Barry Crimmins, Political Satirist.

De-electable   link to this story »

From the "comments" section...
Among other things, reader Walter Dufresne opines:

If instead the GOP attack machine tears apart Obama this autumn, we'll never know for sure if Hillary would have better withstood their attacks. For me, the Democratic primaries have always been about precisely that issue, electability.

OK, I encourage comments on this site but it's a serious mistake to look upon my interest in your views as a sign of weakness. I haven't worked on barrycrimmins.com for twelve years and I haven't built up such a respectable following to simply allow people to paste copied conventional wisdom around here as if it's a relevant editorial comment on my work. And please don't presume I'm some sort of sap who is waiting to be saved by the Democratic Party.

That said, thanks for writing, Walter. You've given us a chance to consider the asinine and insidious term "electability." Hillary Clinton's electability is no longer in question. This is because SHE HAS LOST ELECTION AFTER ELECTION. She has been deemed unelectable by millions of voters and participants in four dozen Democratic primaries and caucuses. Her unelectability has been underscored by all the reactionaries who suddenly became her "grudging admirers" when it grew obvious that this fall's choice was going to be between a young and dynamic candidate and a man who should select a running mate capable of overseeing the transformation of the White House into an assisted living facility. If you really think troglodytes like Pat Buchanan, Joe Scarborough, Peggy Noonan and so many more suddenly developed an appreciation for the Clintons then I assume you are living in poverty because you gave your credit and banking information to an e-mailer who promised to send the national treasury of Nigeria to you for safekeeping.

Barack Obama and his campaign staff figured out exactly why Clinton is unelectable.

She is unelectable because...

People are sick of her and her husband -- sick to the point of colic.

People find her more annoying than Billy Mays.

People find her less credible than the science department at Liberty University.

People understand that electing her would give a booster shot of relevance to scum like Rush Limbaugh.

People are beginning to suspect she may actually be crazy -- it's those wide-eyed entrances.

Her "kitchen sink" has included everything from race-baiting, to gas tax-pandering, to promising to "obliterate" Iran -- as well as some serious fangs that she has shown too often, to too many people.

Her family is worth almost $140 million and yet she has run as one of us. This demonstrates how stupid she thinks we are.

She ran as if she were the incumbent president at a time when the incumbent president is reviled.

I could go on, but something about dead horses.

Anyway, now they're telling us Obama has to pick her as his running mate to make himself more -- you guessed it! -- electable.

Electability is just another way to say "pandering." It's a pretentious concept used as a smokescreen for the low act of assuming the worst of Americans and then making every effort to bring it out in them. In the case of this election the word is meant to remind us that Barack Obama is black. It is meant to imply that above anything, Americans will vote their bigotry. (Even if that's true, the only choice left is to support the candidate who annoys the bigots, isn't it?)

Concerns about electability are inevitably based of fear-- fear of sexuality (either different from your own or -- more scary-- the same), fear of non-flag pin wearers, fear of anyone willing to talk first and consider shooting later, fear of insulting our corporate masters, fear of falling out of lockstep with the mob, fear of intellectuals, fear of youth, fear of fellow workers, fear of diverse coalitions based on positive ideas and so on.

While I have serious concerns about Senator Obama's promises concerning several bad policies, his de facto publicly-financed campaign and sensible refusal to eschew sleeve-worn patriotism are encouraging. Mostly, I like the throng he has brought out. If and when he is elected, I hope these folks realize that it is not their job to immediately go to some website to agonize over his "re-electability" but to instead become watchdogs over the power they have just granted to their new president. He should listen to them because he will owe them.

Hillary Clinton's historic run for the presidency is now history and everyone knows it, even Senator Clinton. She isn't still running because she's actually crazy, she's running to recoup as much of the nearly $11.5 million she's "loaned" her campaign. Think about it-- at a time when this election could hinge on the public's perception of how a candidate would handle the mortgage mess as president, one candidate has openly poured good money after bad -- into her own doomed presidential bid. Even more electability!

Now she wants us to repay her by donating to her campaign or (if you believe the rumors) she wants us to repay her via Barack Obama's campaign chest. Senator Clinton's campaign may be broke but it's still bursting at the seams with audacity.

