Joe I am sure that the press secretary’s job in a Clinton administration is yours for the asking.I am still a little dizzy from the spin in your piece.Everybody who says anything negative about someone else from her campaign is acting on their own.Really important people who know how the game is played made unbelievable inflamatory statements on their own.Only Mark Penn in this sequence of statements is impossible to spin as a rogue.I am embarasses for you.As a reporter were you chuckiling to yourself as you were writing this bullshit that the morons out there will believe anything.Hillary is declining in the polls just as Howard Dean did people are now starting to look and make real voting decisions and what they are seeing they do not like.Remember this Joe if Hillary does not get elected what are you going to do to get your credibility back.

Dear #121441 by i,Q,

Like most Hillary Haters you try and smear anyone that says anything that is not a rabid attack on her or her campaign. Even a pinhead should be able to see that a stupid suggestion that Joe Conason is Chelsea Clinton, even as a dumb joke, is beyond silliness and heading for idiocy. Perhaps the name should be No i,Q? Joe Conason is a man of integrity, wit, and intellect. Expecting someone with no I.Q. to recognize that is foolish of me. Sorry I mentioned it.

Cyrena,
I have gone from deriding Hillary because of her equivocating stand on Iraq to softening my stance against her after most electable Democrats have wimped on Iraq (putting your candidancy ahead of wasting human life and money that could be spent to better humankind tends to set me off).

I realize her attempts to appear rightest on many issues, especially the war, being a woman and believing that moderates will support a woman who’s aggressive on war.

I am very troubled about her electability when she doesn’t poll well even against the fraud, Rudy.

Add to that electability problem, the additional disadvantage of getting old—with our double standards, it matters for a woman more than a man. The gelatinous gasbag, blob Limbaugh pointed that out with his “crow-feet” reference.

#121523 by ocjim

Ocjim,

A thanks for your excellent observations, if I can just add a comment here and there.

• In the final analysis, I really can’t determine if Hillary is more ethically challenged than the other Democrats in the presidential race.
On this, if we really did have time or space for a thorough consideration of ethics in respect to them all, I’d have to say that she pretty much IS more ethically challenged than nearly all of the other dems running. I don’t know a lot about Richards, so I’d leave him out. From what I do know, he’s not. So yeah, I think she is, but we also have to consider what is ethical here. I’m going by what I think are the basic standards, but admittedly, it’s gets tricky.

• Unfortunately, running for high office carries the same corrupting influence for all candidates. As Conason points out, Clinton has had detractors dating back before the Clinton White House days, who piled money and effort to the task of destroying Bill.

On this, I agree 100%. I had the ‘concern’ for Obama as a new-comer to the inherent nastiness of US politics, that he would come under the same corrupting influence, because I don’t believe he had it to begin with. And, I still don’t believe him to be ‘ethically challenged’ in the least. But, still, the impact of the ruthlessness of it all, can clearly have it’s affects on any winners. This is why I believe that those who fail to succumb to it, are generally left on the sidelines, (ie, Dennis Kucinich). It’s also why we’ve not had a really decent president since..well, that becomes debatable, and I didn’t plan to go there.
Still, my point is that those best suited for the job rarely apply. On the rare occasions that they do, they’re generally run out of dodge by the traditional pack of hounds.

And, that points to the other main point that you make here. There is an entire brigade that has hated Hillary from day one, LONG BEFORE she ever even really stepped into the ring so to speak. At least IMHO, because I’ve listened to enough of them over the past 15 or so years. They hated her when her husband was first campaigning, which makes little sense to me. At that point, she’d done nothing to deserve the wrath, (at least not anything known to the general public) and so it was just the mindlessness of those who follow the ideology of those they hang out with. They haven’t a clue to why they ‘hate’ her, and those types never cease to piss me off, just for being stupid.

Personally, I never had anything much against her as first lady, (she did a few sort of less than honorable things, as well as some good work) and since I’m not a New Yorker, there’s been no reason for me to pay a whole lot of attention since she left the WH, until of course her tenure in the Senate materialized.

NOW, her record of the past 4 or so years, is increasingly dismal, and there are some things from the past that sort of haunt her as well. (like her association with the law firm that bailed GW out of his failed Harken business..one of his many failures) Still, your point is that there are enough that have always hated her, regardless of sound reasoning.

Most importantly now of course, is that she’s proven to be nothing more than a replacement war monger for what we’ve got now. Same basic plans for war and special interest control. Cheney thinks, if it has to be ANY of them, let it be her.

• Still many of her enemies want her to run, thinking she can be more readily beaten than others like Edwards.

