Article: An Open Letter to Clinton Fans

Dear Clinton Fans,

Your faith in the Hillary Clinton candidacy for President is admirable. That is, we admire your pluck and your recognition of this chance for a woman to be President. But, we wonder, do you really think that Hillary Clinton is really an "on-her-own female" candidate, or isn't her candidacy really the result of a convenient marriage to a former President? How did she get to this position in politics? Did she win her spurs the hard way by getting elected to a school board, then the city council, then the state legislature, then Washington, or did she instead ride into town on the coattails of her husband. Isn't a fact that Hillary is what she is because of Bill Clinton?

Okay, your argument is that Hillary is the major factor in Bill Clinton's life and that he would not be a former President of the United States if it were not for the solid advice Hillary gave him as he scrambled up the heap in Arkansas and then inside the national Democratic Party. You can hold on to that illusion, because every First Lady could claim that, but no First Lady has ever attempted the audacious assertion that she was part of the Constitutional government.

It is impossible, in fact, for a First Lady to know anything about half the government when she does not have a security clearance. Or, are you saying that Bill Clinton, in addition to his philandering defied his own government and disclosed top secret information to his bedtime partner. If he gave such information to Hillary, then to whom else did he impart state secrets?

Okay, yes, Hillary did head up the Health Care initiative. What happened to that? Yes, we know that it did not get off the ground. Whose fault was it that it did not? Was that Bill's fault for entrusting to Hillary or was it that some big mean Republicans on the Hill beat her up and Bill could not protect her? You see, we do not understand which part of the coattails Hillary rode in on are quality experience. Certainly her imaginings of sniper fire are not real. We are suggesting that most of it—all but name recognition—are unreal, false, and illusory.

If Hillary is not an authentic bootstraps femme candidate—and clearly she is not—then what does she represent. Are all you fans centrist, DLC, triangulating, opportunists? We believe you might be slightly confused, but not all centrists. We believe you are holding on to the false illusion of Hillary's authentic female candidacy and in the back of your minds you are telling yourself that a centrist candidacy is a safe candidacy, likely to pick up the stray independent vote. But this is another illusion, a falsehood carefully disseminated by the Clinton campaign.

Hillary is constitutionally a conservative. She belongs to a fundamentalist religious group that preached a form of Christofascism in its early days. Hillary and Bill (and they are inseparable, you know—a twofer that won't stop with pillow talk). She was born and raised a conservative Republican. She became a Democrat only in the Arkansas sense which, folks, is not the mainstream of the Democratic Party by any means. The truth is that Clinton centrism is plain old down home opportunism, lusty and barren of the things that Progressives and Liberals hold dear, such as helping social programs, the rule of law, ethical behavior, promotion of liberty for all, and progress!

Hillary is not a safe centrist, she is a political opportunist and a very cheap-shot mud-slinging one at that. Independents know this and they are appalled. They are more likely to vote Green this year in disgust over the tactics and mean-spirited stuff coming out of both Clinton mouths.

But down (or up) at the level of policy is where Hill and Bill fail utterly. Despite Hillary's back-pedaling on NAFTA, Bill remains steadfastly a global free-trader. He has to because he was bought and sold by corporate interests long, long ago. If you think that Hillary's talk about revising NAFTA is pure campaign feldergarb, you are as smart as I think you are. There isn't a chance in hell of a new Clinton regime standing up to the do-nothing politics of the global free-traders. The consequences to you Clinton fans will be a deep recession that scrapes the bottom and feels like a great depression among the poor and the less fortunate in the middle classes.

You can take the road you are following, which is the road through the Pennsylvania primary to see if your candidate has the grit to mount a surge. When you think "surge" remember that Hillary was in favor of this war in Iraq even though there were many voices, including Barack Obama's, against it. She was not tricked or lied to. She made a decision to look tough for her own political purposes and it has cost 4,000 American lives and 30,000 American maimed and disabled, not to mention hundreds of thousands of destroyed lives in Iraq.

You are supporting a candidacy that is built on fallacy and coattails and illusion. You need to wake up to the reality of your situation and understand that the struggle is not to elect the first female President but to cleanse the Democratic Party of its opportunist centrists. If you do not abandon your idealistic illusions the result will be an out-of-office house-cleaning, and believe us, the Progressive and Liberal body of the party will remove the opportunists completely. You should understand now that these centrists will easily become the liberal wing of the Republican Party as it was for most of the twentieth century. So, are you really Republicans or do you have the good reflexes of the real Democratic Party? Tell Hillary. We will hear it.

Sincerely,

JB