Accidental Blogger

In a previous post I had mentioned Clinton hack James Carville’s cavalier assertion that Hillary Clinton is 1.5 times more man than the average male and 3 times more so than Obama. Perhaps Hillary has displayed her machismo a bit too convincingly.

I don’t know if Joe will agree but his [second most] favorite blog has an excellent interview with Hillary Clinton. And boy, does she come across as tough!

An excerpt (do read the whole thing):

FB: Now, back when your husband was president he cut nine million poor women and children off welfare. But now you’re the candidate of women and poor people and poor workin women. So did you approve of what your husband did at the time, and if not are you going to reverse it as president and give all those poor people their money back?
CLINTON: Ha haaa! That’s an excellent question, Fafnir, and the only way to answer it is with a hearty chuckle followed by a complete non sequitur!
FB: Ha ha, that is so true!
CLINTON: You know, I wish I could make all those women’s lives better, I really do. But in a way, wouldn’t it help all of them even more if we could just make one woman’s life a whole lot better, and then say it sort of counts towards all those other women who aren’t getting anything? And wouldn’t it be even better-er if that one woman was me?
FB: You know, you just can’t argue with that math! Now are you running for president of Iraq, too? Because then your vote for the war totally makes sense!
CLINTON: I didn’t vote for the war, Fafnir. I voted to give the president the authority to go to war. What was he going to use that authority for? Maybe he’d just frame it and hang it in his office. Maybe he’d use it to prop up one of the legs on his desk. Maybe he’d use it to sing songs and dance jigs and lift weary spirits down at the old folks home! I honestly couldn’t say!
FB: If only you knew at the time that that devious George Bush would use a war authorization to authorize a war!
CLINTON: You know, I guess I’m just too giving. Maybe I just love my country too much to deny it the universal health care and endless wars it so desperately needs. Maybe some theoretical secret black Muslim who hates America wouldn’t have that problem.
FB: Maybe it didn’t have to be an actual war, though. Maybe you coulda just met the president halfway by settin a big pile a money on fire an shootin a buncha random people.
CLINTON: You know, Fafnir, we could stand around and argue over who raped and slaughtered whose country all day long, but where’s that gonna get us? What America needs now is a president who’s ready on day one to rape and slaughter competently for the American people in the next war, and I’ve got the sixty-five years of experience to do it.

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the same point more seriously in the Nation.