Hillary's Final Countdown to Downfall

Hillary, Hillary, Hillary....., girl whatever were you thinking when you decided to stand by your man?
I know your eye was always on the prize. I know your wistful dream was to sit in the Oval Office one day and make your husband cringe while deciding if you should take his health care reform bill to congress. I know how much he hurt you as a woman, and I know that revenge served cold is the best dish, but what you didn't know, what you didn't take into consideration, what you didn't see coming straight at you at ninety miles an hour was that holding onto his hand and trying to make his heart love you, and only you, would ultimately lead to the political ruin of you both one day. And that unceremonious day is now here darling. I know dear one, it hasn't turned out the way you hoped it would. As women, we all heard your genetic pain when you cried out to every single Illiad God above, "Shame on you Obama!"

If only you had listened many years back to your head sweetness, instead of your heart. If only you respected the voice inside telling you it was now or it was never going to happen. You know the voice I speak of. It warned you. It told you to run. It knew that man was only going to bring you down. How many times did he tell you it will never happen again, only to find out once more he lied. Once more he betrayed your trust. Yet if you had listened to your inner voice then and not to his, you would have stood on the proverbial podium as an independent woman running on only one platform. One agenda. One mindset. But no, you thought you were cleverer. You thought you could outsmart all the naysayers.

This shellacking you're taking is only made worse when you think about how many times you criticized Bush for throwing away all the sentiment and support our country had right after 9/11. Don't you see blind spirit? In an ironic twist of fate baby girl you did the very same thing. When there wasn't a dry eye in the house, when the entire world would have supported your decision to walk away and begin a new journey on your own merits, you insisted on staying and playing nice. On plastering up every crack in your holy matrimonial vow. Surely you missed the broader picture then, but it's become all so clear now, hasn't it? That strategy didn't win you the hearts and minds of your intended betrothed - the voters.

Forget for a moment about the Obama/Winfrey ticket blowing up in your face. In the end what's really behind your fiasco was you being seen as half of a power couple. It was a bold move by this country to speculate on what it would have been like to have a male stand-in for the position of First Lady. But it became all too too much for this country to think about what it would be like to have two presidents in the White House vying for the same attention. And then thanks to Bill shooting off racial colored remarks in a lame attempt to defend your polling loss in a specific state, he provided Obama with unconditional conditions to set up a perfect storm to deflect your imperfect campaign.

Girl, if only you had taken the time to look deep in the eyes of your audience you would have spotted the problem long before it proved to be your defeat. I know you think it's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. Hindsight is always the purveyor of bad tidings. But you forgot most powerful superwoman, one of the two most important rules we all have to live by. The first one is no one gets out of here alive. The second is no one gets to have their cake and eat it too. Enjoy your cake Hillary. It's all that's left.

The Artless Science of Communication

A friend called me yesterday with a problem most of us have probably come across in one way or another. Her problem was that she was using email to establish a rapport with a potential date. She had been using email as a social networking tool for some time now, but after catching and then losing too many potential partners she began to see the mistakes she was making as her inability to write with a true voice.

"I think I just offended another man."
"Why?" I asked with authentic concern for my friend and her frequent online dating miles.
"Well, one minute we were having a very pleasant cyber space chat, and without any sinister motive or malicious intent, he dropped me.
"What do you mean dropped?"
"He never answered me back. Innocently I responded to his last note just as seductive and sassy as I had been trying to be up until then, but in the wink of an eye he was gone.
I was left dead in the water. Nada. Call in the pallbearers. Don't send flowers. Donate money instead to my favorite charity. Sayonara. It's over. Last guy out shut off the lights.
"You poor soul! What did you write that was so derelict?
"Well, it was he who approached my court and placed the first serve, and at first it seemed the conversation was going really well. You know, our words were flying smoothly over the net, his, then mine, then his..."
"I get the picture."
"Oh, okay, well, I felt like I was in the 'zone'. Know what I mean?"
Hello? Remember me? I write for a living so yeah, I know all about being in the 'zone.' Go ahead, keep talking."
"Alright, so I think we're having this really good volley and then I whack one back at him and at first it looks high and headed straight over the net, and, and then my heart took a nose dive as I watched it drop out of bounds. "
"And then?"
"And then I just sat back quietly and tried to wait patiently but nothing. He never sent me a ball back."
"So what was in your last note that might have set off this stink bomb?
"I told you already. The flow was so going so smooth I thought we were cool. Two peas in a pod...two minds following the same flight pattern. It's hard work trying to maintain equal levels of flirtatous banter, ancient spiritual wisdom and relevant personal information. Who knows which part of I am Woman You are Man turned him immediately off."
"Yeah, I get it. Sometimes that happens in my columns as well. I think I'm expressing my thoughts articulately and brilliantly and then, then I get a comment railing against my inability to see the injustice of everything I stood up for, so, yeah, communication can be an upstream task sometimes. Hey, look what happened to Obama - he got called into the principals' office recently for possible plagiarism, and then in a recent interview his wife, Michelle, apparently she made a controversial statement about never being more proud of this country than now. And who could forget that loud and shrill backlash Hillary received the first time Bill was campaigning for the presidency when she stated flat out you'd never catch her in the kitchen baking cookies. Boy did the Betty Crocker and Pillsbury Doughboys raise their collective voices back then.
"I hear you but I think my failure to communicate speaks to a much larger problem."
"Which is?"
"I want to know how people in previous centuries communicated so well?"
"What do you mean?"
"What do you mean what do I mean? Think about it. Pharaohs and Kings and Queens got a hell of a lot done without instant message, email, fax, cell or text. How did wars ever get going if they first had to weigh all the options, and then before actually declaring war, they first had to send out a soldier of good conscious and quick steed to travel, God knows how many hundreds of miles, to bring a message of menace to another war monger authority, and don't forget, they had to allow for time loss in case their messenger was slaughtered simply for bringing the message, because back then, 'Please don't kill me, I'm only the messenger,' was the real deal. And think about the game Telephone. You know, where you whisper something in someone's ear and then they're supposed to whisper the exact same thing in someone else's ear and so on and so on. At the end it's never what it started out as. Makes you think huh?"
"About what?"
"Well, before there was stone and an etching rock, or paper and ink, what if this forlorn messenger completely forgot the damn message before he ever got to his destination, and the undereducated, possible illiterate messenger had to put the message into his own words which are never quite as eloquent as your own. I mean what would be the point of the whole exercise if that happened? And I'm sure from time to time it did. So if your mail carrier wasn't offed, he would have to then ride back hundreds of miles with an answer!! And in the meantime you're doing what? I can't stand having to wait ten, twenty minutes to get an email back from some guy. Imagine having to wait months for a reply! It absolutely boggles my imagination to take into consideration that humanity has progressed for thousands of years on the back of a horse, and I can't even keep a chat line going because of one false word. "

