Much Ado About Nothing

There were three big developments this week, which I will rank in order of patheticness.

1) The Plagiarism Non-Issue: As Hillary’s campaign began its hopeful final downward spiral, she comes out with the charge that Obama has plagiarized speeches and sayings from our own Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick. The similarities between the two candidates are unmistakable. Since Patrick doesn’t care, it’s a dead issue. And it’s tough for Clinton to make this claim when she co-opted the change mantra and the “Yes we Can!” cry from Obama, not to mention the race card from Karl Rove.

I’ll delve into the parallels between Obama and Patrick if Hillary finally goes down, because there are similarities. Patrick’s motto was “Together We Can.” In the best anti-sign defacing I’ve ever seen, I saw one of his signs read, “Together We Can…What?” Man cannot run by hope alone.

2) McCain vs. NY Times: A paper that had finally started to return to respectability gets knocked down yet again with prominent notion to a complete non-story. It’s hardly a news flash that most lobbyists provide invaluable knowledge, support and, yes, donations to politicians to advance their agendas. Private citizens do the same thing. Campaign donations do not buy votes. That would be bribery, and you can count the number of federal politicians convicted of bribery during the last eight years on one hand with fingers to spare. The money buys access, which is certainly not the way it should be but unfortunately is the way it is. But this is all perfectly legal. For all of McCain’s talk against “special interests,” he uses special interests as much as any other state or federal politicians, especially with his work on the Armed Services, Commerce and Indian Affairs committees.

I truly have no idea what the Times was trying to accomplish with this story, and I can’t believe an editor like Bill Keller let it run unless he let his personal feelings trump his journalistic integrity. Were they trying to embarrass McCain, who had no reason to be embarrassed for anything? Were they trying to catch him in a sexual scandal, when there was zero evidence of one? It has done one thing – united more conservatives behind him who used the Times story as a rallying cry. Donations to McCain’s campaign exploded after it ran. And here's a huge overview of what the blogosphere said.

3) Hillary Goes Wild!: Watching Hillary pretend to be angry because her opponent had the nerve – the nerve, I say! – to criticize her health care strategy was humorous and horrific at the same time. It was like watching a professional wrestler trying to intimidate a fake opponent before they go into a ring for a beating everyone knows is coming to them. When this sad spectacle is hopefully over soon, Hillary will go down as a warning to any future candidate that thinks they can easily win by flip flopping to poll results, and sycophantic consultants who refuse to tell the empress she has no clothes. Her clumsy lurches from nice to nasty and back again do not leave a good impression with undecided voters, and her new reliance on crying when she doesn’t get her way reminds me of my three-year-old. You can sense the panic setting in that she may not get what she wants, and if she can’t maturely handle rejection on the campaign trail, let alone successfully manage a campaign for the long haul, she has no business being in the White House.