I don't usually blog about political issues, because everyone else is doing it, but I am getting to be crazed (I hope not literally) by Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama has won the nomination. He has the requisite number of delegates. What is Hillary doing? She's "considering her options." What options are those? I hope she's busy writing a speech in which she says something like, "I encourage all of my supporters to support Senator Obama in the fall, since we have to take back the White House, AND ANYWAY OUR POLICY POSITIONS ARE NEARLY IDENTICAL!!!!" I just watched the beginning of the Today show, and one of her staffers was on. Matt Lauer showed him the headline from the Washington Post today. It said something like, "Obama Wins Nomination," and asked, "Is this headline accurate or inaccurate?" The staffer couldn't give him a direct answer, even when Matt asked him again.
A few weeks ago in the New Yorker, Hendrik Herzberg wrote that the Clinton campaign had reached an almost mystical phase, in which her decision to drop out no longer had anything to do with the change she had to win. And that was before Obama had actually clinched the nomination! And they still won't concede. Incredible! AND, I think this vice-presidential thing is just a distraction by her people to get more attention.
Hillary Clinton, please concede gracefully and urge your supporters to support Obama before you do even more damage to his campaign. McCain was already starting to recruit your supporters last night!
ON AN UNRELATED NOTE: Since I'm in the realm of politics, I would like to wish Ted Kennedy a refuah shleimah (full recovery). He did something horrible a long time ago, and, it's true, if he were not a Kennedy, he might have gone to jail, although he would not have done that much time. I believe in teshuvah (it's a complicated term, but let's go, in one word, with "repentance"), and I think that his tireless work in the Senate over the past four decades has demonstrated a commitment to be an upright, contributing citizen who advocates on behalf of the poor, disenfranchised, and usually ignored. As I heard on TV, it's hard to imagine the Senate without him.
On his surgery: The cable news networks have been tying themselves into pretzels trying to explain his surgery, and the fact that he was awake. Maybe I remember too much old TV, but it seems simplest to me to compare it to the surgery that Dr. Mark Greene had on the TV show ER 5-7 seasons ago. He, too, had a tumor in Broca's area, which controls speech, and he had experimental surgery in which he was awake the whole time. I think that a good number of TV viewers remember that episode. That would have been my idea for a news segment, anyway.
1 comment:
Actually, being awake during most brain surgery is not experimental, its the protool. They knock you out while they saw off the top of your skull (which they save to put back), and then wake you up when the docs start mucking about in the gray matter. They map the brain out with flags, using electrical stimulation, so you really need to be responsive.
And you're probably being too generous to Kennedy, behavior-wise (nobody deserves disease).
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