Hillary is guilty as sin, and here's why. When you write or speak publicly for a living, sometimes you screw up, but there's still an internal censor that shuts you off when certain topics come to mind. One of those topics is death, particularly pertaining to political candidates. When Ted Kennedy fell ill last weekend, for example, I wanted to write about what would happen to his Senate seat if he died. But you don't do that in politics (even if, with an evenly divided Senate a lot of political insiders were understandably concerned about the day's events) - you don't do that in civilized society - so I referenced, politely, how succession would work in Massachusetts "if for any reason Kennedy were to step down from his post." I made it sounds as if Kennedy might choose to resign, rather than talk about the very real possibility that he might die.
There have been a number of posts, in the past, where I've wanted to write that Hillary was "dead wrong" about something, and Joe would ping me and say "you can't do that." Why, I'd ask. Because you just can't say anything that sounds like "death" surrounding a political candidate, especially a presidential one. An even more recent, and relevant, example happened only hours before Hillary invoked Bobby Kennedy's assassination yesterday. Joe sent me a paragraph from an MSNBC story in which Hillary's top advisers talked, again, about some unforeseen event bringing down Obama before the convention. The graf was creepy, it gave both of us a ghoulish feel, but we didn't write about it because it would have been equally ghoulish to even bring up the notion of something violent happening to a candidate, even if we were writing about Hillary having been the person to raise the notion.
I'm even having a hard time writing about what Hillary said now. I don't know what to title my posts. I'm not sure when I should even use the word "assassination." For Hillary to invoke Bobby Kennedy at all when talking about this race, let alone to use the word "assassination," is beyond creepy. It isn't done in politics. Even if it's just because of superstitious fears of jinxing things. In Europe, old Europe at least, you don't talk about serious illnesses of another, lest the mere mention bring the illness down on you and yours as well. In politics, we all have a bit of Old Europe in us. That is why what Hillary said is so startling, so offensive, and so horribly telling. You reference, if you must, "the horrible tragedy of Bobby Kennedy." (And even that is a stretch.) But you don't invoke assassinations, out of the blue, especially when there is a lot of fear, sotto voce, about the safety of the other guy in a country with an unfortunate history of political violence (see, even just now, I had written "assassination" and it so gave me the creeps, I changed the word to "political violence").
What Hillary said wasn't just sickening. The very fact that she said it broke a lot of unwritten norms in this town. And that's horribly telling about who this woman is.
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