Ah, this is true, but there’s the even more cynical side of it. Of all the Dems running, Hillary is far more acceptable to them then any of the others, in maintaining their current agenda. If Hillary makes it, it WILL BE with Rethug support. I’m sure of it. That’s the reality of just how corrupt they are. Any other dem candidate is not going to be NEARLY as closely aligned with rethug policy as she.

Maybe she’s not quite as ethically challenged as he, but close enough.

In the final analysis, I really can’t determine if Hillary is more ethically challenged than the other Democrats in the presidential race.

Unfortunately, running for high office carries the same corrupting influence for all candidates. As Conason points out, Clinton has had detractors dating back before the Clinton White House days, who piled money and effort to the task of destroying Bill.

Many would like to declare her dead politically.

Still many of her enemies want her to run, thinking she can be more readily beaten than others like Edwards.

My main concern is rebuffing the efforts of any of the sorry candidates under the Republican banner, all of which seem to be running for dictator rather than president.

Their rabid defense of the war, torture, and restricting rights scares me almost as much as the incompetent we have in the White House.

It’s a hell of a lot easier for journalists, and especially columnists, to write about horse races and speculate on the problems of a campaign than to get to the heart of the issues, which might take some complex thinking. The Clinton camp is far from being in trouble and is as well managed as it has been from day one. Sometimes I think conservative columnists for papers, say the Washington Times or some such, gets up in the morning, and already bored from beating his dog, cheating on his wife and digging through his teenage daughter’s diary for gossip, decides, “Hey, I’ll rip Hillary a new one today and then starting tomorrow I will include Obama’s middle name in every column I write.” At the end of the day the guy still gets paid and still goes home to beat his dog.

http://13martyrs.blogspot.com/

What is difficult to imagine is how Sheehan was not executing a strategy conceived of by a hemorrhaging and panic stricken Clinton camp. Especially in conjunction with Billy Boy’s tasteless and unflattering appearance on Charlie Rose, and Obama’s lead in Iowa, team HillaryoUS is looking desperate. Even if some of these gaffes are genuine faux pas, the campaign looks embarrassingly disorganized at best. i’ll give you Kerrey though. He was just jumping on the bandwagon and probably thought he would do his part to toss another one on the question-of-electability-bonfire.

Another tell is the complete change of character in Hillary. She has forgotten all of the grooming she had been so carefully cultivating: the improved make-up to minimize the tired sagging eyelids, peeling off the permanent scowl in favor of a ubiquitous cheeky smile, the softening of the shrill tone of voice, learning how to laugh. Up until Obama and Edwards took off the gloves in October (and let’s not forget that she didn’t do herself any favors in the Couric interview with the whole issue of inevitability—no one likes an egotist), Hillary was the portrait of composure and pleasant graciousness. Since then, she has returned to looking frumpy-faced, tired, and in almost every interview she repeatedly unleashes her shrilly inflected ”I did thises” and ”My plan woulds” with all the grace of a snubbed homecoming also-ran losing to Ugly Betty—and she has grown down right argumentative with interviewers. The indignity is almost palpable.

The latest news cycle is dominated by “journalists” chastising other journalists claiming Hillary is scrutinized far more than the other candidates. In the case of this new wave of sympathy for the devil, i guess she gets what her media magnate supporters pay for, but it is her air of entitlement and unconventional long-distance power-couple marriage to the former president, and support for Bush’s sabre-rattling toward Iran, and associations with questionable campaign donors, and failure to change health care as first lady, and her stubborn secrecy relating to the white house documents which chronicle a good deal of the experience she claims as qualification to be President, not to mention having been largely vilified in the nineties by the Gingrich-Limbaugh set which may be contributing factors in her wide spread scrutiny by the press.

Team HillaryoUS knows that they’re in trouble if they can’t prevent Obama from taking Iowa, and they know they’re in trouble because the real damage of the October debate wasn’t simply a bad debate performance, but that Hillary exposed herself as a double-talking wants-her-cake-and-eat-it-too candidate who refuses to take a stand on hard issues. For the 70% of us who are tired of the status quo and want real change, that just doesn’t fly.

Does anyone else feel like fanboy Joe Conason might in fact be Chelsea writing under a pseudonym? Or maybe after taking one for the team, Sheehan’s found his new job description.

Neither should she be over estimated. I noticed that you failed to mention, something that has largely been squashed by corporate media, namely that George Bush senior would become a messenger of hope, in any new Clinton adminstration, undoing all the wrongs of his son, travelling around the world as a special envoy, to spruce up America’s image around the world.

Just like the American auto industry, changing the design -the outside of cars, while the inside remains the same old sick out of date thing.

A truely Brilliant idea, except for one thing, they forget to mention it to Papa Bush.

Once again, rather than focus on the issues, the media would rather focus on the polls only. Because, the truth is too hot to handle right now.

One thing is true for certain, Hillary feels entitled to the Job, and I think her husband does too.