Perhaps there is more to this than just the eight figures the Clintons have "loaned" the campaign. Perhaps the true source of that bread is the problem. What if Bill's "speaking fees" were simply advance payment for influence that, when Hillary loses, will no longer be his to peddle? Maybe the reason he was said to be crying the other night was because he was thinking what certain Colombians do to people who do not pay their debts in full.

Senator Clinton knows once she officially tosses in the sponge, it will be hard to ask the little folks to restore the ten or so percent of her family fortune that she's squandered in a vain attempt to scare her way into the Oval Office. She knows once the door is slammed on that office (at least for now) that it will be difficult for Bill to find work banging nails next to Jimmy Carter much less collecting speaking honorariums the size of many nations' GNP's.

So while Mrs. Clinton maintains the pretense of continuing a noble fight for the public good what she's really fighting for is her own money. Bet the bank that she'll seem more sincere doing this than she's seemed at any other point during her run for the presidency. And this will result in some people telling us she has become that much more electable.

last updated Friday, May 9th, 2008 12:05AM

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Gassed   link to this story »

“It’s full speed onto the White House," said Hillary Clinton last night, tossing caution aside and announcing a bold plan to level the venerated structure with a suicide bomb rather than allow anyone but her family to take up residence at the swank Pennsylvania Avenue address.

Before her late night remarks at Indianapolis' Murat Center, Clinton and her boosters suffered through a considerable wait brought on by the inability of Reich Limbaugh's supporters to reverse the will of legitimate participants in the Indiana Democratic Primary by any but the scantiest of margins. So the Hoosiers for Hillary stayed up well beyond their bedtimes, save for the Klansman for Klinton who spend most evenings night-riding, cross-burning and harrying race-mixers as is the Ku Klux Kustom begun all those years ago on fertile Indiana soil. Hoodless, they were unrecognizable from other factions in the Hillarightist coalition, Operation Chaos.

The dragged out evening allowed physicians time to make some emergency pharmaceutical adjustments to the candidate. The psychotropic tune-up was necessitated by a security breach that allowed reality, in the form of North Carolina Democratic Primary results, to briefly confront the New York Senator. Her pitiful margin in Indiana combined with the malicious Tarheel thumping to make for the cruelest kind of double-digit disaster she could face -- one in which she fell behind her opponent by at least another ten pledged delegates. Dawn came at around midnight for Clinton who now knows that unless she uses nukes as conventional weapons in Denver, she has no chance of becoming the nominee. None. This means it will be Barack Obama who tears the gift-wrapping off a doddering Republican opponent this fall. This means we will not be duck-duck-goosed by yet another Bush or Clinton presidency. And that means something.

Judging how she finally took the stage with a burst of frenetic smiling and waving, it looked like the medicos may have pulled off a miracle. But all too soon, gaseous rhetorical vapors began taking a terrible toll on both candidate and audience. Before it was over, everyone had wilted like orchids on an ice floe. As Clinton sung with the swans, her husband loomed behind her looking so red-cheeked that it seemed possible that he might actually be feeling embarrassment (although the smart money was on the former prez's involvement in an accident involving a tanning bed, gin and a junior staffer.)

Even if Hillary Clinton somehow managed to bludgeon her way to the nomination and then defeat John McCain this fall, her presidency would reek of Robert Mugabe, or even worse, George W. Bush. But it'll never happen because this race is over. References to the Eveready Bunny, Rasputin and trick candles that re-ignite have grown threadbare. Of course disillusionment with her novelty shop Lazurus act won't stop the New York senator from demanding that super delegates give her the nomination. The voters have had their chance-- now it's your turn! Right, and at the end of the regular baseball season, let's skip the playoffs and simply have the owners hold meetings to decide which team wins the World Series.

As the night wore on and the crowd grew restive waiting for their candidate, Hoosier Senator Evan Bayh tap-danced the full length of the Indy 500 in an attempt to limit the spread of narcolepsy at the Clinton wake. In the meantime, Obama's remarks electrified the throng at his enormous North Carolina victory party while simultaneously euthanizing the hopes of Clinton dead-enders.

