2/15/2008

Hillary Clinton's Rove Has Destroyed Her:
Hillary Clinton makes it so easy to dislike her when she says, as she did yesterday regarding Barack Obama's candidacy: "Speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches don't fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night...There’s a big difference between us — speeches versus solutions. Talk versus action. You know, some people may think words are change. But you and I know better. Words are cheap." So that's where her argument now rests: Hillary Clinton is the kid who always whines that only the popular people get to be on the student council.

She seems to be channeling this fat fuck:


Close your eyes. Imagine him in high school. Imagine him saying exactly what Hillary Clinton said yesterday. Got it? Makes you wanna give him a wedgie yourself, doesn't it? And, yep, it pretty much explains Clinton's "strategy": Revenge of the Nerds.

That's Mark Penn, who, as the Rude Pundit and many, many others have said, is a fuckin' charlatan of the Bob Shrum School of Political Consultancy for Pathetic Losers. Here's a quote from page 3 of his tome Microtrends, written with E. Kinney Zalesne, part of that pseudo-Malcolm Gladwell (but not as clever) type of book of shit-what-I-pulled-together-to-explain-the-world:
"There is perhaps no feeling more acute than being left out. Everyone remembers what it felt like not to be picked for a sports team, or to be excluded from a friends' night out, or to be the only one not invited to a wedding. What compounds the angst, of course, is the injustice - why me? I am a better ballplayer, a more loyal friend, a more gregarious guest - and yet I'm the one left out." It's pretty much exactly what Clinton said. This segues, really, into a discussion of trends in an attempt to explain why women are single.

It's sad, really, how badly Penn wants to be Karl Rove when he's just, at the end of the day, like every cartoon villain who thinks he can control dark forces that will make him blow up or become a dessicated corpse. In Penn's case, let's go with "blow up."

And so it's even sadder that Hillary Clinton invested so much of her presidential ambitions in this wannabe intellectual, this bloated boob, who says smart sounding things like calling groups of people shit like "Impressionable Elites" and "Permissive Parents," spouting vaguely coherent pop sociology like, "Numbers help you land on something that is incontrovertibly true." Well, that is until they don't.

The reason that Barack Obama has a movement behind him is that he went for a unifying movement. Clinton, listening to Penn, who saw how Rove eked out "wins" through targeting small, specific groups, is now in the position of trying to string together the Caffeine Crazies and the Unisexuals and the Working Retired into a crazy patchwork of a majority while creating the illusion of a movement.

It ain't gonna work. And, while the Rude Pundit believes Clinton needs to bail now on the race for the nomination, if she wants to have any chance at all, she needs to hang this Penn bastard up like a pinata and give her staff long sticks.

(By the way, don't write to tell the Rude Pundit that the "nerds" get to grow up to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or some such shit. Most of the nerds you knew in high school are working at Best Buy to pay off their student loans.)