hillary clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party
As many of you know, I’m an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter. I have never been so excited or inspired by a candidate — or, really, any leader — in my life, and I view this election as an historical opportunity — maybe even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — to not only save my country from the disaster wrought by Bush and Cheney, but fundamentally change how my government interacts with the rest of the world, and how it works for me and my fellow Americans.
Knowing all of that, I’m sure it will come as no surprise that over the last 10 weeks or so, I’ve gone from respecting to feeling sorry for to actively despising Hillary Clinton.
It’s over. She knows it’s over. It’s been over for almost three months, but she’s been moving the goalposts and cynically and cravenly pandering to voters in a way that’s not only insulting, but is embarrassing. John Cole frequently says that he can’t believe he ever supported Bush, and I can now join him in saying that I can’t believe I ever supported, defended and believed in the Clintons.
The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it’s become clear that this whole thing isn’t about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush’s third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it’s all about her. It’s about her ego. It’s about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said “No thanks. You’re a good senator, but we want something different now.”
It’s been crystal clear for weeks, yet she refuses to put party and country over personal ambition and drop out of the race, forcing Barack Obama to not only run against McCain and the Media, but also against her. It’s particularly galling, because she can only win if her campaign can force Democratic superdelegates (one of the worst creations in the history of politics) to tell millions of Democratic voters — many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone — to go fuck themselves.
It’s driving me crazy, and I hope that someone sits her down with a calculator so she’ll make this primary that is just strengthening McCain — who, I feel obligated to point out again, is running for Bush’s third term. That would be George W. Bush, the most universally hated president in American history.
At times like these, when it would be easy to despair, I find comfort in humor, like this post I saw on Reddit this morning: Hillary Clinton: The Psycho Ex-Girlfriend of the Democratic Party.
It’s 2:31 AM. The Democratic Party is sleeping peacefully when it hears
its phone buzz on the night stand. It rolls over and sees “Hillary” on
the caller ID. It pauses briefly, considering pushing “END” and not
dealing with this shit tonight. The thought is appealing but the
Democratic Party knows that if it doesn’t take this call, another one
is only minutes away.DEMS: …Hello?
Hillary: Hey baby.
DEMS: C’mon Hillary. Enough with this.
Hillary: Don’t you get it? You NEED me.
DEMS: No, I don’t. It was fun while it lasted but I’m with Barack now. I made my choice, it’s done.
Hillary: You can’t really mean that. How can you say that after all the good times we had?
DEMS: To be honest, I started hanging out with you because Bill’s pretty awesome.
Hillary: But I’m just like Bill!
DEMS: No, you’re not. Bill is charismatic, inspiring, and gets me really good weed.
Hillary: Fuck you. You’re elitist!
DEMS: I’m going back to sleep.
I hope that, after the crushing defeat in North Carolina and few thousand vote “victory” in Indiana, the undeclared superdelegates (again, the absolute worst idea in the history of politics) will respect the will of the people and commit to Obama, so we can all focus on introducing the real John McCain — not a Maverick, not a nice guy, not an honest guy, not a regular guy, not substantially different from George W. Bush in any meaningful way — to the American people.
And allow me to just head something off right now that’s already come up on Twitter: I’m not sexist. This isn’t sexist. That’s a stupid straw man, and if you try to make that claim, I will point and laugh at you.
Update: Here, let me try this one more time for the humorless and professional victims out there, who seem to have shown up in a flood today: Gender, race, sexual orientation, things that make us different that we don’t choose . . . they just don’t matter to me. At all. People are people and identity politics is stupid.
I found this post hilarious because it satirized the behavior of an ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend/ex-robot who just refuses to accept that it’s over. I’ve had a psycho ex-girlfriend. My friends who are women have had psycho ex-boyfriends. In all cases, the behavior has been exactly like the behavior satirized in the post I linked. Get it? Get it? I’m talking to you now, people without a sense of humor: It. Is. Not. About. The. Gender. It. Is. About. The. Behavior. The Behavior. The Behavior.
Everyone get it now? Am I spelling it out simply enough for you? Let’s all say it together. Use a puppet if it helps: It’s about the behavior. It is not about the gender.
That’s the whole point, that’s the humor, that’s what inspired me to link this post. If you’re unwilling or unable to understand this . . . well, anything I’d say now would waste even more of my time, so I’ll go back to pointing and laughing.
