WWHD?

During last week's podcast, I referenced a piece in Salon that advanced a hypothetical that at least a few shell-shocked Obama supporters have been turning over in their minds lately: What would Hillary have done? Despite catching a certain amount of crap for even venturing out onto that very thin ice, I stand by the argument that it's only natural to wonder what the road not taken might have been like when the road taken wound up leading to that ice in the first place -- hell, my entire life has been like that -- and I've never edited my public statements before so I see no reason to keep completely quiet simply out of fear of appearing to be piling on or bandwagoning. I get the impression that I'm like a lot of people who've wondered if all the things they didn't much like about Clinton during the 2008 campaign -- qualities traditionally associated with Hillary, such as her willingness to fight really dirty and her understanding that politics is indeed occasionally a contact sport -- would've been assets used to put the dangerously intransigent Congressional Republicans in their place over the past few weeks.

Barack Obama is fantastic at the long-game and at thwarting his opponents in ways they might not first grasp, and that's served him -- and the country -- well on more than one occasion. He's a chess player, and a pretty good one; it's one of the reasons I tend to trust his judgment more often than not. But I still couldn't help feeling like we didn't need a chess player this last time around; we needed an MMA fighter willing to step into the octagon and pummel the living shit out of somebody. And so, yeah, I wondered if Hillary would've been as willing to put up with the nonsense dispensed by the GOP and its tea-bagging overlords, the senile dipshits who openly applaud the destruction of the U.S. economy because I guess it somehow meets their twisted ends. I've maintained for some time that indiscriminately attacking Obama from the center or left, in the current political climate, simply does the work of Republican strategists for them -- that smart accountability, the kind that acknowledges political reality, is the only way to go in this situation. But I got a little pissed and maybe let it show, and once again I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that.

It took the debate with Cesca to kind of ground me a tad and bring me back to planet Earth, despite the fact that I was never suggesting that discussing the positives and negatives of a hypothetical Clinton primary run in 2012 amounted to outright buyer's remorse anyway.

I bring all this up because Joan Walsh of Salon apparently feels the same way I do, which is to say that she did a little pondering of the road not taken recently and was handed a healthy dose of reality by the always-great Ari Melber of the Nation. Her piece today in Salon spells out in no uncertain terms who's really to blame for the political and economic nightmare we're all suffering through right now. And here's a hint -- it isn't Barack Obama.

Salon: Mistakes of the 2008 Primary/8.10.11