Shame on you Hillary Clinton!

I think it’s fair to say that as a white, middle-aged, male, heterosexual Republican, I don’t fit into any of the known Pander Zones of the so-called Hillary Clinton demographic. In fact, like many of my peers, I heartily despise her!

Of course, this is not a recent feeling. I’ve pretty much hated Hillary for all of the 20 years that she has been a national figure. I guess it started when she lied to us all on 60 Minutes about her husband’s philandering ways in 1988, and as far as I can tell, she has been lying about pretty much everything else ever since.

You can count me firmly in the 46% of our country in the ABC (Anybody But Clinton) Club, but I haven’t been very vocal about it lately. In the Good Old Days, back in Bill’s administration, I wrote a number of very negative columns about the Clintons. After a while, however, I figured out that all I was doing was pissing off my Democratic friends who had drunk the Clinton Kool-Aid.

I did make one of my rare Clarion formal endorsements in 2000 in favor of her opponent Rick Lazio when she first ran for the U.S. Senate, but even that was fairly mild. Re-reading that today, the toughest argument was: “Do we want our daughters to think that the way to get ahead in politics is to marry the right man and stick with him for political gain no matter how badly he disrespects and embarrasses you? As the father of three daughters, my answer is a resounding no!”

When you strip away all the class warfare rhetoric, the kooky liberal policy positions and the obnoxious campaign tactics, I think this remains the issue that will bring Hillary down. There were many who expected that as soon as Bill left the White House, and Hillary was safely ensconced in the Senate, that papers would be filed in Chappaqua. (As her idol Tammy Wynette spells it, D-I-V-O-R-C-E!)

If she had done that, at least she would have demonstrated a little self-respect. There is a fundamental conflict between Hillary’s posturing as an ardent feminist and her sticking with a proven Horn Dawg. I think it’s called living a lie.

That basic phoniness is something that the average person can pick up on when we see the two together faking marital bliss for the cameras, and its a big turn-off! Has the Clinton marriage always been one of convenience to cover Hillary’s different sexual preference, as some have suggested? I don’t know and I don’t really care, but it clearly has become one in recent years.

If Hillary wants to succeed at the highest level of our nation’s politics she needs to change her theme song. Get rid of “Stand by your man” once and for all, and try something like “I will survive!”

I guess this cartoon from the Financial Times of London (and the article it appeared with) pretty much sums it up:

Crunching the numbers

As reported in our sister news blog today, last night we recorded our 20,000th visitor to the Clarion News Blog. This column and the other column blog by Bill Lofquist, also each have had over 6,000 readers in the same 10 month period. (Actually, Bill is ahead of me by about 1,000 visitors with almost 7,500, but I’m gaining fast!)

What does all this mean? Looking at the News Blog, 20,000 visitors over 10 months works out to about 500 visitors a week. Our biggest week, not surprisingly, was election week in November when we had almost 1,200 visitors.

Our News Blog numbers have actually gone down a little in recent months, since we redesigned the home page and started sending out a weekly e-mail newsletter. This makes sense, since both of these changes allow people to see what the news story is without actually clicking through to the blog.

At the same time, however, traffic to the two column blogs has more than tripled, and for the last few weeks they have actually been outdrawing the News Blog. Part of this is no doubt due to a lack of hot news items as of late.

With the Planning Board’s attorney announcing that he will need 5 or 6 weeks to digest the draft FEIS proposed by Newman Development, and the board (with the notable exception of the Chairman) signaling a willingness to take the time to do things right, it doesn’t look like anything drastic is going to happen any time soon.

This is likely to be just the lull before the storm, however. Eventually the board will have to come to grips with the fact that Newman has not changed its spots, and that the proposed FEIS, just like everything else they have done on this project, is woefully inadequate.

The Newman pattern was established long ago. Submit mountains of irrelevant data with as little real information as possible, and then whine about how much they’ve done and how unfair the delay is. The theory, of course, is that the Planning Board and the general public will eventually get tired of fighting and give in.

That’s a strategy that may have been successful in other towns, but I don’t think it is going to fly here. The main reason is that there are too many of you out there reading the truth in these blogs.

Please keep reading (and keep telling your friends about these blogs), keep writing comments, and keep letting our elected and appointed officials know that we want real answers, not more lies and deception!