17th and Irving

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Where logic "doesn't have no relevance"...

How is she pandering and slobbering today?

a) going on about elites
b) pretending she understands long commutes and pain of gas prices
c) not putting in her lot with so-called "experts"
d) talking about the little people she's meeting
e) all of the above

If you've guessed (e) then you've really got the measure of perhaps the most depressing and dispiriting descent into political opportunism since, oh, 2004.

From the Times:

This morning, George Stephanopoulos began his televised interview with Senator Hillary Clinton by asking if she could name a single economist who supports her plan for a gas tax suspension.

She did not. “I’m not going to put in my lot with economists,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” program. A few moments later, she added, “Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantages the vast majority of Americans.”

Throughout the exchange, Mrs. Clinton argued that she trusted her own eyes and ears instead. “This gas tax issue to me is very real because I have been meeting people across Indiana and North Carolina who drive for a living, who commute long distances, who would save money,” she said.

Senator Barack Obama has derided the gas-tax suspension as a gimmick that would save consumers little and cost thousands of jobs, and Kara Glennon, a member of the audience at a town-hall meeting, seemed to agree. Gas prices are “not academic” for her, she told Mrs. Clinton, because she makes less than $25,000 a year—and then she accused Mrs. Clinton of pandering. “Call me crazy, but I listen to economists because I think I know what they studied,” she said.

However, in an interview afterward, Mark Moorman, another audience member and a firefighter, said he shared Mrs. Clinton’s mistrust of experts. Political candidates cite economists but they “never say anybody’s name, or where the study came from,” he said. “So as far as me, it doesn’t have no relevance.”


Hillary Clinton, caring about the little people, because you know, the Clintons have always cared about the little people. I mean she was on the board at Wal-Mart, and everybody knows how well Wal-Mart has cared for its employees and in what high esteem they hold them. Hell, Sam Walton, that little person of little people, went so far as to call her "a great friend of ours." And by "ours" of course he meant little people everywhere, not those big nasty elites. And by elites, of course I'm not talking about somebody worth $109 million dollars or the dozens of billions of dollars the Waltons are worth. I'm talking about you and me, so Hillary, I believe you, and I invite you to come to my school and tell my students to their faces why as Senator you have put absolutely no pressure on the state of New York to make sure that our school gets just as much money per student as the schools in Great Neck and Chautauqua and then you can tell them about how you had no problem authorizing the insane president of the United States to use these same little people to go to Iraq seven or eight times each, some of them, to fight a war for the other little people like Haliburton and the various fellows of the Carlyle Fund. Maybe we can talk about what you did on your time at Wal-Mart to help the workers unionize or get higher pay or greater access to health care - after all, health care is so important to you and the little people are so important to you, I'm sure you have all kinds of things you can say. Or you can prattle on about the elites some more and we can all wonder at the inanity of this campaign being run in the middle of a moment when the only important things are the things we are not talking anything about.

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