Three Years

B1364-LH139

Three Years

In three years, you could paint an elephant like a robin and train it to flutter around the bird feeder. In three years, humans could go to Mars, set up a McDonald’s and still have time to get back to earth and go on CNN. In three years, you could circumnavigate the globe over the world’s oceans in a bathtub. And in three years, there will be a Presidential election. Three Years!

Between now and then there will be—and it is already getting up a full head of steam—a concerted, frantic, mindless, impassioned, reckless, and often cruel effort to “stop” Hillary Clinton from being the Democratic nominee. There are already groups gearing up to do that with videos, and suggestions that the sins of the husband are carried by the wife. There are dark and sinister imprecations directed against her and it’s not all just what happened in her husband’s administration.

There is Benghazi, which—I freely and bravely predict—will be a word we will all hear more than “hello.” Hillary is raising money, and it seems clear that she lusts for that big chair in the oval office, but “stopping” her means that the Republicans must stop each other, which means a big ol’ fight. It will be fun to watch. But three years? There will be never-ending, 24/7, news coverage the likes of which the NFL would wish for its business. It will seem to the American consumer of “information” during all that time, that nothing else is going on in the world, that all the hot spots are quiescent while Hillary does battle with the Tea Party.

So, we’ll all conclude, from the visual and auditory evidence presented to us, that Egyptians will have gone back to making flat bread and guiding tourists to Luxor. I’m sure Yemen and the UAE will be thought of as remaining calm. I’m quite sure there will be nothing going on in Congo or in Latin America, or in the Arab peninsula, and those drones will only be in the sky for purely peaceful reasons and will cause no trouble or anger. The Israelis and Palestinians, one might gather from the lack of news outside Presidential politics, will be playing dominoes together and Iran will have finally turned their nuke factories into refrigerator plants. The NSA will have stopped looking at the nude photos of your camping trip and will only read the letters to Santa which toddlers send to the North Pole. Edward Snowden will disappear from CNN and Fox, and into the Russian winter.

There will be events—terror alerts, unexpected coups and riots and who-knows-what, but we might not know any of that. How many times will we all hear about Hillary’s foibles, and Bill’s peccadilloes and the purity and nobility of the Republican challenger? How much can we take? Will it be too much? To paraphrase a poster from the Vietnam War: “What if they gave an election and nobody came?” But of course, they WILL come. All the white, angry, male, silver stallions will do what they do best: they will pass restrictive voter laws (see: North Carolina and Texas, for example) and make sure congressional districts are twisted so agonizingly and cleverly that even when a district has a majority of, say, Latino voters, they’re all in one place, so they can’t vote for more than just one person. It has been said by the pundits who still control the dialogue of the Republican Party, that if they can get all the white folk to vote, then they will emerge triumphant.

This chimera is one they continue to pursue and will see that, contrary to their fantasies, things in America are changing. But they really do believe they have a winner in Hillary. First, she is a woman. Second, she is an assertive woman. Third, she’s married to a known womanizer, an impeached President. Fourth, she is smart, aggressive, and has a LOT of well-heeled supporters. Republicans are very frightened of Hillary and very frightened of what she may represent: a diminution of the GOP as it is fondly remembered by the Old Guard, and as it is fondly romanticized by the New Guard. Stopping Hillary will—has already—become the focal point of the Right, and getting her ensconced in the Oval Office has become the focal point of the Left, with no one to actually govern the country, but the governors and local legislators who are determined to see America impoverished in true ultra-conservative fashion.

There will be so many Benghazi stories that maybe some consumer of news will finally get fed up and look on a map to find out where the hell this place is. When Hillary was Secretary of State, she testified before a Senate and a House committee, and they never laid a glove on her. I watched those hearings, and I had questions which the assembled legislators didn’t ask. I still have some, but if Hillary was pinned down behind a desk and forced to submit to questioning, and she STILL came away fairly clean, how much harder will it be for any free-flowing attack on her as a moving Presidential candidate, advised and directed by the best experts money can buy? Stopping Hillary may be a goal more worthy for conservatives than school lunch programs or education or food stamps, or any number of legitimate needs the country has. But, really….three years?

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