It's all lies, of course. But petty people in a mad stampede somehow have gotten the notion that any lie about Hillary Clinton is plausible and printable. And so they stampede on. She's been their favorite target for 16 years now; they're nuts about attacking her. She's our generation's Ted Kennedy. These self sustaining lies just pile on and pile on. They tire me.
Here's
the article that inspired my current rantlette:
Hillary's Baggage: A Story From My Former Life as a Clinton-Hater
Back before he had a beard, blueskinned Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, made his bones as chief counsel to a Senate committee that was investigating Whitewater and related stuff. (I should warn the reader right now, some of my little facts are going to be wrong here. It doesn't matter. The facts are generally accurate, and in the end this is about interpretation.) At the time, 1996, then-Senator Al D'Amato wanted to use Whitewater to delve into the Vince Foster death, the deputy White House counsel who died six months into the Clinton presidency, his body discovered in a park on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. D'Amato later thought better of it. It was a bad move for him politically in New York, and much as he loved the seamy side of politics, and was steeped in it himself, D'Amato backed off. But for a while he investigated aspects of the death, and held hearings in the Senate that touched on it.
<snip>
What follows is more arguable, so let me talk about my source on it. In Little Rock in 1996, for the New York Times Magazine, I interviewed a Clinton hater named Gary Parks. Parks was a former auto salesman and something of a troubled youth. He'd kicked around, he'd had physical injury. His dad had been murdered: Luther "Jerry" Parks, a former state cop, who had been head of security for the Clinton headquarters in Little Rock during the presidential campaign in 1992, had been murdered less than a year after the election. This is incredible and true: Two months after Vince Foster dies, Jerry Parks, Clinton's former security aide, is slain gangland style, with a semiautomatic handgun, his car shot up in West Little Rock. The media didn't touch it, and they were allowed to drop it. There was no internet then, as there is now, able to play the media as it did with Dan Rather.
And it just spins on and on into the madness. This is all from crazyville. The pointlessness of it all is overwhelming. I don't agree with Clinton's positions on a few points and I have some issues with her political style & instincts. But all of that is ultimately overlookable if she gets the nomination. My fear is this: once she's nominated (and not a second sooner) these termites are going to come inching their way out of the woodwork. We'll hear this shit non stop, get it in our emails, hear it whispered at the office, alluded to on the nightly news, and then blathered on the opinion shows and talk radio for the rest of the campaign. And even then it won't stop. It won't ever stop.
They'll smear whoever we nominate, have no doubt. But with Clinton it will stick a little more, it'll live a little longer through the news cycles, and it will dog us and all our hopes for this country throughout her administration.
I don't believe in giving in to the bastards, but (her policy positions and skills aside) I don't see much point in providing them with the fattest target possible. I don't see the point in charging headlong, WW1-trenches style, into their waiting machine gun nests.
I hate to argue it this way. But it can't not be said. It can't be ignored as a tactical and strategic factor in choosing our nominee. For all her talents, Sen Clinton as a nominee will allow our opponents to create a huge and effective distraction from the real issues in the next election.
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