I guess I still miss Rick Wright.
Why I Love Posting Happy Things, and Frequently Interrupt Bad News Days with Random Silliness
Because all of us sort of intuitively know this:
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.This study says the effect only works in close physical proximity, but I suspect that's inaccurate, though it may well be observable only in close physical proximity. Then again, internet communities may not have been part of the study, since they didn't exist 20 years ago.
The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.
...Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person's emotions can influence another's -- laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.
When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.
A Perfect Example, Unfortunately
You know how sometimes you've been sitting with and chewing on and exploring a subject for a few days, maybe trying to communicate an idea you feel deep in your gut or understand intuitively, something that you don't even know how to fully explain, and then something comes along to perfectly make your point for you?
Sometimes that's a really good thing. And sometimes it makes you want to put your fist through a wall.
Especially if what you were trying to explain is why a really common behavior totally sucks.
Shaker rrp, who yesterday wrote a really excellent post about appropriation of the civil rights movement by people who are not African-American, and how that appropriation has a tendency to imply that the civil rights movement is not ongoing and contemporarily relevant but complete and historical, just sent me the below image…
That's the cover of The Advocate's December 16, 2008 issue. If you can't see the image, or can't believe your eyes, it says: "Gay is the New Black: The Last Great Civil Rights Struggle." Kumbaya, bitchez.
And the reason I'm blogging this is because rrp is currently indisposed, cleaning the plaster off her fingers.
[Let me make crystal clear, this is not about "the LGBTQI community." This is specifically about The Advocate and very loosely about the part of the LGBTQI community it most directly serves, which is demographically similar to the most visible LGBTQI political leaders, who are, at present, disproportionately white, male, cisgender, wealthy, and able-bodied.]
For those of you just joining us, the disproportionately white, male, cisgender, wealthy, and able-bodied leadership of the LGBTQI rights movement have been criticized for, oh, about three decades now, a lack of outreach to and inclusion of people of color, women, trans people, working class LGBTQIs, and/or the disabled.
This subject, particularly with regard to race, has very recently come to a head once again as black voters in California were (wrongly) accused of being primarily responsible for the passage of Prop 8, even as the narrative of the civil rights movement was widely appropriated in discussions of the initiative.
That makes the cover of a prominent national gay magazine reading "Gay is the New Black: The last great civil rights struggle" exceedingly, uh, unproductive. Suffice it to say, if The Advocate's idea of outreach to people of color, whether queer or not, is to declare racism done and dusted, they needn't be surprised when POC give them the finger.
Calling the gay rights movement "the last great civil rights struggle" is exactly what I was talking about in comments yesterday: When you relegate any rights movement to the dustbin of history, as if everything has been tied into a neat little bow of perfect equality, instead of regarding the movement as the ongoing, living, breathing, still-significant, still-necessary struggle that it is, it's effectively a declaration of not being your ally, because if there's "nothing left to accomplish," if there's no struggle, there's no need for allies.
That's not a very effective strategy for motivating people who are your natural allies by virtue of their own civil rights struggle (or shared, depending on one's possible intersectionalities) to stand alongside you.
Neither is disappearing their struggles altogether, aside from stepping on it to declare your struggle its successor.
That is some serious fuckery, right there.
Quote of the Day
"Shut up, bitch."—Jim Quinn, professional dipshit and co-host of the syndicated radio show The War Room with Quinn & Rose, in an imaginary conversation with Deborah Lawrence, "an artist who submitted an ornament for the White House Christmas tree expressing support for a congressional resolution to impeach President Bush."
You may recognize Quinn as the delightful gentleman who has previously erected woman-hating feminist straw-women and referred to NOW as the National Organization for Whores. Quite the charmer!
I certainly hope Ms. Lawrence takes being called a bitch by the likes of Jim Quinn a spectacular compliment.
(There's contact information at the link, in the righthand sidebar, in case you'd like to email Mr. Quinn and politely let him know why such language is inappropriate.)
Conservatives Need a Bailout
The Big Three automakers are in Washington this week, hats in hand, looking for a handout. Washington has already bailed out some of our largest banks. But they are not the only ones suffering in this economy, which was ruined by the Democrat Congress and regulations that were implemented by the Clinton Administration that set the meltdown in motion. No one has been hit harder by this financial turmoil than conservatives. Although conservatives generally support self-reliance when it comes to others, the situation is so dire that the only thing that will save our conservative institutions at this point is a quick infusion of government aid.
