Reply #34: thank you, Huskerlaw, for posting this.

[SheilaT]

I am so tired of the "Hillary is a goddess" posts here on DU, as well as from those I know outside DU who also ought to know better.

Hillary is not the liberal she's assumed to be. As Huskerlaw points out, she's supported Bushco far too often. And to speak out honestly against her is not being a troll. It's being honest.

Too many Democrats, for reason which escape my understanding, think of her as our savior. She's not. She's a politician who learned the art at her husband's knee. Bill is the all-time consummate politician.

It's not necessarily a bad thing. When I ran for the Kansas State House last year (I lost to a popular incumbent moderate Republican) I did learn something about the temptation to say whatever you must to get a voter to vote for you. And I wasn't in a high-profile race.

So long as we have the stupid electoral college system (and I'm really restraining my language here) there's no point in voting for a Democrat if you live in a Republican state (as I do) nor vice-versa. In Kansas, my vote for John Kerry didn't count. Plus, the fact that his campaign sucked money and volunteers from Kansas over to Missouri, without a single person from Missouri, so far as I could tell, ever coming back here to help out any candidates on this side of the state line. All I saw there was a one-way street. I will NEVER AGAIN support a presidential candidate who does not fully support all the Democratic candidates at all levels.

Which is what Howard Dean is currently doing, and getting roundly criticized for. Actually, he's being criticized for not going along with the standard party bull-crap.

The sad fact is that we are still in the beginning part of a long spiral downward. We're in a historical cycle that will eventually culminate in a true crisis. This is just the beginning. Read Generations and/or The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe to understand the cycles of history. It's sort of like we're Germany and it's 1937. The Depression seems to be lifting, but we don't have any idea that WWII is only two years away, and it's going to devastate our personal lives and change everything forever.