Skirting my responsibilities

I try to be fair, and I like to think that I don’t suffer from regional bias.
However, I’m afraid that my Northern regional bias might have been exhibited in several posts in which I repeatedly compared Hillary Clinton to Lurleen Wallace.
I also compared both Hillary Clinton and Lurleen Wallace to Peronist wives…
For using Lurleen Wallace to criticize Hillary, I might owe Lurleen Wallace an apology. Whether I owe the Peronistas or their wives an apology is more complicated, as it depends on what moral standard should be used in judging Third World regimes — a topic beyond the scope of this post.
More properly, maybe I owe Glenn Reynolds’s mother an apology, for this is what she said:

“I remember Lurleen Wallace. I was a citizen in Wallace’s Alabama. And Hillary Clinton is NO Lurleen Wallace!”

OK, fair enough.
I never really studied Lurleen Wallace, although I’m sure that she and Hillary are politically dissimilar enough that the point is well taken. My focus was not on political similarities so much as on the circumvention of constitutional provisions. In the case of Lurleen Wallace it was the Alabama Constitution:

Wallace devised a plan in which his wife, Lurleen, would run for governor while he controlled the policies and procedures of the governorship in the background, duplicating the strategy in which Ma Ferguson won the 1925 election for governor in Texas.
Wallace’s attempt to change the succession rule before the 1966 campaign failed. However, using his wife as his electoral surrogate succeeded, and Mrs. Wallace won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966. She was elected Governor of Alabama in November 1966, and was inaugurated in January 1967.

Of course, in Bill Clinton’s case, the roadblock is the United States Constitution. No reasonable person believes that Hillary would be a candidate for president but for the fact that she is the wife of Bill Clinton, and there is considerable agreement across the political spectrum that her candidacy represents an end-run around the 22nd Amendment.
Whether the voters care about the ethics is another matter, but I think it would be more honest to let them have a crack at dumping the 22nd Amendment and then simply being allowed to vote for Bill.
(I wish some GOP prankster would get Maria Shriver to run on Arnie’s behalf.)
Interestingly, Jane Fonda called Clinton “a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina.” Ann Althouse correctly perceives some problems with Fonda’s comparison, but I’ll take it at it’s face value and add that actually, I do think Hillary could quite possibly be a ventriloquist, but only for that portion of the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina.
Just don’t expect me to PhotoShop such gruesome details.


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3 responses to “Skirting my responsibilities”

  1. M. Simon Avatar

    Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This “ass-talk” had a sort of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you hafta do is “turn loose”? Well, this talking hit you right down there. A bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival, you dig, and tos tart with, it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better Oh”, that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it, but it was clever, like, “Oh, I say, are you still down there, old thing? ‘Nah, I had to go relieve myself!’”
    After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib, and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy incurving hooks, and started eating. He thought this was cute at first, and built an act around it. But the asshole would eat its way through his pants, and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags, nobody loved it, an’- and wanted.. and it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it. But nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him, “It’s you who will shut up in the end, not me. Because, we don’t need you around here any more. I can talk, and eat, AND shit”.
    After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call “un D.T.”, undifferentiated tissue, (herr) which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly, and grow there. Grow anywhere . . . on him . . . grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell.
    So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous.. did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa, and only among negros, where the little toe amputates spontaneously?
    Except for the eyes, you dig? That’s the one thing the asshole couldn’t do, was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophed, so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. it was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For awhile, you could see the silent helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eye on the end of a stalk.
    Nova Convention

  2. M. Simon Avatar

    Dr. Benway on talking assholes.