In the 2008 election a number of conservatives with families to feed who thought their jobs would be safe for years to come got laid off by callous voters. And on January 20, more hard-working conservatives will find themselves on the unemployment line. Barack “Scrooge” Obama has already signaled that he will be pink slipping a huge number of government workers when he takes office, which will flood the economy with unemployed job seekers. Although Presidents have traditionally allowed ambassadors to stay on during transitions from one administration to another, for example, Obama has ruined Christmas for all of our currently serving ambassadors by informing them that they must vacate their offices as soon as he is sworn in. President Bush has made some effort to save people’s jobs by making it impossible for Obama to fire some political appointees through "burrowing," that is, changing their jobs into civil service jobs. But he may not be able to save everyone’s job. Only Robert Gates seems to be absolutely safe from the carnage.
But it is not only government workers who find themselves in economic dire straits. Conservatives throughout the country are losing their jobs as conservative institutions try to save themselves through belt-tightening. The staff of The National Review returned from its luxury cruise in the Caribbean to discover that it is surprisingly not actually making a profit and is now on its knees pleading for money, unfortunately, without much success. “It takes a lot of bucks to run NRO. Of course, each and every dollar we have is stretched to the max — we don’t have the luxury of, well, having luxuries. Cabs? Ha! Subway fare? Think again! How do I get to the press conference then? By foot! That’s how we operate. Calluses, fallen arches, and vibrant conservatism are the consequences” writes Jack Fowler, before losing what’s left of his dignity and concluding, “Come on, I’m begging.”
Recent cost-cutting initiatives to purge conservatives from the masthead of The National Review who failed to toe the editorial line, such as David Frum, Kathleen Parker and the son of the magazine’s founder, Christopher Buckley, have apparently not been enough to stave off financial disaster. To stay alive, The National Review may have to narrow its definition of acceptable conservative thought even further and encourage more of its writers to quit. If readers do not pony up soon, John Derbyshire could be the next apostate to get the boot. Mr. Derbyshire has apparently read the writing on the wall and has started a blog for “secular conservatives” (which is an oxymoron if I ever heard one), though I’m afraid I must disabuse him of the notion, which he probably heard from a mischievous liberal, that blogs are a great way to make money. Mr. Derbyshire is already struggling to pay his health insurance premiums, so losing his job at The National Review would be especially devastating for the man who is, let’s face it, not getting any younger and hasn’t looked well lately.
But even if The National Review makes its political philosophy indistinguishable from James Dobson’s, that may not be enough to save it. Dobson’s Focus on the Family has also fallen on economic hard times. Because group spent $539,000 passing Proposition 8, which ended gay marriage in California, it doesn’t have enough money left over to pay its employees’ salaries so it has been forced to lay off 20% of its staff, which is just the latest in a series of layoffs. I’m sure that the workers being laid off are grateful that their families have been saved from the scourge of gay marriage, which should provide some solace when they lose their homes or their children have to skip a few meals. And economic calamity should make their families even closer and stronger, helping them to fend off future threats from homosexuals. Meanwhile, a leaner more focused Focus on the Family will concentrate its efforts on fighting other dangerous enemies of America, such as ex-National Review writer Kathleen Parker, and retailers who don't say "Merry Christmas."
This economic downturn is especially hard on conservatives because many of them have never held real jobs. Forcing them to develop skills other than deploring the liberal media and warning how gay marriage and Islam will destroy our country from cushy perches at conservative think tanks may be asking too much. There are only so many positions for out-of-work neocons at conservative think tanks and their funds are drying up. Conservative authors are discovering that they may actually have to sell their books as fewer of them will be bought up by their own publishers, like Regnery. Some conservative institutions may even have to resort to outsourcing jobs overseas, to places like India where conservative pundits are cheaper. It’s one thing to send all of our manufacturing, call center and newspaper editorial jobs to India, but conservative punditry is a skill whose nuances would be lost if it were outsourced. Imagine what it will do to our political discourse if every pundit on Fox News and every token conservative on MSNBC sounded like Dinesh D’Souza and Ramesh Ponnuru. It’s too horrible to think about.
