Fortune-Cookie Games

Now that everybody’s jumped all over Geraldine Ferraro’s racial comments and Hillary’s “as far as I know” non-denial denial that Barack’s a Muslim, a little looking back on the past week is in order.

Nowadays bloggers can’t resist writing about Hillary without inserting “as far as I know” in there somewhere. In fact, I’ve decided that “as far as I know” should be appended to all sorts of sentences, the way people say “in bed” when they read their Chinese fortune cookies out loud: “Great skill and firmness of resolve will be yours … in bed.”

It’ll be wild, wacky, and fun for the whole family … as far as I know.

What a week, huh? That Eliot Spitzer, lemme tell ya … “Client 9 from outer space.” I can’t understand how a mind like that works. Except that I can … in a way. Seriously. I feel bad for the entire Spitzer family, even Eliot. The guy has an addiction problem of some kind. That’s clear. Maybe several … sex, power, money. We think of blatant hypocrisy as an exclusive province of Republican politicians, but clearly it’s not.

Maybe there should be a new wedding vow for the power-obsessed:  "... for richer or for poorer ... in sickness and in health ... 'til death do us part ... as far as I know."

As for Geraldine, the former Congressional representative from the “Archie Bunker district,” the less said the better. The story just serves to remind everyone that Barack is black … which was her objective, of course. But now she just seems to be addicted to the attention, even though it’s negative attention.

Remember how there was always a kid in your elementary school class who would act obnoxious just so that everybody would look at him? At this point, that’s who Geraldine Ferraro has become … as far as I know.

And as for Sen. Clinton, if you think I’m about to slam her you’re only half right.  You really should watch her clip from 60 Minutes, the one of “as far as I know” fame.  What’s instructive about it … and it’s very instructive … is that there seem to be two Hillary Clintons fighting it out before our very eyes. One is the paragon of moral rectitude. You couldn’t ask for a better and more upright dismissal of those scurrilous Obama rumors. She is clearly a good and decent person who wants to do the right thing and will, come what may.

But the other Hillary Clinton can’t resist peering out from over her left shoulder.  It’s that Hillary that adds “as far as I know,” “I take him at his word,” and those other shameful qualifiers to an otherwise upstanding demurral. It’s like watching the entire Clinton campaign in microcosm: She has a core of goodness and decency, but finds those dark impulses toward ugly politics impossible to resist. It reminds me of the way her lofty words at the close of one of the debates were followed by cheap-shot attacks the very next day.

Hillary’s campaign is like opening a fortune cookie (or a box of chocolates, as far as I know): You never know what you’ll get. That’s what a Clinton II Presidency would be like, too, and that’s troublesome. Come to think of it, there’s something almost Eliot Spitzer-like about the strange dual persona carried by the Senator from New York. And the devil on her left shoulder seems to have taken almost full control.

Now Sen. Clinton is basing her increasingly-quixotic campaign on the notion that superdelegates should choose her if she “wins the popular vote.” Talk about inscrutable fortune cookies! It almost sounds plausible except, as Christopher Beam points out, “winning the popular vote” is an entirely illusory concept.  In order to accept that any such thing has even happened, superdelegates would need to completely dismiss caucus states and the Democratic voters that live in them. Or, they would have to devise some complex formula that converts caucus results into popular-vote equivalents. Or, they would have to set up popular-vote do-overs in every caucus state.

Doing that would require the wisdom of Solomon. But there’s no need to worry. Who can fail to trust in the probity and fairness of superdelegates like … Geraldine Ferraro and Eliot Spitzer? You know they can always be counting on to exercise sound judgement …

… in bed.

Comments

[lally]

great riff brother