Some people have asked me why I seem to take such great delight in the good old days of American presidential dirty tricks--bagmen delivering satchels full of dough in the 1880s, Al Smith being roundly dismissed as a druken papist, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon bugging their opponents campaigns.
I guess it's because these seem like real, old-fashioned, in-your-face-red-blooded-American dirty tricks, as opposed to the game of "gotcha" we've been playing lately. The whole brouhaha about Hillary's comments in South Dakota is the straw that finally broke this camel's back. To claim that she actually meant to refer to the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a way of saying that Barack Obama might be assassinated is simply idiotic and the people who believe it are either idiots or they have a political agenda. The report first came through the New York Post, which wrote that Hillary said ‘Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June,’ making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama.”
This is not the comparison she was making. She was simply referencing--as she has done before, and as others (including myself) have done before--that certain primaries have run well into the summer, including that of 1968. She was not talking about the possibility that Barack Obama might be assassinated. My irritation with people who believe this goes back to the Barack Obama supporters who have "pre-martyred" him, walking around speaking in hushed tones abut the possibility that he might be killed. This tactic makes it seems as if Obama is some holy figure, rather that the very flawed and inexperienced, although inspirational, candidate he is.
This entire Democratic primary began with Hillary and her husband being considered the smartest politicians in the universe. Now we are led to believe they are the dumbest. Somewhere in between lies the truth. In the meantime, I'll take a good bagman anytime....
Sunday, May 25, 2008
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