Columns 2007

Who really is the communist?

I think of it as the Hillary dilemma.  Of all the people of either party running for president right now, she is probably the most qualified and the one with the most common sense and chutzpah needed to extricate us from the misery our current administration seems to revel in.  She’s intelligent, experienced and, if she was a man, would probably be sailing towards the Democratic nomination while people asked, “Obama who?”

But this is Hillary Clinton and she comes with lots and lots of baggage.  The question is, of course, whether this baggage will make the slightest bit of difference if she’s elected president.  So far, I’ve not seen a lot of good arguments that it will. 

The biggest baggage seems to be her marriage. I look at it and think that Christian conservatives should be singing her praises. She stuck by her man, fought to make her marriage work, disdained the idea of divorce and, as far as I can tell, did what every Christian woman is supposed to do, got counseling and prayed and raised her child in a two parent home where both parents were the original ones. How retro of her!

But I must admit that I still have doubts about her; doubts generated by the fact that she is a bit too naked in her lust for power. She just seems to want it too much. And then, just when I’ve accepted that I’ll never know how I really feel until I actually get in the voting booth, I hear about a t-shirt that appeared at a local football game recently. The t-shirt apparently had the words, “Defeat communism again”, with a picture of Hillary in a circle with a red slash across it.  The friend who saw the t-shirt said she’s also been on the fence about Hillary but every time she sees something like this, she finds herself falling a little faster off the fence and straight into Hillary’s arms.

Here’s what I actually find so funny about that t-shirt.  Our current administration eavesdrops on American citizens pretty much at will.  Any disagreement with the current regime results in your patriotism being called into question and causes them to suggest that what you advocate is treason. The current administration has made a joke of some of our most time honored and basic legal safeguards such as habeas corpus. They have split hairs over the definition of torture, kept Americans in prison based on nothing more than their say so and put all our fighting men and women at risk if captured because of their cavalier attitude towards the Geneva Convention. But somehow, Hillary Clinton is the one who supposedly represents communism. Let’s see if we can come up with some regimes in recent memory that abrogated citizens’ rights, snooped on their conversations based on purported national security needs and imprisoned their populace based on accusations they neither needed to reveal or prove.  Hmmm, can you say Soviet Union?  Can you say China?  Can you say Cuba?

Apparently the brains making these t-shirts are not big enough to grasp the difference between socialism and communism. And I’m guessing what they really meant was socialism since Hillary’s been hung with this tag for, among other things, thinking everyone should have health care available to them.  Our current First Decider, on the other hand, plans to veto a plan to provide health care to more poor children because it will lead, he claims, to socialized medicine. He stated clearly that he felt that health care decisions needed to be made between a doctor and a patient and the government should stay out of it. He apparently doesn’t get that if you don’t have health care insurance, you don’t have a doctor.  Aside from the meanness of denying children a chance at a healthy childhood, the man isn’t even bright enough to come up with a good argument against it.

Any candidates with any level of intelligence, quickness and wit will be a welcomed change to the narrow focused, damn the torpedoes – full speed ahead, crowd that currently occupies the highest seats of government in this land.  Compared to them, Hillary starts to look really good.  Heck, compared to them, Dennis Kucinich starts to look really good. And when it comes time to vote, I’m probably going to vote for someone who I trust will actually act in a way that honors our democracy and the principles upon which it was founded, not someone who parrots the words, wraps themselves in a flag and denigrates the integrity and patriotism of anyone who questions them.

The current administration in Washington has brought us as close to communism as I want to get.  Let’s take back America.