In an unmistakable signal of the tone her presidency would take, Hillary Clinton has agreed to appear on The O’Reilly Factor tonight, on right wing cable network Fox News. Hillary Clinton is demonstrating that she embraces the most extreme elements of the Republican smear machine.
It’s true that Barack Obama appeared on Fox News a few days ago, but that was on Fox News Sunday, a show that at least attempts to appear to be journalistic and objective. The O’Reilly Factor is a show purely of right wing opinion. The O’Reilly Factor is the worst of right wing extremism that Fox News has to offer.
I think that it was unwise for Barack Obama to go on Fox News Sunday, but it’s an entirely different matter for Hillary Clinton to go make friendly with Bill O’Reilly.
Clinton’s coming handshake with Bill O’Reilly comes as a particular insult to progressive Democrats, whom she snubbed by voting for the war in Iraq. Since that time, Hillary Clinton has not entered into serious dialogue with the antiwar majority within the Democratic Party. Yet here she is today, reaching out to Bill O’Reilly.
If Hillary Clinton had tried to reach out to people in her own political party in the way she has reached out to Republicans, she would not have gone from apparent inevitability to desperately fighting to remain in the Democratic presidential race a year later.
I’d like to see Hillary Clinton go on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, or on the Bill Moyers Journal. It’s not going to happen. Hillary Clinton has always believed that she doesn’t need to show respect to the progressive base of the Democratic Party, because we’ll just follow along like good little dogs once she makes a show of power.
This morning, I am not feeling like a good little dog.
It’s becoming ever more apparent that Hillary is a Republican. Just like Lieberman, she pretends to be a Democrat, but all her actions (her words can be twisted so that she doesn’t have to follow any of her campaign plans once elected) indicate that she’s in this race now to bring down or stop Obama so that McCain can continue the disastrous policies of the Bush administration and corporate America.
Clinton isn’t a Republican. She might not be a Democrat either. I imagine she is whatever she thinks will get her the most attention at the moment. In a room full of Weight Watchers she’d be a blueberry muffin.
So why is it that she sees herself in a room full of Republicans when she’s running for the Democratic nomination?
AT: Hillary’s political career began as a Goldwater Republican – she worked for his campaign while in college.
Now, the conservatives then were much more honorable and far different from the current brand of “neocons” that we have today. For one thing they upheld the Constitution, though there has always been corruption (with both parties and in all branches).
Agreed, the Republican party of today has very little in common with it’s earlier incarnations.