Why are we still on the old Double Standard Time?

Let's be real. This year's Democratic presidential race is not about issues. Registered Dems agree they have two candidates running who appear to be decent, law abiding citizens. They both seem pretty suited for the job. But one candidate is a woman and the other a man. Let's ignore for this article the part about the male candidate also being black. The gender issue alone is so layered with complexities and misogynist subtext, that to add Obama's skin color as well to the mix would just be overkill. (Which speaks more to the point I was trying to make in my previous article, If I Wrote It, You Never Would Have Believed It)

Yes America. For the first time you have a female raising her hand in Social Studies class but not to ask to go to the little girl's room. For the very first time she is asking to go to the White House as President and not as First Lady.

The right wing airwaves fill up on bird seed and water so they can pump out coo coo bird messages telling their audience to be afraid of the lady candidate, be very afraid. How can a female run a country? Her weight, clothes, cleavage, hair and make up have all become the butt of jokes made by humorless, pasty, rich white men. Rush Limbaugh in fact seriously asked his listeners to think long and hard if they could stomach watching a female president age before their very eyes! Who writes his stuff? And how does he get to maintain a gene pool of breathing people to listen to him everyday?

Talk about shock and awe!

As a member of this culture and historic time and place, I am in shock this line of non sequitur reasoning is still being bantered about - it's 2008 people! Not 1908. We've gone to the moon and back already. When is this country going to grow up and stop listening to jabbermouths that only want to distract you from using your own critical thinking cap in order to form an opinion that may differ from what's constantly spewed out of talk show hosts who couldn't handle a real job in any other industry, nevermind enlist in the military.

And I stand in awe of third world countries who have primitive domestic lifestyles and are not sophisticated in the ways of the Prada, Gucci or Louis Vuitton world, yet they're not burdened with a cultural bias or any mind numbing limitations on deciding whether or not to vote for a female to run their country on the sole basis of her governing skills and not how fat her ankles are.

If I Wrote It, You Never Would Have Believed It

When people speak about a cultural revolution they typically think of the industrial revolution, or the women's lib movement, or what occurred during the sixties when flower power uprooted the then staunch Republican mental landscape. But has anyone taken a real hard look at what is actually happening before our very glassy eyes? Because what I'm perceiving when I watch and listen to the three front runners for the Oval Office seems nothing short of a cataclysmic cultural change.

Let's begin by breaking down the principle characters vying for Amerca's top job.
We have America's first viable female presidential candidate - Hillary Clinton
We have Americas' first viable male First Lady - Bill Clinton
We have Americal's first viable black presidential candidate - Barack Obama
And at 72, We have America's oldest presidential candidate - John McCain

I mean really........if I wanted to write a novel about a political campaign that had a woman, a black man and an elderly citizen all in the same presidential race, running neck to neck, who I ask, with my pen to paper, who in their literary right mind would buy the premise, nevermind the book? I mean really!

To be considered a good writer, it's important to flesh out your characters. You know, give every character in your story a meaty backstory readers can get their teeth into. Here again, the fleshing out is so overdone no reader could be expected to actually swallow the stuff. Yet, let's remember to keep in mind, we are not talking about fictional characters. Imaginary, made up people the author has conjured up. These three individuals are very much alive and supposedly the best this country can come up with to steer our national vessel back into safe, secure waters.

