Sunday, April 23, 2006
If Everyone Hates You, You're Not Necessarily Right--Maybe You're Just Really, Really Wrong
From today's New York Daily News: "Taking her hardest line yet against illegal immigrants, Sen. Hillary Clinton told the Daily News she wants U.S. borders secured with a wall or fence, possibly surveillance drones and infrared cameras."
(Blogger sighs heavily, beats head against desk.)
This probably looks like clever triangulation to her and her people--position yourself, in true Big-Dog style, between the Democrats who would let everybody in and the Republicans who'd ship everyone of Mexican ancestry back over the border--but it's just stupid. There are millions of voters, even in the center she's trying to peel off, who will never vote for her no matter what she says. And by saying stuff like this, the net effect is mostly to piss off the Democratic base--most importantly, minority voters who already hate the Republicans for saying the same damn things.
Hillary's reelection to the Senate this November is as close to a sure thing as there is in politics, so this statement is really about 2008. And it's a play straight from Ye Olde Centrist Democrat Master Plan. But that book's been out of date since Hillary's husband strolled into history. If we run plays out of it in 2008, we're going to lose--again.
Recommended Reading: I'm late finding this, but it's still worth a look--an article from New York magazine on the conspiracy theorists developing their secret histories of September 11. Just describing them with the phrase "conspiracy theorists" makes them sound wacky, like the guys living in their mother's basements who've spent the last 40 years cooking up Kennedy assassination theories. And some of the 9/11 theorists are indeed wack, but others continue to raise plausible questions about exactly what happened that day, and continue to ask why. It's easy to get sucked into a speculative vortex if you take all of their theories seriously. However, it's easy to get out again if you remember that the same Bush Administration some theorists accuse of actively facilitating the whole thing is also the crowd of geniuses who've screwed up everything else they've touched since Inauguration Day. So that most extreme of possibilities is almost certainly wrong. But lots of other possibilities can't be ruled out.
From today's New York Daily News: "Taking her hardest line yet against illegal immigrants, Sen. Hillary Clinton told the Daily News she wants U.S. borders secured with a wall or fence, possibly surveillance drones and infrared cameras."
(Blogger sighs heavily, beats head against desk.)
This probably looks like clever triangulation to her and her people--position yourself, in true Big-Dog style, between the Democrats who would let everybody in and the Republicans who'd ship everyone of Mexican ancestry back over the border--but it's just stupid. There are millions of voters, even in the center she's trying to peel off, who will never vote for her no matter what she says. And by saying stuff like this, the net effect is mostly to piss off the Democratic base--most importantly, minority voters who already hate the Republicans for saying the same damn things.
Hillary's reelection to the Senate this November is as close to a sure thing as there is in politics, so this statement is really about 2008. And it's a play straight from Ye Olde Centrist Democrat Master Plan. But that book's been out of date since Hillary's husband strolled into history. If we run plays out of it in 2008, we're going to lose--again.
Recommended Reading: I'm late finding this, but it's still worth a look--an article from New York magazine on the conspiracy theorists developing their secret histories of September 11. Just describing them with the phrase "conspiracy theorists" makes them sound wacky, like the guys living in their mother's basements who've spent the last 40 years cooking up Kennedy assassination theories. And some of the 9/11 theorists are indeed wack, but others continue to raise plausible questions about exactly what happened that day, and continue to ask why. It's easy to get sucked into a speculative vortex if you take all of their theories seriously. However, it's easy to get out again if you remember that the same Bush Administration some theorists accuse of actively facilitating the whole thing is also the crowd of geniuses who've screwed up everything else they've touched since Inauguration Day. So that most extreme of possibilities is almost certainly wrong. But lots of other possibilities can't be ruled out.