And if you think things are bad for conservative pundits, conservative bloggers are hurting worst of all. Kim du Toit, whose essay “The Pussification the Western Male” may be the greatest piece of writing the blogosphere has ever produced, was forced to stop blogging after his stingy, freeloading readers were unable to come up with enough money to pay for his shooting range memberships and food and drink for his family’s European vacation. What a sad commentary it is that after all he has done for his readers these many years, they could not come up with enough cash to keep him living in the style to which he has become accustomed. Unfortunately, Mr. du Toit is unable to work because years of lobster dinners have given him a severe case of gout, though at least he’s not a pussy like black people who just “want to be looked after when they’re sick, for free.”
Mr. du Toit may be the first of many conservatives who get “fed up with supporting the unproductive” and decide to “go John Galt,” denying us their wisdom and expertise to punish us for not appreciating them enough. If Confederate Yankee does not get enough donations to purchase new guns, which are going to be necessary when Obama takes office, he may be next. Luckily, this modest blogger makes enough to survive – barely – with the income I get from Google ads and Mrs. Swift’s three jobs, but, of course, any bit helps if you have a little to spare this Christmas season (see the Paypal button on my blog or on the sidebar of this one). Unfortunately, my son Spiro and my daughter Schlafly may have to forgo college and join the military anyway, which would be a terrible waste of their skills, though if it comes to that, we’ll probably put the cat to sleep first.
I know there are probably some uncompassionate and vengeful liberals who would prefer to see conservatives left to the vagaries of the free market, and even some conservatives who are too proud to accept government charity and would prefer to stick to their principles. But as President Bush showed us, in a crisis you are sometimes forced to abandon your principles temporarily to survive. Being a conservative, like the Constitution, is not a suicide pact. To fight the terrorists President Bush was forced to bring back the era of big government, on a temporary basis, just as President Reagan was forced to spend profligately to end the Cold War. Conservatives must face reality the way Bush and Reagan did and realize that the only way to preserve our ideals may be to sacrifice them for a time and reluctantly accept government checks. Once we have gotten back on our feet again, then we can go back to doing what we do best: condemning lazy welfare queens and berating the poor for not raising themselves by their own bootstraps.
Crossposted at Jon Swift
Caption This Photo
"Pleased to meAHHH!! OUCH!!!!"
(Via CuteOverload)
Now would probably be a good time to explain the absence as of late. After returning from our visit to Shakes Manor, I started a new job. What that means is that the freedoms I had during the day at the old job (like blogging or reminding Liss she's a bowl of farts) no longer exist, at least for the time being.
That said, I'll still try to post some stuff in the evenings when I can, and I'm still omnipresent behind the scenes (which will be proven early next week :) ).
Friday Blogaround
What's the frequency, Shakers?
Recommended Reading:
xkcd: Friends
Tami: Icing on the Cake: The Truth about Marriage
Queen Noor of Jordan: Hillary Clinton -- A Champion for Human Security
Echidne: Join The Discussion: Health Care
PZ: CNN Screws the Pooch
ZooBorns: "Miracle Kitten" Born at the Beardsley Zoo
Darryl: David Lynch Does Gucci
Jorge: All of my Pants have Holes in the Pockets
Leave your links in comments...
Everything Right is Wrong Again
The most infuriating thing about Bush's folksy "interview" for me was his "gee, shucks, what can you do?" brushoff of the nightmare he created in Iraq:
"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," Bush told ABC television in an interview scheduled for broadcast last night. "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." But he followed that moment of candour with an attempt to try to deflect charges that the White House misled Congress and the public to build a case for war, arguing that there had been widespread belief that Saddam had a nuclear arsenal.He guesses. It wasn't him, it was that gosh-darned faulty intelligence. Well, gee, isn't that just dandy? And if you're as pissed off about that as I am, you'll just love this little exchange regarding the Downing Street Memo, (remember that?) laughed off by Dana Perino (video at link):
Tee-hee!Defending Bush’s pre-war intelligence failure, Perino claimed that “other leaders from all around the world” thought Saddam had WMD. When Thomas noted that British intelligence — referring to the the Downing Street Memo — disagreed with Bush, Perino simply said that the memo had been “debunked”:
Q: What about the chief of British intelligence saying you were going to fix the facts around the politics?
PERINO: I think that that’s been debunked.
Thomas quickly countered, “It’s never been been debunked.” Caught off guard, Perino admitted that she was the one who “debunked” it:
Q: It’s never been debunked.
PERINO: Well, it’s been debunked by me.
Q: Good for you.
PERINO: Good for me.
