Laugh at Hillary Clinton While There's Still Time

With this week being the time when Democratic leaders — crucially, leaders other than Hillary Clinton — have said people should make up their minds between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we may not have HRC to kick around much longer. That’s why I’m wearing my anti-Hillary t-shirt (“Re-Defeat Communism [in] 2008”) at every opportunity — such as when I host this Wednesday’s Debate at Lolita Bar between Avery Knapp and Ken Silber about whether conservatives and libertarians should vote for Bob Barr or John McCain, a Nader/Gore-like battle leftists could learn from as well.

A fading Hillary also means you should hurry up and read Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Suspect Musing of Billary, edited by (rare) conservative comedienne Julia Gorin. Then again, if comedy = tragedy + time, we may laugh even harder at Hillary in years hence. I know I’m hoping my “2008” anti-HRC shirt will have retro-kitsch value once 2009 rolls around and someone else is inaugurated as president.

And whether that someone else is Obama, McCain, Barr, Nader, or whoever the Greens pick, it will still be someone who I expect to lie less and commit fewer crimes than Hillary would, though that’s not saying much. The Gorin book reminds me, for instance, that Hillary claimed to have no role in or knowledge of the pardons scandal — or her brother being involved in it — aside from being handed envelopes that she just sort of, you know, passed on to other people, as First Ladies constantly do without asking what they contain. And we’re surprised when she claims to have dodged bullets in Bosnia, to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, or to think it’d be undemocratic if her Florida and Michigan delegates weren’t seated?

If America doesn’t know when to take out trash like this — like Pepper Potts ousting Tony Stark’s Brown-alum one-night stand — we may deserve dictators.

P.S. I was flattered that a couple I know — the male a fellow Brown alum but not prone to one-night stands or haranguing Iron Man — say Tony Stark reminds them of me. Not that Stark is entirely admirable, mind you, but given his arch-capitalist/reformer, cynic/do-gooder, and hawk/dove tensions, I could be compared to far worse characters. Like the Mandarin. Or the Living Laser.