Take Your Boobs to the White House Watch

As I've mentioned previously, in 2008, there was so much pressure for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the Democratic Primary, even when she still had a decent chance of winning the nomination, that I started cataloging the public admonishments for her to go away in a series called Take Your Boobs and Go Home Watch.

Now, with no small amount of bitter irony, all anyone can talk about is whether Hillary Clinton will run for the 2016 nomination. These are just the pieces I've read this morning:

1. Alex Pareene at Salon: One Thing We Don't Know About Hillary: Did She Learn Any Lessons From 2008? What I love, ahem, most about this piece is its final observation:

The other question, of course, is what a Clinton 2016 campaign would do to The Right. The anti-Clinton machine would have to crank itself back up, though it's been dormant for so many years now that the default position among right-wingers since 2007 has been basically to proclaim unalloyed admiration and love for Hillary Clinton, as a means of insulting Obama in comparison. Anyone with a vague recollection of the age of Whitewater and Vince Foster and Travelgate and all the other weird shit that consumed both the fringe right-wing and the mainstream press for much of Bill Clinton's terms in office knows what made the Clintons and their inner circle so paranoid and hypersensitive to attacks.

For years the standard Republican talking point on Hillary Clinton was that she was a socialist lesbian harridan castrating bitch-queen puppet-master. If the conservative media goes down that road again — and I see little to suggest that they wouldn't, honestly — it would tragically undo so much of the important image rehabilitation work the conservative movement has been engaging in since last November. And the impotent raging backlash mentality that still powers the movement would have one more thing to be pissed about. (This is obviously the best argument for Clinton in 2016.)

That's literally how the piece ends—on a note that the best argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency is discrediting the conservative movement because they can't resist unleashing fuckloads of vile misogynist vitriol on her. Welp, that's one way of looking at it. Personally, I believe the best argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency is that she is smart, talented, competent, and formidable, but what the fuck do I know.

(Yes, I know. I'm sure Pareene was just joking, and I am the Most Humorless Feminist in all of Nofunnington because I don't find it hilarious to make a joke about sacrificing the most qualified female presidential candidate in the nation upon the altar of exposing the rightwing's disgusting misogyny of which everyone is already painfully aware.)

2. Maggie Haberman at Politico: A Viewer's Guide to Hillary Clinton Fever. This piece opens with a perfect explanation of why the Take Your Boobs to the White House Watch exists:

Will she run or won't she?

The obsessive speculation about Hillary Clinton's plans for 2016 promises to be the longest and most intense parlor game in the history of American politics. It is a consuming fixation already, not just among the operatives and reporters who always inhale this stuff but to an extraordinary degree among average Americans.

A parlor game! Ha ha perfect. Not just the usual gross, cavalier, effects-indifferent description of politics as a game, but a parlor game. You know, for fancy ladies.

3. Leslie Kaufman in the NYT: Hillary Clinton Foreign Policy Book Coming Out Next Year. "Former Secretary of State and possible presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will publish a new book in the summer of 2014 about American foreign policy, her publisher, Simon & Schuster, said Thursday morning." Everyone who wants to run for president writes a book. For real. Except maybe Fred Karger.

4. ABC News (video begins to play automatically at link): Hillary Clinton Appearance Sparks Presidential Rumors. Ha ha really?! I'm pretty sure there were "rumors" about Hillary Clinton running for president before she made one public appearance after her tenure as Secretary of State.

5. Public Policy Polling: Paul on the Rise, Hillary at New High.

On the Democratic side support for Hillary Clinton to be the party nominee has hit its highest level of support in our national polling since the election last year. 64% of the party's voters want her to be the candidate to 18% for Joe Biden, 5% for Elizabeth Warren, and 3% for Andrew Cuomo with no one else polling above 2%. Clinton has majority support from liberals and moderates, men and women, African Americans, Latinos, and white voters, and voters within every age group that we track.

But the best argument for her candidacy is that she will drive conservatives into a self-discrediting frenzy of seething hatred.

6. Aaron Blake in the WaPo: James Carville Supporting Pro-Hillary Super PAC. Carville "emphasized he has not joined the super PAC in any official capacity but is happy to lend a hand to promote Clinton."

"I've been pretty clear that I'd like to see her run," he said. "But I'm not a member of the organization or anything like that."

All right then!

I know Hillary Clinton has skin fully one million inches thick, and there is virtually nothing under the sun in politics that could get to her anymore. But she is also human. And what I hope is that the country she has lovingly and loyally served having told her to get out of the way for Obama and go the fuck home, only to tell her now, four years later, that she can't go home because it's time to serve some more at our demand, is something that makes her laugh, even if mirthlessly. What I hope is that it doesn't bother her, because it sure as fuck bothers me.