I didn’t think the crying was faked. If it was, she wouldn’t have stumbled and made that strange comment: "You know, I have so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards." It was a slip. She has had so many opportunities from us. And we’re not going to fall backward; she will.
I try and hide my hatred for the Clintons. It turns some people off in my blue state (N.Y.), and I have bigger fish to fry. But now and then I have to trot it out, especially now that Hillary has announced her surge strategy for the nomination…
She said that the voters were finally seeing who she is the other day. That’s weird. She’s been in our public life for over 16 years now, and we don’t know who she is. It says something. She’s afraid to show us who she really is, or, beneath the calculating shapeshifter, she doesn’t have much of an inner life. It’s like we finally figured Nixon out in ’74, after 20 years.
The simple reason I can’t vote for her is because I don’t trust her. I can’t believe a thing she says. Not since she said on "60 Minutes," during the Gennifer Flowers business, in 1992, "If you don’t like the answer, then don’t vote for us," about her private life. I loved her for that, it was real. Baking cookies was real too. The Travel Office was real. And people never have liked the real Hillary. She’s an operator. So she tried to hide that and come up with a persona. But there’s nothing else there. No values, no political convictions, no vision. Politically, she’s an establishment centrist, she might as well be Rockefeller. Stem cells and abortion–she’s right on them.
She’s a liar. When I asked my friend Dan Swanson why he hated the Clintons today, he said, "Utter and complete insincerity. Mendacity of Brobdingnagian proportions. It took a while for me to figure it out. The hatred took years." Mendacity. The most revealing moments for me in the Hillary story are all the calls she made the night that Vince Foster died. To Maggie Williams and Bernard Nussbaum, before someone rifled Foster’s office. I think someone wanted Hillary’s divorce file, or Travel Office stuff. Who knows. She was on it that night, with endless phone calls, and she’ll never tell us the truth about it. Just as she’ll never tell us the truth about the $100,000 she made in commodities trading. Pure graft. Run her in the general and people will bring it all up again.
Has she been cleaner and more straightforward the last 6 years? Yes. But it’s because she’s struggling to overcome her negatives. Never forget what these people did to the White House. They sold the Lincoln Bedroom to their meritocratic big-donor friends, and they looted the place when they left. They pardoned a bunch of corrupt people at the last minute. When Hillary clucks that we have to get rid of the "two oil men" in the White House, it’s a blue-state neolib delusion. Those two oil men didn’t get us into the Iraq disaster on their own, Hillary did it too, and she did it for the Israel lobby, which is her financial base; and when she says she’ll take on the lobbyists, she won’t take them on.
As my mother constantly reminds me, I helped get Bush in by supporting Nader in ’00 (though I was in New York, which Gore won handily). I thought, What could go so wrong, and boy was I wrong, huh. I feel bad about that, though I also wonder what Big Al Gore would have done. The reason I voted for Nader is that Gore had the Clinton stink on him, and he wouldn’t distance himself enough for me. I wanted to trust my president. That’s one thing about George Bush. He’s stupid and he’s stubborn, and he’s made a gargantuan error in the Middle East, with Hillary supporting it all the way, while I was demonstrating against it; but I know who he is. With her I haven’t got a clue. All she believes in is herself. Her opportunities. Nominate her, and it will happen again: a lot of us will sit on our hands or go to a third party candidate, or hold our noses for McCain. Don’t you want to get past all that bad feeling? Let’s nominate someone we can believe in…
