Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Overthinking Hillary

Our Patriarch of the Airwaves played the audio from a webcast by Hillary Clinton yesterday and parsed the speech. It wasn't pretty. Imagine the San Diego Chargers taking on your local high school football team. Hillary never seems to show evidence to support her "smartest woman in America" title and yesterday was no different.

One of the topics was our dependence on foreign oil. Hillary mentioned all the traditional politician claptrap about alternative energy sources, home-generated electricity from solar cells, geothermal and so on. As blogging genius Steven den Beste has written extensively, none of these will work, if for no other reason than the scale of the problem. We need terawatts of power and the alternative energy sources produce megawatts at best. It's physics, not politics that holds us back.

Hugh's destruction of Hillary was loads of fun and was done with his normal wit and panache, but it was mental overkill.

Hillary is not a candidate of ideas, she's a candidate of appearance. Each one of her lines had gone through more product testing than Kellogg's latest cereal. A good example was one that went something along the lines of, "Why are we paying money to buy oil from people who will use that money to buy weapons to kill us?"

Hugh made the point that if you changed the people in charge of the oil, you could give them all the money you wanted and no one would be trying to kill us, but there's another answer as well. We buy goods from China and China buys oil from Iran. If the US stopped buying oil from Iran, they would still get our money from China. That's just one example. There are many, many more. No matter how you work it, so long as the mad mullahs are in power, our dollars will find their way there and be used to buy weapons to kill us.

To top that, the weapons they're using to kill us are so cheap, they don't need our money at all. Now I'm overthinking. Hillary wasn't trying to solve the problem, she was trying to get elected. Her campaign is one colossal head feint, getting all of her opponents to waste their time responding to the empty content of her proposals. A better response would be to say that she was an airhead and make her defend her positions. Her greatest weakness is the stupidity of her positions. Opponents need to treat her like she was a moron and force her to prove otherwise.

Hillary's positions are simplistic and vapid because that's what focus groups have said the majority wants to hear. She's the Count Chocula of politics. A puffed up, processed piece of sugar-coated air. Utterly worthless, but delicious to children. I would argue that the American electorate is not childlike and if you pointed out how Hillary disrespects their intelligence, you could defeat her.

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