Final update:
Well, I’m just going to throw up my hands here. I’ve made it as abundantly clear as I possibly can that I don’t care about Clinton’s gender, and I don’t have a problem with women. What I do care about
is watching a woman I once respected degenerate into a Republicanesque Karl Rove monstrosity in a Quixotic effort to destroy a candidate I believe in. What I care about is beating John McCain in November so we can start to put our country back together.
If you want to boycott me, go nuts. As a life-long activist, I understand and totally support the concept of voting with your pocketbook and voting with your feet.
But stop telling me who I am and what I think and feel. I know what I was thinking when I wrote this, and it’s not what many of you have accused me of.
I’m not going to waste any more time on this, and I’m locking comments on this post. May I suggest that you take whatever energy you’d use to tell me what a terrible person I am and use it to put some good into the world instead.
Writing to your congresscritter and demanding an end to the war would probably be a good place to start.
in which i write a prequel
Ficlets is this cool collaborative writing project that I occasionally play with as I work out my creative writing muscles. Ficlets takes the philosophy that creativity is born of necessity and applies it ruthlessly: writers only get 1024 characters — not words, but characters — to tell a little bit of a story.
Where Ficlets really shines, though, and what makes it so unique and inspiring, is that it’s a collaborative writing process; each story has a link attached to it that can be used to write a prequel or sequel to any of the stories people submit (which are all released under a creative commons license.) Stories can have lots of different prequels and sequels, too, as each ficleteer finds and expresses their own inspiration.
There have been some fantastic prequels and sequels written around some of the stories I’ve put up there, but today was the first time I was ever inspired enough to write one of my own.
Last night I saw that Will Hindmarch (a very creative a hoopy frood) had written a really quirky and awesome story. I instantly wanted to build upon it, but nothing came into my mind. I told my brain to run it as a background process until it returned something useful, and at 7 this morning I suddenly woke from a deep sleep with the entire idea fully formed (core dumped, if you will) in my head.
Because the ficlets are so short, it’s not really practical to excerpt them, so I’ll just direct you to Will’s story, A Loaded Gun in the Mailbox, which you should read first, and my story, An Unremarkable Factory.
The challenge I gave myself was to not just write an interesting piece of fiction inspired by Will’s, but to also write it in a style that flowed well with his. At the risk of sounding entirely too pleased with myself, I’m very happy with the result.
If you want to take the Creative Commons experience all the way, listen to tracks five and six of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I while you read mine. I had them on while I wrote it.
three quick things
I’m super busy today, so I only have time to post five three things:
- I am way way way behind on Happiest Days orders. I’m going to catch up this afternoon and tomorrow. If you haven’t gotten your "I’m shipping this" e-mail from PayPal (International orders won’t, because of the way I have to process those) keep an eye out in the next 24 hours. Thank you all for your patience, support and understanding.
- There are tons and tons of fantastic, entertaining and thought-provoking comments in yesterday’s Star Trek posts. In fact, after reading them all, I’m going to go ahead and upgrade my Star Trek Movie condition to something similar to Charlie Brown going after the football.
- I found my original Gameboy Tetris cartridge this morning. I was feeding my dogs, and when I went into the garage to get their kibble, it was just sitting on a stool next to the washing machine. Man, if this thing could talk . . . well, it would probably say, "Thanks a lot for leaving me in the garage, you douche."
thanks, but i think i’ll pass . . .
How funny is it that I’m decrying the retcon and bitching about the "reinventing" of Star Trek on the same day that io9 writes Captain Wesley Crusher: SIS:
The Star Trek franchise has always been about "big picture" stories,
but the next Trek series should take the opposite approach, narrow the
scope and focus on a few well-developed characters – primarily Wesley
Crusher. Yes, the much maligned ensign should be brought back as the
captain of a Starfleet science vessel that warps around the Alpha
Quadrant solving mysteries for the Federation. Think of it as CSI . . .
in space! Here’s how it would work …
How do they handle the whole Traveler thing? Easy:
Oh yeah, about that whole resigning from Starfleet and tripping around
the universe with that space-hippie, The Traveler? One word: retcon.
The whole thing is very entertaining, and I honestly don’t know what to say when a science fiction site says nice things about me, so I’ll just say thank you.