While waiting for the Indiana totals, the cable networks marked time by reeling in some of the slack from the jaws of their commentators, who finally seemed to have worked through the denial stage of their grief over the terminal status of the Clinton campaign. Serious hilarity ensued on CNN when Clinton family bootblack Lanny Davis, accustomed to leisurely swatting softballs in such surroundings, was asked to try to explain how his candidate could possibly garner the Democratic nomination. His clumsy response looked even shiftier as Davis squirmed in a suit last worn by Joseph Bologna as King Kaiser in the "Boss Hijack" sketch in My Favorite Year.

Also on CNN was Clinton acolyte Paul Begala, who smiled falsely while attempting to write off Obama's supporters as a combination of "African-Americans and Eggheads." He cautioned that Obama would alienate "working class whites." Begala made himself scarce after spewing this anti-intellectual and racist bile. Too bad no one bothered to ask him why working class blacks don't matter. Nor was he challenged on his assertion that white working folks simply won't vote for Obama because, we were left to conclude, the only thing they hate more than black people is smart black people. And no one bothered to call this Bill and Hill apologist on the most glaring insult of all-- it was W.J. Clinton and his so-called "free trade" deals that backed up the trucks to America's loading docks and jammed them full of decent jobs for deportation to the Third World. Conscience-free trade has screwed over working class people of every background and stripe. So now we're supposed to hate one another rather than the Clintons and the slime at the DLC and their corporate masters who have sold our decent and secure lives down the river and across oceans for the sake of profiteering? Spare me.

As the race in Indiana grew as tight as the grip of the political grim reaper on the Clinton Campaign, I thought of Paul Begala and did some smiling of my own. Unlike Begala's, my grin was genuine because it came at a moment when I knew the shameless, unethical and divisive campaign of Hillary Clinton was taking its last few zombified steps. I smiled because I knew that finally a drain had been installed in Clinton's notorious kitchen sink and that its vile contents were gushing onto the Guccis of the candidate and her strategists. What a tragedy for the working class!

In a week in which Clinton promised to bring down both OPEC and taxes at the pump, one thing was clear last night -- her campaign isn't cooking with gas, it's just cooked.

last updated Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 12:05AM

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No Taxation On Acceleration!   link to this story »

I just arrived home from Boston. The shows were terrific and we raised enough money to buy Bob Lazarus a barrel of oil. Laz is doing great and so are all the Ding Ho alums. It was wonderful to see everyone, including so many of the Ding's patrons.

Speaking of oil, the federal gas tax really added up during my trip from upstate NY to Beantown. If only someone had declared a holiday from that brutal tariff, my trip would have been perfect. The idea of untaxed unleaded is an obvious winner --especially considering how the fee could simply be reassigned to the oil companies. They'd never risk any precious profits by lobbying to fight such a move. Once Big Oil is good and saddled with our old gas taxes, it would never try to pull off anything so sleazy as passing along the cost of the increased tax (and then some) to the consumer.

Besides, it's about time a politician showed the moral courage required to take a stand for the haggard and downtrodden Humvee owners.
Best of all, such a plan would eventually lead to reduced consumption of foreign oil because once highway maintenance is suspended due to lack of funding, the resulting bridge collapses, tunnel cave-ins and overpass failures will serve as a deterrent to joy riding. But first comes this year's summer driving months with nary a road project to slow us down between here and Chico's Monkey Farm (Live Grandmother Monkeys!)

Once the gas tax holiday is over, I'm sure the American people will be thrilled to start paying it again. What's another 18 cents [or so] when it's September and you're already spending upwards of $4 per gallon? Hell, the goddamned pols will fight for the honor of announcing the reinstatement of the petrol levy.

So the gas tax holiday can't miss. An occasional bridge plunge is a small price to pay for a few months of tax-free fill-ups. -- BC

last updated Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 12:05AM

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Lloyd the Dog 8/23/98 - 8/25/07   link to this story »

It is with extreme sadness that the family of Lloyd the Dog announces his passing at 8:45 AM Saturday, August 25, 2007. He was a remarkable friend, loyal family member and brilliant and loving dog.

He will never, ever be forgotten. He will always, always remain in our hearts. We were so lucky to have him illuminate our lives for the past eight years and forty-six weeks

We'd like to express our gratitude for all the kindness shown to all of us during his illness as well as the rest of his life. In his memory we humbly request that you treat animals with love, dignity and respect.

Karen Crist
Barry Crimmins

last updated Saturday, August 25th, 2007 12:08AM

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