...Hillary Clinton! For phoniest display of belated emotion in a Presidential campaign!
Hillary's recent emotion at the tanking of her multi-million dollar; mass pandering campaign reminded me of a scene in Mike Myers' Wayne's World where he, as Wayne, throws water on his face and emotes about something while "Academy Awards Clip" flashes on the screen. Hillary Clinton does not do anything that is not coldly, if not icily calculated. However, seeing her ambitions and life's work of becoming the first female president go down into the primordial-primary ooze may be something for which she might exhibit a little emotion.
She showed no emotion when I met with her along with another Gold Star Mother, Lynn Braddach from Oregon, whose son Travis Nall was also KIA in Iraq. We poured our hearts and souls out to her and she hardly even blinked, let alone shed a tear for our heartbreak that she had been a major neo-connette chearleader for.
That meeting happened in September of 2005, just a few short weeks after we left Camp Casey in Crawford, Tx on August 31, 2005. Anti-war sentiment was high and the apex was a mass march and rally that hundreds of thousands of like-minded (many for the first time) attended in the belly of the evil empire on September 24th. Since then, the motivation and energy of the anti-war movement has ebbed and flowed with each subsequent fresh assault on peace and democracy by BushCo with the help, support and justification of "Democrats" like Hillary Clinton.
After Hillary was booed at a campaign event in New Hampshire over the weekend, I am sure that there was a high-level meeting of her campaign that came up with the strategy of the new and improved and "emotional, but not too emotional" Hillary Clinton. This is the same campaign that thought Hillary could demonstrate that Senator Mike Gravel (who chastised her in a debate about her vote to sanction Iran) was crazy by laughing at him like she was the insane one with a very bizarre and disturbing cackle. This is the same campaign that told Ms. Clinton that she should under no circumstances apologize to the families of the needlessly and tragically fallen for her support of the war that killed them. This is essentially the same campaign that handed the White House over to Bush again in 2004. Kerry's campaign was such a resounding "success," Hillary thought she could run the same careful and calculated one and be victorious...seems to be a disconnect here.
America is tired of panderers and blatant political animals that carefully campaign to as not offend anyone by telling the truth.
The truth is something that has been profoundly lacking in most political discourse for many, many years---BushCo did not invent lying and deceptions, they have just elevated dishonesty to an art---the truth is hard and can be as cold as Hillary in New Hampshire in January, but I believe we all thirst for it and will drink from the cup of the candidate who offers it to us.
The top tier Democratic candidates can not run on their records, so they have to run on an ephemeral and hard to quantify promise of "change." We need change, but do any of the top tier candidates really offer it, or will it always be more of the same old, same old until we break from the mold of the two-party duopoly that is designed to block democracy, not elevate it?
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother's Child and Dear President Bush.