AMERICAN POLITICS:
HILLARY CLINTON DOES HER "WEEPING MADONNA" IMITATION:
The score in the US Democratic primaries now stands at 2 and 2, with Clinton having won in New Hampshire and Nevada and Obama having won in Iowa and South Carolina. Personally I'm cheering for Obama. Not that anybody should expect the American Empire to cease being the American Empire, no matter who is in the White House. The policies will be very much the same no matter who occupies the Presidency, with the caveat that almost all of the present candidates, both Republican and Democratic, would lack the self-destructive talents of the present Administration, with their desire to sink the USA deeper and deeper into its imperial decline. Maybe that isn't such a bad thing, though Molly lacks the "lefty faith" that the powers that come to replace the USA in the rest of this century will be any more benign than the USA has been. They'll actually probably be far worse.
All that being said everything I know about Hillary Clinton leads me to a reactive and visceral dislike of someone who is far too obviously a crook and a shyster. Obama, on the other hand, reminds me of "Denis the Menace's father". I kid you not. He is rather cartoonish in his clean cut presentation, and though I have no doubt that he has many skeletons in his closet I am unaware of them. He comes across as "cute and sincere", and it is no wonder that so many youthful voters flock to him. Clinton, on the other hand looks very much like she should be President of the Feminist Caucus of the Used Car Dealers of America. What is much more important,however, is that-even if it leads to no perceptible policy change whatsoever on the part of the US government- Obama's election would have a very salutary effect on the American left. It would force them to finally grow up out of their obsession with ethnicity and to rethink all the politically correct cliches that they spout instead of proposing real solutions for America today. As the bard says, "that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished for".
Well back to Hillary. The pundits presume that she reversed the poll trends in New Hampshire by doing a weepy bit while meeting with a select group of voters in that state. Conventional wisdom says that this broke some sort of spell that had lead people to conclude that she had all the emotional resources of a block of concrete (not a bad assumption in Molly's view), and that, in particular, women voters in that state voted for her out of sympathy. Maybe out of stupidity, particularly as Hillary waited until the opportune moment to get misty eyed over how much she loved America- always a crowd pleaser in the USA.
But like all too many reports of weeping statues of the Virgin Mary there is more than slight room for doubt about the reality behind the carefully orchestrated moment. The old (almost paleolithic) feminist icon Germaine Greer has expressed her doubts in an article penned for the British newspaper 'The Guardian'. The article titled 'For Crying Out Loud' is an extended exploration on the use of crying as a technique of power. Her article is both entertaining and amusing, and Molly recommends it highly. It begins with the following words:
"Watching Hillary Clinton begin to get teary-eyed is enough to make me give up shedding tears altogether. The currency, you might say, has become devalued....Hillary's feeble display of emotion, while answering questions from voters in a cafe in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Monday, is supposed to have done her campaign a world of good. If it has, it's because people have wished a tear into her stony reptilian eye, not because there actually was one....Hillary's clipped diction did not falter; all she had to do was take the steel edge off her voice and our imaginations did the rest...."
Read the full article at the Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections08/hillaryclinton/story/0,,2238249,00.html . A great read if Molly says so, and she does. So here is Molly's vote for Obama instead, not because he is so great, but because his election would finally force the American left (and all they influence in their own imperialist version of exporting Hollywood culture across the rest of the world) to become a real left and not a miasma of identity politics. Go Barack go !
