Hillary Clinton is the Democratic George W. Bush...

She can raise money. She can say the right thing to stoke the base...but when it comes down to it, the woman thinks of three things before she thinks about anything else:

1. How will this help me?
2. How will this help me?
3. How will this help me?

And her handlers think:

1. How will this help Hillary?
2. How will this help Hillary?
3. How will this help Hillary?

Bush got himself into a tragedy of his own design, not self-aware enough to be tragic himself, he made tragedy - because he can't answer the three questions with any kind of cohesive logic and so he allowed others to create the logic for him who then used that "logic" to pursue their own ends. But make no mistake, every move was choreographed and presented in a way to make George W. Bush feel that his interests were being served. Hillary at the very least, can create her own ends, but I am not excited by what ends she will pursue. Nothing will change on K Street, and those are the people who most need a one way ticket back to the festering hole they crawled out from - whether it be Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Messiah College.

She can look as confident as she wants and she can play politics. Great. So what? We've seen the end results of that Rovian game in spades. And it's not pretty, and it kills people. When the chips are down, she has failed everytime to accomplish anything of substance and I don't want her to lead my country. She's in bed with everybody I don't want to sleep with and her resorting to little nuggets of posturing and doubling back are the kind of flip-flopping I'm agaist. There is no mea culpa in her discussion of Iraq, there is no stepping up and flat out saying I did something out of politics rather than principle and that was wrong. While that wouldn't lead me to vote for her, it might make me consider her in the larger election when I have to choose between her, the crypto-fascist insane person the Republicans run and whoever the Libertarian is. She doesn't see her vote or that idea of politics before principle as wrong.

Sometimes it might not be so bad - you build a bridge where they don't need a bridge say...but you get something out of it - maybe your own bridge - maybe a promise to vote on your health care package - who knows, ok it's waste, but waste is not always evil...but when it's about the lives of literally millions, it is more than wrong. More than evil even.

It's unforgiveable.

And she has done nothing to suggest that it is an isolated incident, while nothing about her suggests that she represents meaningful change. She's Bush-lite with a law degree rather than a should-be-outlawed M.B.A.

She comes from the center rather than the right. And while those two things about her sadly represent real and measurable improvement, it represents much less than what we can find or what we need from out of these presidential candidates.

I hate the Republicans, but I refuse to support anybody who is as poor a candidate as she is. And the idea that she's won a debate simply by looking like something is stupid. And the media is moronicaly continuing with the fiction that appearance should be rated with more weight than substance.

Is this the media we deserve?

And if it is...what have we done to deserve it?

Ask around in Baghdad, I suppose...