by Molly Ivors
I must admit, I've been waiting with bated breath to hear what Ariel would have to say about Iowa. As une femme d'un certain age, with Hillary-hate refined to a diamond point at this juncture, she was bound to leap all over the Obama-Edwards-Clinton results with her spike heels carefully aimed at the heart of the one she clearly fears so desperately.
And she did not disappoint.
The Hillary forces at the Plymouth Church caucus in Des Moines weren’t averse to bribes.
They were passing out See’s chocolates to Richardson supporters.
And they weren’t averse to threats. “My wife told me I’d have to join them or I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight,” said Ed Truslow, a compact 68-year-old manufacturing representative. He was still wearing his Chris Dodd sticker when he lumbered over to his wife’s side. A Clinton organizer slapped a Hillary sticker over the offending Dodd sticker, and with a frantic cheeriness told him: “Hillary now, right? God bless!”
They weren’t averse to bending the rules. When they realized that they might not have enough people to get even one Hillary delegate, they sneaked out of their assigned room to Red-Rover their neighbors over, before they’d been officially counted themselves.
It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses. As one Dodd supporter said, looking for her little Dodd corner, “I’m lost in the Obamas.”
Get it? Get it? Hillary supporters are elderly, desperate females, bullying their husbands and playing children's games to worship their goddess. What Dowd doesn't realize is that she herself is a "Golden Girl" lost in a fantasy of herself as a "Girl in Gold Boots." But, desperate to be young and hip, she's now a full-scale convert to what the kids are doing. Next stop: piercing parlor!
I admit, I didn't see this coming (and how could I, given last week's outing?): the full-tilt crush she has developed on the good Senator from Illinois. All is forgiven: the sense of entitlement, the sharp-tongued wife, the "talk[ing] too much." Nope, now that he's a winner, he's a well-dressed JFK, he has "vague optimism and smooth-jazz modernity," he's a "cool, smart, elegant, reasonable, literary, witty, decent 'West Wing' sort of president who won’t bankrupt us or endanger us or co-opt our rights or put a black hood on the Constitution." Get over it, MoDo: he's not going to put on the Johnny Mathis albums and ask you to neck.
(Senator Edwards, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, has reverted to his invisibility. You'd think a candidate outspent 100 to 1, who garnered a good 5 percentage points over what he'd been polling, would be worth a notice. You'd be wrong.)
As Hillary poached voters in Iowa, she also poached Obama's lines in NH, according to Dowd. Because Obama, according to the pundittery, owns the words hope™ and change™, so anyone using those words must by definition be stealing from him. Whatever. It's retarded on the face of it, and, as noted in last night's debate by all three front-runners, any of them would provide a reasonable and positive hope™ for change™ from the current administration.
The first rule of pundittery is simple: never, ever admit collusion. Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer for her work on the Lewinsky scandal, but adherence to this rule means that the blame for the whole impeachment theater of a decade ago must be placed not on the wingnut wurlitzer or the pundits who begged to be their waterboys (and girls), but on the Clintons who, in short skirts and wearing too much makeup, asked to be attacked by it. To Hillary's quite reasonable assertion that none of the other candidates has the experience dealing with the "Repubican attack machine" as she--a claim I'd have thought would be relatively uncontroversial--Dowd replies: "What she doesn’t mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up." Huh. I guess it was all their fault all along. My mistake.
Anyone who honestly believes that the attack machine will stand down if the Democratic candidate is someone not named Clinton, or over talk of bipartisanship, or if there's a Republican in the Cabinet needs to have their head examined. The machine hasn't yet figured out how to attack Obama without revealing its racist underpinnings, but it will. They aren't even bothering to attack my candidate, but the media blackout surrounding his candidacy is attack enough. And should that fail, they've always got his hair. I worry about both Obama and Edwards, because they may have things in their lives that the press hasn't been masticating for 17 years, and that's a potential problem.
But I'm far more worried that the Obama supporters Dowd mentions in her column are Republicans who assure her that they are "ready for the red state, blue state merger. They said they didn’t want Hill and Bill back in the White House, and that John McCain was too much of a yes man for W., who had betrayed Republicans with his handling of the Iraq war and his fiscal irresponsibility."
I know it's considered strident and un-coral to point this out, but they're fucking Republicans. I don't care that they're disappointed in the sociopath they've given us for eight years. Clearly, their hatred of the Clintons burns as strong as Maureen's (which is undoubtedly why she chose them). Why do these people get to choose my candidate? It's bullshit. It may make MoDo feel better about seducing William Kristol, but these people are fucking scorched-earth lunatics who have destroyed the economy and the planet and landed us in a war in which there are no good options. Fuck them, and fuck polite bipartisanship. Maureen's new crush on the erstwhile "Prince Barack" may make her cocktail parties more pleasant, but it's not going to do one goddamn thing for ordinary Americans.
I just hope™ she remembers to change™ her underwear after the party.
UODATE: It has been pointed out to me that evoking Johnny Mathis is a "slur," presumably racial. Many apologies. I was just trying to identify what music a fellow might have to produce to get the World's Most Obnoxious Feminist Concern Troll onto the couch. For a woman of her generation, I assumed Johnny Mathis was he sine qua non. Any racial overtones were purely unintentional. Besides, Rick Astley just isn't sexy at all,.