It does not surprise me that it takes a woman to sit before a partisan panel and keep her cool. What does it take to do that for over eight hours, taking a grilling from people who most likely are not as smart nor as experienced as you? Age and experience. Childbirth. Marriage. Menopause. And a life in politics.
Many of the faces on the Benghazi panel looked weirdly modified to me. Hillary doesn't do Botox, hasn't had a chemical peel, a nose job, or a face stretched like small sized pantyhose over an extra large sized leg. She's not trim. She looks her age. Hillary Clinton has been around a long time and it shows.
I always felt Hillary wore her heart in the right place, and that place was never on her sleeve. Yet I voted for Barack Obama for president twice. I admit that I wanted an African American as president in 2008. African Americans were forced to build America with their bare hands as an enslaved race. They never got retribution for it, either. They were oppressed in the most profound way, and suffer now from decades of discrimination on every level.
To make it to where Obama did you've got to be better than everybody. Much, much better. I felt African Americans were overdue and Obama the was perfect candidate to break that barrier. He was eloquent, level-headed, intellectual, and he lived in Chicago, where I grew up. So my heart went even softer for him on that count.
I met a chef at party who worked for the Pritzker Family, the billionaire liberals who bankrolled a big slice of Obama's campaign. She gave me the inside scoop on the moment Barack and Michelle won Philadelphia and clinched Florida. She was with them. The story she told me made both of us cry. When the President and his family walked out on that stage in Grant Park I was watching with my friends in Southern California, and we wept. My niece was at the event in Chicago and she sent me a video. I felt it was one of American's finest moments.
What followed has been shameful, of course, if not revelatory in a cathartic way. The bigoted attempt to force the president to fail has become one of our country's biggest shams. Still, Obama has come out smelling like a rose plucked right from the Rose Garden.
Now it's time for a woman.
I really like Bernie Sanders, but the nation will have a hard time electing a so-called Socialist. I don't want to take that risk. And we need him in the Senate. We need his vote. I'm not convinced that he'd be a great administrator nor able to bring the parties together and get his agenda going. And, quite frankly, I am sick of men, any men, telling me I can or can't have an abortion.
I'm sick of a man telling me what I can do with my body or whether or not I deserve equal pay or should have birth control pills covered by my insurance policy. I don't care how far you lean to the left, if you are a man I want you to shut up about what I should get or not get.
Hillary won the first debate as far as I'm concerned. She out shined them, out smarted them, and held her ground as if she was the only one standing on it. I want somebody in the oval office whose feathers can't be ruffled. And finally I want a woman in The White House who isn't relegated to the children's table, as much as I love children.
But it was the the eight hours of the Benghazi Hearings, of which I watched three, that have convinced me she's the boss.
So blatantly partisan that they go beyond a bad joke, the Republican creeps on the panel, replete with pin-heads and ugly ties, can't even do a good job of pretending they are anything but carpetbaggers selling snake oil. Gleaning no new information and barely grilling her on who actually attacked the embassy and what we are going to do about them, has made the Republicans look even dumber than the current motley crew of self serving knit-pickers they already so stupidly are. In trying to make Hillary appear un-presidential, their attempt has backfired loud and clear, like a gun shot in the middle of the night.
Hillary answered the insulting questions with calm and aplomb. She's been through 20 years of personal attacks and harsh judgments, her husband's two-term presidency, his numerous flings, and his pubic humiliation. She has also been through a term in the Senate followed by, in my opinion, a stellar performance as Secretary of State. And she has finally found, in her appearance in the first debate and at the Benghazi Hearings, her persona. She's not a hugger. She's not a crier. But she is indeed a woman who won't crack under pressure. She's sharp as they come.
The Republicans don't have a presidential candidate who's worth a dime, figuratively. Ben Carson is in the lead right now and he's on a book tour. His weird statements on everything make someone as mushy as Ted Cruz seem like he might be kind of rational and make Trump look better than what he is, a game show host. The whole weird show the Republicans have put on plays like a ludicrous number from a '30s musical or an absurd parable Jerzy Kosinsky might have written.
Can it get any stranger than who the Republican candidates are?
The Democratic debates may have been too tame and careful, but the candidates at least talked policy and not about who has the scariest face or weakest energy In their lineup of lightweights the GOP debaters called each other everything short of poo-poo heads. The Democrats didn't waste our time fabricating preposterous lies against Plan Parenthood nor condemning same sex marriage or who should be allowed to end a pregnancy and for what reason.
It astounds me that in the face of the horrors of the world right now, anyone would have the time to deny love, affordable health care, better schooling, social security, and a higher minimum wage. But that is the right wing agenda. Republicans can't make a policy unless it denies somebody something they really need.
Apart from their efforts to crush the black and brown vote, the Republicans only option now is trying to take down Hillary's campaign. And they are failing miserably at it.
I want Hillary Clinton for president. The only thing that will satisfy me after the great run of our historic first African American is a smart, tough, unflappable woman. I don't want to see another white male in The White House for as long as I live, unless he's gay. Openly.
I want change, and not in the form of Fiorina or Palin, but in the shape of Hillary Clinton. She will make one hell of a president. In fact, she might be one of our best.
A-the-fuck-men.