And there you go. With one off-the-cuff remark, the DSM has been completely brushed off and flushed down the memory hole as "debunked;" yet another step towards blaming the Iraq disaster on "bad intelligence," rather than placing the blame right in the blood-soaked hands of the responsible parties. I fully expect to see this myth cropping up every time the DSM is mentioned in the future, it'll be dismissed as "debunked" with no evidence, and one of the most important pieces of evidence against the architects of the war will become something to laugh off. Like targeting and vanishing Muslims and Arabs. Ha-ha! What a foolish conspiracy theory! You still believe that?
Of course, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the Downing Street Memo is being erased. The battles to keep it out of sight went on for a long time, until even FOX news couldn't ignore it.
Debunked? Don't fucking insult me, although I'm fully aware you love to do so.
Heckuva Job, Bushie
The fucking-off into oblivion of our current lame duck of a president cannot happen quickly enough. At this point, he's essentially just some asshole who dropped a rancid fart in our vicinity and is hanging around to revel in how much it disgusts the rest of us.
With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation's employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.Check out the list of the most-emailed stories in the New York Times' Business Section:
The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression.
…"We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history," said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s.
…[E]conomists are estimating that the gross domestic product is contracting at an annual rate of 4 percent or more in the fourth quarter, after a decline of 0.3 percent in the third quarter.
Yowza.
"Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work."—George W. Bush, 60 minutes II, CBS, December 5, 2000.
Of course the dumbass meant to say "we want anybody who wants to work to be able to find work." Nevertheless, he and Dick Cheney might not have wanted the nation to be plagued by a recession and high unemployment, but I guess they wanted two wars and some tax cuts more. Lucky us.
Emails from Betty Boondoggle Make Me Laugh
Like this one:
Subject: Some Things of Interestlol your snarky email
Gay marriage ban is backed by the less educated and religious, according to this poll. Shocker! I know!
There's no study proving a link between abortion and depression. "Efforts to show it does occur appear to be politically motivated, U.S. researchers said on Thursday." Shocker! I know!
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
[Part Two; Part Three.]
In memory of Paul Benedict, who played the Jeffersons' neighbor Harry Bentley, seen here gaily wielding mistletoe at Christmas. Benedict has died at age 70.
Many Shakers will also remember him as Mr. Roy Loomis, the hapless out-of-towner who inadvertently disappoints the Blaine, Missouri Community Theater Players by not being Mr. Guffman.
[H/T to Shaker Oddjob.]
Question of the Day
What one thing do you most hope President-Elect Obama's administration and/or the Democratically-led Congress will accomplish in the next four years?
Caption This Photo
Darryl knew they would all regret laughing at him once he achieved lift-off.
[Via Recon.]
lol your fat gay onion
I'm Really Gonna Miss Systematically Destroying This Place by George Bush:
Oh, America. Eight years went by so fast, didn't they? I feel like I hardly got to know you and methodically undermine everything you once stood for. But I guess all good things must come to an end, and even though you know I would love to stick around for another year or four—maybe privatize Social Security or get us into Iran—I'm afraid it's time to go. But before I leave, let me say, from the bottom of my heart: I can't think of another country I would've rather led to the brink of collapse.Go read the whole thing.
...What am I going to do once I'm no longer president? I've gotten so used to waking up every day, playing fetch with the dogs on the White House lawn, and then spending a lazy afternoon shredding every last bit of our good will abroad in a mind-boggling display of diplomatic incompetence.
...I have to admit, sometimes I think I could've dismantled so much more. The very fact that the environment still exists, that a mere 4,000 troops have died in Iraq, that there is still the slightest glimmer of hope for the future left in this nation—it's easy to feel like maybe I didn't do my job. But no, no, there's no use having any regret. I fucked everything up the best I could and that's good enough for me.
[H/T to Shaker Ouyang Dan.]
Quote of the Day
"The Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped. … In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers."—"Purpose-Driven" Pastor Rick Warren, hanging out with his BFF Sean Hannity, whose purpose is to drive me batshit fuckin' nutz. Warren was responding to Hannity's assertion that we need to "take out" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Even if the Bible does justify such a thing, which is dubious (see further discussion at the link), the Bible is not the handbook of the Department of Defense—a sentence I can't believe I even have to write, but there you go.
