This is not really a bad post about Hillary

You would think that the story out of yesterday’s primary is that so many Democrats still feel so strongly about Hillary. You’d think journalists would look at the results of the Pennsylvania primary and say to themselves “Why does Clinton inspire such loyalty? I’ve got to get to the bottom of this!”

But alas, you would not only be wrong, you’d be a creature from some alien world, maybe New Zealand, where journalists do things like try to find out facts, instead of whine about how things aren’t turning out the way they liked, or the way they predicted they would.

By the way, is it just me, or has this Democratic primary started to feel like a game of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots?

Remember how fucking boring that game was? I mean, what’s the fun of knocking someone’s block off, if the voters in Pennsylvania can press it right back on again?

Look, as much as I would like this contest to be over, so the winner can start concentrating on convincing the American public of McCain’s gigantic asshattery, it’s not over. And Clinton’s got a right to run whatever kind of campaign she thinks will get her the win, and that’s exactly what she’s doing. And clearly, there are large numbers of Pennsylvania blue-collar voters who don’t hate the game, they hate the playah. They don’t want to see any rules rewritten, they just want to fucking win, because they’ve been losing for a long-ass time. In other words, they are way past feeling such a thing as hope, and even if they weren’t, hope is sure as hell not going to come in the form of a black man with a strange name whose minister wears a dashiki.

One might argue, by the way, that those voters, while Democrats on paper, are very likely to vote for McCain in the fall anyway, even if Clinton does win the primary. Because a large majority of them are political meat-heads who vote Guns & God and cannot draw an inference from the $177 million per day that we are spending in Iraq, and the infrastructure of our country crumbling all around them.

Or, in other words, the Republican base.

One trend I can definitely do without, however, is the endless spin on whether women who favor Obama over Clinton are post-feminist, anti-feminist, or simply voting against her because she reminds them of their mother. And click on that link if you don’t fucking believe me that that theory has been floated, and you know – goddammit but I wish I’d thought of that theory! Because I could definitely squeeze a lucrative book deal out of a premise as stupid and as insulting to women as that one is.

But I going to act as unlike an American journalist as I can for a moment, and speak only for myself: I think either candidate would make a fine president. And a word to a few of you gals who have been hectoring me about preferring Obama: if being a feminist requires me to vote for a woman, then we’d all be looking back in horror at the Elizabeth Dole presidency right about now.

I prefer Obama over Clinton because I think Clinton too often votes on the side of political expediency. It’s a simple as that. Clinton claims that she was tricked into voting for the Iraq war, but I’m not buying it. I remember that there were lots of people questioning the intel on WMD, and lots of people questioning the wisdom of giving that all-hat-no-cattle douchebag the power to wage war without further consent of the Congress. Look, if I was smart enough to know not to vote for that war, then Clinton was too, and yet she did it. What constituted the difference between her and me on that issue?

The difference is, I don’t have to run for reelection. I’m just an asshole with a blog.

And being a mere mortal, I enjoy infinite freedom to not only use my brain to analyze the information I am given, but to use my heart too, to guide me. My heart told me that Bush was a no-good fucking liar with an avarice-covered lump of coal where his soul should be, no matter what all those fucking charts and aerial photos and vials of powder oh-so-earnestly held aloft by formerly well-intentioned Secretaries of State said.

And I believe, in this heart of mine, that Hillary knew it was all bullshit as well. But she voted otherwise.

She did it, I think, because the political wisdom at the time said that to vote against the war would've been career suicide. Political wisdom was plumb wrong, as it turned out. She should’ve listened to her heart, perhaps, if I can be so corny as to suggest that such things are even possible anymore.

I do think she has a heart. I know she can cry tears for herself and for all the genuinely unfair things people have said about her. Whether she can still put that heart to use for our collective good, is still out for the vote.

But I hope she proves me wrong. I really do. You don’t know how much.