Let's begin with our first female candidate's backstory. Talk about backstory! It doesn't get much better than this. What better way to learn how to navigate the best route to the White House except to be married to a former president? To all the little bright eyed girls today waiting to grow up to become president, that has got to be just as inspiring as being told to go to college to marry a doctor was back in the fifties.

Nonetheless, in spite of that misstep her character is fittingly portrayed as a brilliant mother, wife, daughter and campaign strategist. And as First Lady of her country she did demonstrate great morale character and tremendous respect for the other human species - men. Or more to the point - her husband, who we learn as the story unfolds is not only a former two time president, he was also a former two timer. Hillary has been married to this same man for as long as she can remember being married and he not only cheated on her dozens of times, he is the first man in any culture's history to be impeached for it! How horny can one man get?

However when Hillary's character is finally confronted with the truth and learns her adulterous husband has indeed cheated on her behind a closed door, in her home, on her watch, she remains at his side, steadfast loyal throughout the most vile of days, even defending him when his back is violently tarred and feathered. Some critics have said this is a strong, positive, female character who should be held up as a role model for wives whose husbands have strayed. Others have sneered and remarked that the character is such a stretch, it's more comical, almost laughable, and makes for a sad commentary on marriages in the media.

Still, on the back of that ragged and torn coattail she whips her forlorn image back into shape long enough to make a congressional name for herself that may take her all the way back to the homestead she and her husband have always loved the best. And if the Hillary character does emerge as our first female commander-in-chief, her saga will widen and grow more incredulous as we watch her husband shapes what he wants from becoming this country's first male First whatever.

Here the emotional components that lent both the husband and wife characters their political astute steel and strategy is urgently torn asunder as the gender-bender juxaposition becomes absurd and even too contrived for this fan of Bill reader's taste.

Now to Obama's backstory. His character is the least fleshed out since the author provides him with a very weak political background. His whole experience doesn't add up to enough time to even find the Senate's men's room. But is there ever a lot of character plot here.

First, we all know as Americans that religious background can essentially make or break a candidate. Here the candidate has essentially none. None!!! How can that point have missed the author's flowchart notes. Oh his stepfather occasionally entered a mosque but who in America's political climate today would want to be labeled a muslim? A black muslim no less. That leaves us assessing his biological parents. There we have a father who was an atheist and a mother who did not practice any religion. Wow! What was this author thinking? I mean talk about a huge void! How can any candidate, presidential no less, expect to get any votes if he or she doesn't have a religious base to start off with.

And if that wasn't enough to throw away a candidacy, the author bestows this character with a name that will never roll off anyone's tongue as easily as Osama Bin Laden's. I mean can it get any worse for this guy?

But here again, like all the interesting twists the author throws in for Hillary's backstory, here we have not just the first viable black candidate. The character is written in as mulatto. Which if you think about it probably makes a lot more sense. Because in terms of this country possibly voting in its first black skin president, since mulatto means half black half white, this candidacy is a really clever way of gradually desensitizing America to the possibility of having a black president.

A better way perhaps of breaking in America's prejudiced populace slowly to the idea of actually electing a full blood black man. This element of surprise makes the race card for bigots a difficult hand to play. Even our character at times isn't sure which hand to play but his black and white supporters don't seem to care so long as he doesn't utter one word that could be interrupted as racist or discriminating or disturbing. The fact that there's no substance in his speeches is a non starter when the message he articulates is so clear.

Which brings us to the third candidate. A senior citizen who has a senatorial record that started flip flopping long before he ever cried into George Bush's chest asking for his father's forgiveness like a rebellious teen.

But the author keeps pumping in extraordinary backstory items and this character certainly does not disappoint. In this chapter we are swept along on a very painful yet courageous and inspiring journey as this character is held five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Suffering horrors and mental anguish no one except other POW's could ever imagine, his story is extraordinary, plus an exceptionally difficult backstory to ignore.

But this character has one major flaw. Even though every presidential candidate wants to become president of the United States so badly they would make a pact with the devil if they thought it would do the trick. This character actually does that. For how else can a candidate who is left to die alone and bleeding at the beginning of the campaign race come back in perfect pitch to win the nomination? How else can one man live to tell the story of so many tales of courage in one lifetime?

By now I'm sure you're asking yourself how come there's no mention of which candidates are running on which ticket? Who's blue, who's red? Who's Dems or Reps? Where's all of that good ole white boy right wing left wing stuff to ruminate on?

Well believe me, that's not an oversight on my part. You'd have to ask the author of this book that question because he doesn't provide one word, sentence or paragraph to distinguish which campus, club or community these three politicians are campaigning from.

But if I had to give an opinion, personally I think the author just isn't a very good writer, so in order to make up for a lack of literary ability he just let his mind go wild and threw in everything but the kitchen sink to make a strong case for either.