How the Story Works
by Shaker rrp
I'm addicted to fiction. I love stories. Any story, told any way. Tell them forward, tell them backwards, tell them inside out, tell them all braided up, I'm happy. When I was in graduate school, I hung out with philosophy majors and critical theorists (an ecologist needs distraction after all), so I started to hear a lot about narrative. At first I thought it was just a academically tarted up way of saying story. But narratives are sequences and stories aren't necessarily. Narratives inflict order and again, stories might or they might not. But the main thing I remember from hanging out, drinking beer and chatting is that narratives make sense of things.
Which is why they're so powerful. Which is why people depend on narratives to do a lot of work. Which also explains why people get upset when a narrative they're comfortable with is challenged or threatened. That's why people got so upset when a blogger suggests that maybe our Thanksgiving practices should include a moment of remembering how much the establishment of the USA, with all our wealth, cost the people who were living here when we got here.
I've been really mulling over the story of civil rights for African Americans, because there's been a struggle about this on the blogosphere and even out away from computers. It came up in on this thread a couple of days ago. There's a triumphant narrative to this piece of American history. Africans brought here in chains, the horrors of the slave trade and slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the backlash of Jim Crow, lynching and the anti-lynching work, then come the 50s and 60s and there seems to be a happy ending. Discrimination is illegal (though far from gone) in the USA.
There are other important struggles for rights in US history, the fight for unions, for women's suffrage, for farm workers rights, against nativist anti-immigrant laws and violence. But none of them seem to have captured the popular imagination the way that the fight for African American civil rights has done.
Maybe it's just timing. With the climatic acts and events coming early in the television age, many people could see the dogs set on peaceful demonstrators, see black kids spat at as they tried to go to school, see the huge march on DC. And then there are the speeches, the incredible speeches that King gave, that give me chills when I hear them now, not simply because I know this man is going to die, but because he's such an electrifying speaker.
But I think it's because the narrative says that ancient wrongs were righted, that justice did triumph and that right was done. The narrative suggests that since it happened once it can happen again. That things that are wrong now can be fixed, that rights that are denied now can be had sometime, some time soon.
And so it makes perfect sense to me that when some LGBT people talk about our rights, they invoke the African American civil rights movement as a model. It's a perfect shorthand and it gives hope.
But when this happens something in me tightens up. As an African American who was a kid in the 50s, who knew that the story that was happening on tv was about me and about people like me, who was the same age as the four girls who died in that blown-up church, I feel like that story is mine.
But it can't belong to me, because once it's become narrative, it's off to do whatever work people can make it do. It's not a story any more and it really can't be mine. But doesn't stop me from feeling that I belong to it, that it owns me in a way that other people can never understand and it's that knowledge which gives me an unease about its casual and careless use that I just can't get myself over.
Another thing that that nags at me is how the narrative's been invoked about LGBT rights. I really started to hear it a lot after Prop 8 lost in California this November. This makes a sort of sense, because marriage is a right that strikes into people's hearts. It certainly struck into mine.
Still last year, when there was that struggle about a trans-inclusive ENDA, no one was writing much about the analogy with African American rights, how come? Employment protection, the right to apply for and keep jobs was an important part of the earlier struggle. But the discussion about getting the legislation pitted people who wanted the law to be inclusive even if there were little chance of the law passing (not that there was that much chance of the law passing anyway) against people who wanted a law they thought the powers that be would go for (as if).
It's this selective thing. When it came to marriage, then the narrative's invoked, But when it came to the equally basic right to work that one person might have and others don't, not a whisper. People have been surprised that many POC didn't vote for marriage rights. People should have been shocked at the number of LG people who weren't wiling to fight for trans rights. Understanding that all our rights are connected and that we need to fight for every right for every person isn't something that comes automatically with your skin color or your gender or your class or any other part of your identities (or their intersections). It comes when you do the hard mental and emotional work to be a progressive. And that's more than any story alone can do.
Action Item
Zimbabwe has declared a national health emergency, after 500 people have died since August from a massive cholera epidemic, the result of a totally fucked infrastructure and economic collapse which has left most Zimbabweans without clean water or healthcare:
Facing the highest inflation in the world, Zimbabweans are struggling just to eat and find clean drinking water. ... Still, residents are getting little help from the government, which has been paralyzed since disputed March elections as President Robert Mugabe and the opposition wrangle over a power-sharing deal.UNICEF has launched an emergency relief program which is geared toward restoring basic social services to the country, including water, nutrition, essential medicines, healthcare, and education. Because UNICEF is already doing work in Zimbabwe, they are likely to have the organization already in place to make sure money gets to where it needs to go. You can find out more about and donate to their emergency relief program here.
