To regular readers of our magazine it will come as no surprise that the editorial board of La Cuadra thinks that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is as irresponsible as a junkie, as reflective as woolly mammoth filled tar pit and as dangerous as a drunken baby with a flamethrower.
We hate him. We wish him ill. Or, to be more specific, we wish him ill up to – and not an inch beyond – the point where the boys down at the U.S. Embassy would find cause to drive the 45 minutes to Antigua, illegally arrest us, chain us in the back of the black-ops Learjet and extraordinarily rend us to Guantánamo Bay.
We believe that this monkey of a President has done more to harm the United States – and the world – than any other occupant of his office heretofore elected. We believe that George W. Bush makes Alfred E. Newman look like an intellectual giant and Travis Bickle seem a man of patience and peace.
We want him gone. We want him excised. We want him flushed.
While being cynical enough to understand that things can always get worse, we sense that in 2008 ANYONE who takes the Oval Office will be a marked improvement over this Presidential piece of shit. Yet, being concerned for the welfare of the fatherland, we feel it is our duty as patriotic expatriates to announce our Presidential endorsement.
On the Republican side it appears that the primary candidates were selected for their abilities to accurately portray the men’s group meetings in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And in the end they have collectively smothered Ron Paul McMurphy with the pillow of their own self delusions and are now whooping with feigned enthusiasm as the once politically mute John McCain tosses a sink through the window and commences the final run of his political career.
To elect any of them, particularly McCain (whose foreign policy, according a recent interview with Pat Buchannan, would make “Cheney look like Gandhi”) would be a madness great enough to encourage us to take up the habit of sucking tailpipes in duct taped garages.
On the Democratic side there is still a contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and that, in our minds, is really no contest at all.
Domestic policy wise they both claim to support the Democratic platform. By their words, you couldn’t fit a sparrowfart between them. In grandly similar fashions they both claim to want to address the reasons that our bridges fall down, our levees collapse and Black folk in New Orleans get treated by the national government like, well, they’re Black folk in New Orleans.
We have hope for Barack Obama, and in the end we just don’t trust Hillary Clinton. Trusting Mrs. Clinton to remedy such great social ills, with her history of “triangulation” and her debts to corporate interests, is – we believe – ill advised. These are issues that will require upsetting the status quo, and frankly, Ms. Clinton is the status quo.
Moreover, as we note that Hillary is running on a message of returning to the Gay 90s, we recall some of the less savory aspects of the Clinton decade. We recall Bill’s first triangle, certainly not pink, when he sold out his gay and lesbian brothers and sisters with his don’t ask, don’t tell malarkey.
We remember that the Clinton years were also the era of Madeline Albright claiming that allowing 500,000 Iraqi children to die from a brutal and poorly constructed sanctions regime was “worth it.” We remember that Clinton supported NAFTA and the huge sucking sound that did, in fact, follow, leaving states like Michigan dying of thirst for a drop of industry and Mexicans flooding to bordertown sweat shops (and then illegally across the border, itself) as American subsidized corn collapsed their local markets.
Theirs was the era when media consolidation began in earnest and the Clintons’ tried to convince those of us on the left that we had to move towards the center to remain politically viable – until we’d had too damn much and bolted towards the Greens in 2000.
Theirs was the era when the Democrats lost control of 7 seats in the senate, 56 congressional seats and an assload of Democratic Governors while those of us outside their side/ angle/side bullshit were told to accept our inevitable bitchslapping by both the meaty hand of our good ole boy from Arkansas and the invisible one of the market.
But even if Hillary has learned from her husband’s administrative mistakes (lessons we sincerely doubt she’s internalized) there is one disastrous decision that is a straight out deal breaker for us.
She voted for the War in Iraq.
Surge or no surge, war in the 21st Century is not a basketball game that can be won with a heroic last minute shot by the Commander in Chief. This awful mess of a war, however it turns out, however long it lasts, however many dead bodies end up in the mass graves, however much influence we gain or lose in OPEC, has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States and the world. It was and is an illegal, immoral war based on lies and waged from Washington by chickenhawks. And those chickenhawks, to politely use a well known Bushism, haven’t “strategerized” it very well.
Barack Obama saw through the miasma of their bullshit way back in 2002 while Hillary was either foolishly trusting of the flamethrower wielding toddler from Texas, or she was sinisterly calculating her position for future political gain. Either way, there’s no going back on that. She’s out. No ifs, ands, nor riflebutts.
Also, no matter how much we at La Cuadra like being potty mouthed and tossing metaphorical elbows into the allegorical air, we would actually prefer an atmosphere of comity to settle upon the swamps of Washington, D.C. The stakes for the 21st Century are simply too high to have another 10 years of gridlock and grinding animosity. Hillary Clinton simply cannot provide this needed calm.
The former First Lady exhibits her scars from the Culture Wars like a biker trying to charm Harley sows in Sturgis. She says that this proves her mettle. Maybe, but it also attracts more of the same. The Baby Boom Generation has been fighting one another since the Yippies took the streets of Chicago and John McCain was being tortured in the Hanoi Hilton – and in 2008 the absolute center of that generational maelstrom is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
We’re under no illusions that Rush and Sean and Ayn and Bill-O won’t find a way to practice their post modern racism on a President Obama – but at least we’d get a short breather in the months after his inaugural when we all might step back and see that we’ve been given a chance to salvage the baby before it splatters to the cold, hard and distant ground with the bathwater of our nation’s experiment in self-government.
Honestly, we don’t know if Barack Obama will be able to handle the mess that he’ll face in the coming decade. But as the other candidates are sure to re-engage in a fruitless war against one another, while needlessly provoking hostile, but manageable nations and assuaging their own corporate handlers with tax breaks and giveaways, there simply is no other choice.
The Baby Boomers had their turn with the torch. Now its ours.
We wish Barack luck.
He’ll damn well need it.