Hilary's war on truth.
It has always stunned me how the American left seem so apologetic for their beliefs and always feel the need to prove that they occupy some mythical middle ground whilst their Republican adversaries appear to be held to no equivalent test of their reasonableness.
But even accepting that I may not be fully understanding of the complexity facing a liberal attempting to be elected in the US, Hilary Clinton has surely broken new grounds of sycophancy.
She has just praised President Bush's "charm and charisma" at a time when the guy is tanking in the polls at 31%.
Leaving aside the fact that this dreadfully arrogant little man is neither charming nor charismatic, one has to wonder what gain Hilary thinks she will obtain from going so against the grain of public opinion on this."This shows her to be a consensus-builder, someone who's not polarising," Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic party consultant, said. "The rightwing take on her has always been that she's polarising. Certainly, there will be people on the left that may not like this relationship [with Mr Murdoch] but the fact that she could forge it speaks well of her ability to build consensus ... To be president, you've got to win the support of white Catholic men in the midwest. They don't tolerate shrieking and they don't tolerate polarisers."
I have to disagree with Hank on this. It does not show her to be a consensus-builder, it shows her to be spineless and willing to spout any lie in order to be electable.
The American left needs to find a path to power that does not accept the parameters laid down in a preordained Republican intellectual landscape. Power will not simply fall to those that become good at parroting the Republican themes better than Republicans can.
Democrats need to articulate a better way forward, emphasising the good of the collective over the self interests of the individual, and stop this futile attempt to fashion the argument in Republican terms.
The US currently spends more on health care per citizen than any other nation on Earth, yet it suffers from a health care system that ranks it behind almost every other industrialised nation on the planet, with Americans enjoying a life expectancy that ranks it on an equal par with Cuba.
The American medical system isn't working.
And yet Democrats seem always to back away from pointing these facts out, as if stating the truth will alienate their prospective voters.
I would argue that the opposite is true.
If Democrats start to point out what people know in their hearts to be true, the public will respond to that truth as they always do.
People are suckers for the truth.
And that is why they will view Hilary's false statements about Bush's "charm and charisma" with the contempt that it deserves.
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