HillBilly for President

Journalist Carl Bernstein has written a biography of Hillary Clinton that will be published next month. Details that have been released by readers of advance copies indicate that the book doesn't paint Senator Clinton in the most favorable light. Furthermore, Bernstein seems to focus a great deal of his attention on the Clintons' tumultuous marriage, suggesting that Hillary toyed with the idea of divorce but decided against it, in the interest of their political careers. Readers are inferring from all of this that Hillary will divorce Bill in January 2009, if and/or when she is elected. Bernstein also suggests that Hillary considered running against her husband for Governor of Arkansas out of anger and spite. Ah, to be a scorned woman.

Personally, I think this biography is absolutely unnecessary and out of scope (what does it have to do with her campaign anyway?), and will just turn into anti-Democratic/anti-Clinton fodder for the GOP. Oh, how they conveniently forget about their Newt Gingriches and their Mark Foleys. The last people we need preaching to our country about family values are a bunch of right-wingers who need to be reminded that they are just as fallible as the rest of us. If not more so. But that's just my humble, Democratic opinion.

As upsetting as the whole premise of this biography is to me, what is more maddening is the Republican response thus far. One writer has gone so far as to say that "the train wreck that is the Clinton marriage is a nagging, perhaps insurmountable, political problem for her campaign." Umm... what? Do you sleep in their bed every night to know how problematic their relationship is for her campaign? I didn't think so. Why not let Hillary be the judge of that? And before you so quickly dismiss her politics, consider what your own party member Newt Gingrich (!) has said about her: "Any Republican who thinks she's going to be easy to beat has a total amnesia about the history of the Clintons... I have been very struck working with her." Huh. I'm speechless.

In closing, I leave you with this rather far-fetched comment left on a website by some anti-liberal loony: "Does it bother anyone that in the past twenty years, only two families have led this nation as President? Now the mainstream media and all those intellectually challenged liberals want to make it at least 24 and maybe 28 years? Democracy? Nope, we have already hit full stride into an oligarchy. If Hillary gets elected, is a monarchy not far behind? Or even worse, a dictatorship?" Okay, first of all, we had two perfectly good chances not to screw this up, first with Al Gore and then with John Kerry. So before you complain about "24 and maybe 28 years," rethink your own voting patterns. Secondly, if you're talking about oligarchy, monarchy, and worse, consider all that controversy in 2004 over the voting system in swing states like Ohio. If dictatorship is on its way in, it's because democracy was on its way out in the last election, when voting rights -- the most fundamental symbol of democracy -- were undermined. Then again, what do I know? I'm just an "intellectually challenged" liberal.