Not just hubris, Mrs. Clinton is shameless or…

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

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.

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