"Our central hospitals are literally not functioning," Minister of Health David Parirenyatwa said Wednesday at a meeting of government and international aid officials, according to The state-run Herald newspaper.
International aid agencies and donors must step up their response, Matthew Cochrane, regional spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told The Associated Press on Thursday.
I've been researching relief efforts specific to the crisis in Zimbabwe all afternoon, and UNICEF appears to be the best that I feel confident recommending, but if you've got other suggestions or recommendations, please leave them in comments.
Daily Kitteh
Sophie spends pretty much her entire day either crawling all over me or trying to figure out how to open the window so she can get those damn sparrows who taunt her. The latter activity can entail a half hour or more at a time of her scooting back and forth across the closed bottom half of the window, a procedure that inevitably ends with her gracelessly flopping down onto the desk, because she can't figure out a better way to get down:
"Your desk is mines now."
Hillary Sexism Watch, #113
Speaking of Media Matters (no, I'm not on their payroll; I wish!), Eric Boehlert makes a good observation here:
Does Hillary + "drama" = sexist coverage?Like the Campbell Brown commentary about which I posted yesterday, Boehlert's rhetorical is, of course, evident to anyone with the merest capacity for critical thought—so why, despite its being patently obvious, is he the only media critic saying it? (Or one of a precious few, anyway.) No need to answer that. There are 112 pieces linked at the bottom of this post that already do.
Or let me put it this way: Does anybody really think think that if Obama had reached out to a former, high-profile male primary opponent for a senior cabinet position that the press would be all atwitter with incessant and clichéd talk of "drama," which, let's face it, isn't a very far leap to, Hillary's a drama queen.
One of the most interesting (where interesting = totally fucked up) narratives of this campaign has been the constant promise that Hillary Clinton was going to cause some sort of wild drama: She was going to do anything to ensure the nomination would be hers, she wasn't ever going to drop out of the race, she was going to take it to the convention floor and turn the entire Democratic Convention into a circus, she was going to singlehandedly destroy the Democratic Party, she was going to refuse to endorse Obama, she was going to make the veep slot a condition of her endorsement, she was going to tell her supporters not to vote for him, she was going to refuse to campaign for him, she was going to run on an independent ticket, she was going to thwart his campaign somehow so McCain could win and she could run in 2012, she was going to make life difficult for Obama in the Senate, she was going to refuse a cabinet position if offered...
None of it happened. Not even close.
And yet still, still, the same people who have incessantly predicted "drama" of one sort or another from Hillary Clinton, and who have batted exactly zero, are now positively insistent that her relationship as Secretary of State with President-Elect Obama is going to be "dramatic," despite all evidence to the contrary.
If I had been so utterly wrong, so many times, as the "Drama Queen Clinton" criers have been, the last thing I'd be doing is predicting more drama that will never manifest. I'd be writing an open letter of apology to Hillary Clinton.
[Hillary Sexism Watch: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine, Thirty, Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four, Thirty-Five, Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, Forty-One, Forty-Two, Forty-Three, Forty-Four, Forty-Five, Forty-Six, Forty-Seven, Forty-Eight, Forty-Nine, Fifty, Fifty-One, Fifty-Two, Fifty-Three, Fifty-Four, Fifty-Five, Fifty-Six, Fifty-Seven, Fifty-Eight, Fifty-Nine, Sixty, Sixty-One, Sixty-Two, Sixty-Three, Sixty-Four, Sixty-Five, Sixty-Six, Sixty-Seven, Sixty-Eight, Sixty-Nine, Seventy, Seventy-One, Seventy-Two, Seventy-Three, Seventy-Four, Seventy-Five, Seventy-Six, Seventy-Seven, Seventy-Eight, Seventy-Nine, Eighty, Eighty-One, Eighty-Two, Eighty-Three, Eighty-Four, Eighty-Five, Eighty Six, Eighty-Seven, Eighty-Eight, Eighty-Nine, Ninety, Ninety-One, Ninety-Two, Ninety-Three, Ninety-Four, Ninety-Five, Ninety-Six, Ninety-Seven, Ninety-Eight, Ninety-Nine, One Hundred, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112.]
