Not just hubris, Mrs. Clinton is shameless or...

She is remarkably insensitive, or stupider than anyone has as yet imagined.

It's one thing to create historical context as part of a counter-argument about not allowing the campaign to drag on too long. It's perfectly legitimate to do so, and indeed, older voters with at least two or three brain cells left to rub together, and the three or four dozen students of history left in our country I should think are not particularly concerned about the length of the campaign. As long as it isn't carried into the convention, where it truly threatens to be divisive for the Democratic Party and corrosive of their chances, a longer campaign is the way it goes sometimes.

However, tacking on the remark about Bobby Kennedy's assassination in June of 1968, after his victory in the California primary, was gratuitous, no more clarifying of her position, and, like certain other of the ways during the campaign this year that she has elected to express herself on specific sensitive subjects, it suggests that Hillary Clinton is either truly malicious, or that we should have concerns about her judgment and "experience." Clearly the 35 years of public service she flaunts with every opportunity have not been sufficient to learn the lessons of not sticking your foot in your mouth or in a bucket of shit any less often than her opponent. In fact, it seems a habit of expression with her. Barack Obama seems at least able to learn from his infelicities of language, and adapt and correct.

I'm afraid, late in the game as it is, that Hillary Clinton is merely expressing, perhaps despite herself, an alarming level of desperation or an inability to think on her feet, hitherto unremarked, or both.

I don't think we need a leader whose passions, or even whose innate compassion, or whatever other incapacitating perfectly human traits regularly and predictably lead them to expressive gaffes in public of destructive potentiality. We already have the king (for perpetuity) of linguistic ineptitude in the White House. I don't think we now want, immediately to follow, a queen.

Comments

[Tom Myers]

You Obama zealots need to lighten up. What do you care about whether Senator Clinton stays in the race or not? What do you care what the pathetic, desparate loser of the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination says? What do you care what divisions she creates between various factions in the party? The Democrats appear near certain to nominate the Great Unifier for whom reuniting Democrats to defeat a third Bush term would seem as easy as talking the Iranian mullahs into stopping their nuclear program and cozying up with our Israeli allies and us, talking the Castros into freeing their political prisoners, and talking Hugo Chavez into stopping using his oil money to foment Marxist terrorism against Latin American democracies.

[Bob]

It raises the question of whether

a) the spectre of defeat has left her unhinged. That emotionally, she is the sort that doesn't bend, but is rigid, then breaks

or

b) this is a calculation on her part to suggest to the party how damaging she's willing to be if she doesn't get her way.

This is not a lapsis (lapsus??) lingua as some have claimed.

[Patricia]

I added a comment on the earlier article which would be more appropriate to this one. To heck with linguistic ineptitude, irksome as it is. I worry about the near-psychotic quality of her craven lust for power. She is fantasizing - publicly!! - about her opponent`s murder!! Is that the only way she can see forward?