the otherwhirled

Those few of you remaining around the otherwhirled have probably long since realized that atop a recent move and certain personal/family things going on right now (not to mention new full-time employment), frequent blogging on the various inanities we humans refer to as “politics” and “religion” has somewhat lost its shine.

That shine was just starting to get polished up a bit (I’ve even got four drafts going right now!), and then Hillary Clinton goes and drops this turd on us:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Now, with many years of soccer refereeing experience and over two decades’ work in quality assurance, I long ago learned how not to lose my cool even when somebody really pissed me off. I don’t think for a moment that Hillary Clinton is so stupid that she was inferring that gee, golly wouldn’t it be candy if somebuddy happened to off that other democratic senator who happens to be running for president right now? I also don’t think she in any way meant it as a slight to the Kennedy family, either.

In fact, I dare say that the assassination of Robert F Kennedy came to mind so readily because of Ted Kennedy’s recent hospitalization and unfortunate diagnosis, so I don’t fault her for thinking of RFK at all, really.

What bugs me is that a candidate for president can let such carelessness out in public, unfiltered. We’ve come to expect that kind of shit from the current buffoon occupying the Oval Office. She’s running on a campaign that purports to do better than that, but she manages to sound at least something approaching the same level of daftness.

Now, Hillary-lovers, don’t go get all up in a huff because I said “she”. It’s the proper pronoun to use for a female. That doesn’t mean I’m bashing Hillary because she’s female. It means this little episode simply underscores her basic unpreparedness for the tasks ahead of her. This is pitiable. This is right up there with “Nelson Mandela is dead,” and for someone campaigning for the presidency, that shouldn’t be the type of company one would want to keep.

But, of course, that’s not the end of it. Not satisfied with equating her own acumen with that of the man she would hope to replace, she took that original turd and just threw up all over it:

“I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation - and in particular the Kennedy family - was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever.”

Read that carefully. Now, read it again. Is Hillary sorry for what she said? No, in the grandest tradition of her Republican counterparts, Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t about to admit that she fucked up. No, instead she regrets that some people might have been offended by what she said.

Not. Even. Brave. Enough. To say. “I Fucked Up.”

Leadership. That’s what this country needs. Leadership. Sometimes a good leader has to be willing to say, “I fucked up. Don’t be like me in that way.”

But we don’t see that from Hillary Clinton.

To those Hillary supporters reading this blog, you have my heart-felt condolences, and I urge you once again to reconsider the logic that breasts make a candidate worthwhile. They don’t. Professionalism and leadership are a significant portion of what does, however, and your candidate appears to equate professionalism with Bushism and leadership with avoidance.

There’s only one real candidate left for president of these United States, and it’s not Ralph bow-to-my-irrelevant-and-sorely-misplaced-hubris Nader.

Senator Clinton, there is exactly one set of options to you, and they can be expressed quite succinctly: “Shut up and get out.”

Edit: hah. It appears that great minds think alike, or at least in my case, that my feeble little mind might occasionally spark upon something that a great mind already thought of. I did not have the pleasure of viewing or reading Keith Olbermann’s piece on this same issue earlier tonight when I wrote what I wrote above.