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How the Demos lost the White House in Seattle | page 1, 2, 3, 4
It's not expansiveness and charisma that the man lacks; it's the total absence of subtlety, creativity, and original thought which, hopefully, should sentence him to retirement as a minor politician from a minor state. He's a Sherwood Anderson grotesque. If the media think they're atoning for their Vietnam-era sins or doing veterans a favor by giving this Strangelovian refugee a free ride, I wish they'd reconsider.
I couldn't agree more. The myopic McCain apologists in the Northeastern media are destroying their own credibility as political analysts. Hillary Clinton, whose "I intend to run" two weeks ago was clearly ambivalent in tone (her qualification was truncated mid-sentence by a mad rush of hysterical lady teachers toward her) is embarking on a trial campaign for which she has no record of concrete achievement and which seems to have no other aim than to snag a comfy post-White House residence and a face-saving reason not to live with bimbo-besotted Bill. Salon reader Steve Story asks, "Is New York in such dire intellectual straits that it must panhandle for leadership?" The people of New York (including my scores of relatives) are merely pawns in Hillary's game. Gail Sheehy's gushy new book, "Hillary's Choice," which I skimmed at the store, contains enough negatives to prove why Hillary has no business meddling in electoral politics. Sheehy confirms that Hillary was indeed the hard-liner who refused to settle with Paula Jones -- thus putting the country through a divisive year of impeachment crisis (since Lewinsky's name surfaced in depositions in the Jones case). And Sheehy claims it was Hillary who pushed the president into bombing Kosovo -- in my view an abuse of American military power. If it is also true, as rumored, that Hillary leaned on Janet Reno to order the disastrous 1993 assault at Waco, then Hillary is beyond doubt one of the most destructive personalities in American politics in the last 25 years. Sheehy's sentimental formulas can't conceal the bunkered mess of Hillary's early family life -- all of which was intuited, by the way, in my stormily controversial cover story for the March 4, 1996, New Republic, "Ice Queen, Drag Queen," where I focused on Hillary's eerie memory of a childhood snowman (her double, I argued) on her televised White House Christmas tour. Sheehy oddly fails to catch the killer competition that seems to have been going on between Hillary and her brothers and Hillary and her mother -- a dynamic that may have been operating in the two weeks Hillary played hooky from her brand-new duties as health-care czarina to station herself like a Victorian angel at her failing father's bedside. Hillary has the kind of glib, sanctimonious mind that I loathe in the p.c. professoriat. She selectively memorizes facts and recites them without regard to context. She is devoid of psychological insight into herself or others. She simplistically externalizes conflicts onto demonic "enemies." She claims compassion for the dispossessed but prefers to hobnob with the rich and famous. She's a secret snob addicted to status, a true Machiavellian who reduces everyone, even her family, into instruments of her will. The only thing that's fueling this absurd campaign is the complicity of the liberal news media. While 80 percent of the leading journalists and columnists now seem to have defected from the noisy Hillary bandwagon of early last summer, the picture editors are keeping it going, choosing the most glamorous photos and news footage of Hillary and carefully concealing how staged her events are -- how she comes and goes, for example, with bully-boy platoons of the taxpayer-funded Secret Service, who keep hecklers at bay. Salon reader J. McCann writes from Johannesburg, South Africa, about another of our presidential candidates, Pat Buchanan, whose ambiguous Scottish-Irish heritage was addressed in an earlier column:
The confusion around Irish names is forgivable because it is a very widespread ignorance. Modern Scottish identity is largely an invention of the Victorian era. The Scots originated in Ireland and settled Scotland in the fifth century, displacing the Picts. The bagpipes, whisky/whiskey and plaid cloth they promote as British inventions were brought from Ireland along with the similar names and the Gaelic language. To complicate the issue, at least one old Scottish name begins with O'. In general Irish "mc" names start with Mc, and Scottish ones with Mac, but there are exceptions. There has also been a flow of Irish migrant labor to Scotland leaving names like Connery, and Ireland has had Norman and Viking invaders as well as immigration from northern Spain and even Italy. Coupled with the recent historical arrival of formalized spelling and literacy in Ireland there is no completely sure way of establishing certain identity from just a name. Incidentally, the Gaelic language is split in two streams and is also spoken in Brittany (Little Britain), France. It has its origin in the same Indo-European language group as Latin, and the two languages have many words in common. Some sub-Alpine dialects such as Occitane are thought by some to be closer to the Latin/Gaelic proto language. Many thanks, Mr. McCann, for this complex contribution to our ongoing ethnic symposium. Cultural and linguistic transmission via population migration is a basic principle of history that I find woefully missing or distorted in the Foucault-influenced theorizing that saturates American humanities departments.
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