Sherry Chandler » Clinton Derangement Syndrome
Clinton Derangement Syndrome
I keep swearing off this subject but then something comes up like Anglachel’s take on Hillary Hatred:
The key marker of a Hillary Hater is the willingness to state, in almost the same breath, that [Hillary hatred] is out of control and then to plunge in for a full-throated round of it. The calumny, of which the respondents, just like our own pitiful Josh Marshall, appear oblivious, is their own. They are engaged in a performative (hey, I did spend a lot of time in grad school learnin’ the lingo…) of hatred. They are not describing something about Hillary (she, as a corporeal being, is negated) - they create “Hillary” with their assertions about what is or is not relevant to the construct. Indeed, the respondents sometimes do not appear to understand the effect they are having on the listener, the way in which they are exposing their own innner psyche:
…
Fish then dives directly into the darkest heart of the revivified Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its powerful hold on the Left, the way in which it is used to rationalize support for Obama. As with Hillary, Obama himself is erased as a person and reappears as a screen upon which the lines of CDS are limned.
Anglachel is riffing off Stanley Fish’s column A Calumny A Day to Keep Hillary Away, which in turn is a response to all the Hillary-hating comments he got to his first column on the subject of Hillary Hatred: All You Need is Hate. All good reads.
What interests me here is the notion that CDS hurts not just Clinton but Obama too and the whole Democratic Party by reifying both our candidates. It amazes me how naïve some pundits on the left are to fall for this. It is not Hillary Clinton who is dividing the party. It’s the right. From Fish:
Carolyn Kay ([commenter] 456) makes the point when she observes that if you vote against Clinton because you fear the virulence of her most vocal enemies, “you have allowed the right-wing hatemongers to decide who our candidate will be.”
To quote Anglachel again:
How inconsiderate of her, indeed. How dare she force the political conditions which make us feel uncomfortable. This gets back to something I have been saying again and again in the last month, where I point out the deep discomfort that the wine-track left and especially the A-List Boyz have with political conflict. They somehow want to have victory without having anyone besmirch their candidate and without having that candidate taint his dainty hands with the crude weilding of power. What Krugman (here and here) and Perlstein both point out is that there are divisions in this nation that run so deep and are so powerful that we have no choice save to fight them tooth and nail, and to understand that we have only our mortal, flawed and always already compromised leaders to rally behind. What these respondents hate the most about Hillary (and also about Bubba) is that they are “unclean”.
And Fish:
Of course Obama has every right to take advantage of the enmity his opponent has garnered over the years. It is the politically savvy thing to do, just as it is politically savvy for him to insist that the superdelegates follow the voters in their districts, given that a majority of them is known to favor Senator Clinton. But political savvy is perhaps not what Obama wants to claim. His boast–problematic down the road–is that he is not a politician at all.
Meanwhile, the Big Tent Democrat sees the future in Bobby Jindal’s eyes. Sigh.
Guys, we are not electing “Most Popular” in the Senior Class. It’s issues we need to think about. We need candidates who are actually going to accomplish something for us whether we like them or not! And we need more Democrats in the Congress!
Rant courtesy of Shakesville blogwhoring.
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