to vote for McCain anyway once the one true Obama has been recognized in the slam dunk majority rulez democratic primary which their leader is simultaneously winning because of his awsomeness and losing because of Hillary's evilness. While re-iterating that they will never, ever, vote for Hillary they also attack Hillary's imaginary supporters (those deluded racist republicans) for 2 to 1 refusing to vote for Obama in a mythical NPR poll. I can't do the math to explicate how improbable it is that every.single.obama.fan. at daily kos swears that they will leave the party if HRC gets the nomination and how it is also the case that it is Hillary's voters who are the most fickle and likely to jump ship. But there's something wrong with this equation, somewhere.

So what is today's never before seen outrage? I'm a huge fan of Samantha Power and admired Obama very much for having the sense and the intellect to go completely outside the ordinary political networks to get someone who actually knows something about a difficult topic. I was distressed to see her pilloried for calling HRC a "monster" but equally distressed to see that the absurd hate and fearmongering of the seething tadpole intellects of the internet was not limited to the hysterics over at dailykos. Surely the word "monster" is rather misunderstood if it is applied to Hillary clinton and an ordinary campaign for president. Or are we oversupplied with regular monsters and need to invent new categories to hate and fear like "dolls with the prettiest eyes" and "older women with crows feet who didn't prevent all the genocides in the last 20 years when they so could have" ?


My personal favorite is over at Sadly, No! where Brad in "A Test For Obama" does the triple axel and double lutz to find a silver lining in discovering that Barack Obama has no balls *and* no class. He feels that it was simultaneously right for HRC's campaign to demand an apology, and even a resignation, and utterly wrong for Obama to give in. In Brad's opinion--which I happen to agree with--both campaigns were enacting a battle that will be fought later anyway--HRC the eternal democrat's struggle to prevent people from talking utterly absurd shit about the eventual nominee, Obama fighting the other eternal democrat's battle not to be forced by the republicans to apologize for breathing or running for public office. So on that metric HRC showed she had the balls to fight McCain (even though her attack on Samantha Power was counterproductive for the democratic party as a whole) and Obama showed he had the class and grace of the true Democratic loser. "After you, my dear Alphonse" being the response that, in the Three Stooges as well as in life, gets you a poke in the eye and a sexual assault in an airport bathroom by the Republican nominee.

What I can't understand is just how truly true believery people insist on being, and how overidentified they are with their candidate, and how much they think that overidentification and hero worship reflects the way other voters came to support their candidate. I think its something to do with the whole "we are the change..." marketing strategy that Obama chose. Somehow when people choose obama, for whatever reason, they become convinced that people must have chosen Hillary for the opposite reason. If you choose obama because you want change, then people who choose hillary must want stasis. If you think Obama is a true progressive, then you think Hillary is a nixonian republican. If you think Obama is able to reach out to republicans, then Hillary must be divisive and repellent to republicans. If you think you chose obama on policy, then Hillary's voters must have chosen her because her policies are the exact opposite. Now when you get to that last point you can see how truly nutty this is because, of course, Hillary's policies and Obama's are not that different. I think there is something in the way each candidate is selling himself, and in the way the media are treating each candidate as binary opposites, that creates this all or nothing mentality in the true believers on both sides. Perhaps its inevitable given the perfect binariness of the candidates. I mean it appears to be the case that if Obama is black then Hillary is white. And depending on which day you read MoDo then When Obama is a man hillary is a woman, and when Obama is a woman Hillary is a man so the eternal verities and symettries are observed. The only way this whole thing could be more perfectly perfect if while Hillary was a Christian Obama was a Muslim but of course I believe some elves are working on that one in their little toy shop of horrors right now.

I am truly ready to shut up shop and just hide under the bedclothes until I can come out and vote for the (*&^% nominee whoever that will be. I would totally and utterly enjoy the last laugh of watching the nuttiest Obama supporter forced to yoke their pure selves to the raddled ass of HRC and support her and Obama in a shared ticket. It would actually give me more pleasure than just beating the pants of McCain.