Running like a girl

Though it's pretty sparse at present, Hillary Clinton's campaign has launched a Web site called "ICanBePresident.com," supposedly aiming to convince budding young politicos of all gender-types that they, too, can blossom into the likes of Hillary. Not merely by slipping into spontaneous Southern accents or channeling multiple policy personalities, but by one day making their own bids for the nation's highest, most thankless office.

But for now, they'll have to settle for nagging their parents to "make history" for them by donating to Hillary's campaign. (Ooh, look, you get a dot on a Google map and for your trouble, sign me up -- that makes all the 8 billion subsequent fundraising e-mails worthwhile.)

Plainly, the real question here is why Hillary's campaign thinks it's found a rallying cry. Even the conduit for what eight-year-old girls are thinking that is Tucker Carlson wrote it off as "retro" and condescending to act on the notion that girls today need to be told they can, in fact, grow up to be president.

Why would any intelligent, ambitious, capable young woman these days even WANT to be president? What little girl would set her sights on Pennsylvania Avenue when she could do something lucrative and influential that doesn't entail all the crushing responsibility, scrutiny, inefficacy and perpetual criticism?

And look at what the last one has done to the integrity of the office itself, who in her right mind would want anything to do with that mess? The Army and NASA are probably having fewer image problems right now in recruiting.

The fact is, the kind of ego and monomania and incapacity for normal human feeling required to mount a modern presidential campaign could, otherwise directed, just as easily land a person in a padded room or a dingy urban hermit hovel accented with tarps, meat hooks and human-skin lamp shades. Seriously, why all the fuss about day care centers? Looks to me like they're turning out so many future leaders, they're veritable POTUS mills.

Notice all the cancer making news in DC these days? See, kids, you do this kind of work for too long, your very cells start killing themselves in protest and taking innocent bystanders with them, just like little suicide bombers. Wouldn't you rather just go into graphic design instead?

Juvenile efforts notwithstanding, word is starting to coalesce about some of the Hillary camp's other ideas for targeting female voters, including an "ambitious effort" to build an online "Women's Leadership Network" and enlist a chorus of "prominent female supporters who made breakthroughs in their own fields" to sing backup. Hillary adviser Ann Lewis said when women have important questions, "they're more likely to talk to another woman. If we can get a discussion going among women about the campaign, and Hillary as a candidate, it could be hugely important."

Maybe so, but I'm not sure that's the best way to go about stoking female support. Not only do women not automatically like candidates just because they're "our own kind," but we hold them to higher standards. Everyone knows women are other women's worst critics. There is no gender inversion of "bros before hos" -- nothing but top-shelf, ultra-caustic venom will do for our "sisters."

And when you're already operating at a disadvantage in getting our attention (Hillary needs a sweeping, strategized operation; all Obama has to do is go shirtless at the beach), do you really want to get other women together to talk about Hillary? If you do, you may not like where that conversation goes. Because once we're through ripping apart her issue positions, her speaking style, her record, her personal life and all those other traditional benchmarks of political prowess... there are those pantsuits.

Don't believe me? Here's a little experiment to try for yourself. Take a look at this article's accompanying picture, taken a while back at the Bloody Sunday commemoration in Selma, Ala. (Really, go look, then keep reading.)

Now, ask yourself: where was the first, natural visual resting place to which your eyes were drawn? I'm betting it was Hillary's gargantuan-looking hips in that textile trainwreck of a pantsuit. Just sayin'...

The point is, in politics as in life, men come and go, but your female "friends" will always be there. You know it, they know it; so you all treat each other like bloodthirsty weasels and everyone's still cool. It's a great platform for social bonding and the continuation of ordered society and all, but not so much for mounting a general election campaign.

Now, let me just state for the record I am not a Hillary supporter, but I do not bear significantly more animosity toward her than anyone else at this point. I don't yet (I have to hope it's a "yet") have a favorite whom I would actually, reasonably want to be in charge of this nation -- though in the interest of full disclosure, I think I've developed a disturbingly apolitical and probably residual of something traumatic from my childhood crush on Al Gore (Babies on fi-yah!).

But, thankfully, I'm a blogger, not a journalist, so this is all OK.

The scum of all fears

An intriguing notion is making news regarding ex-NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his '08 presidential bid. Not only is he getting burned by a major firefighters union rebutting years of post-9/11 hero lore with reports from the ground, but Sept. 11 first-responder families are apparently rather eager to climb aboard the next "Swift Boat," arguing Giuliani's disaster preparedness policies as mayor basically doomed their loved ones.

While Salon's supposition that Democrats might actually get the chance to fire the torpedoes before the GOP primary bombardment exhausts the ammo is adorably quaint, the mere capability raises a whole other issue.

Such criticisms are compelling and perfectly legitimate, especially for a candidate running (explicitly or not) on his 9/11 record, but are they productive?

After all, none of us thinks or reacts too rationally when it comes to 9/11. Remember when 90 percent of us registered approval of President Bush's handling of the crisis -- which, because it didn't entail (publicized) sniveling in his bunker or a massive civil liberties-grab, we judged just peachy? Six years, two wars and one election later, Bush's numbers are well below freezing, to the point that he's finding a sufficiently warm reception among the burning-Bush-with-Hitler-mustache effigies in Latin America to make a week-long, lame-duck vacation out of it.

9/11 illustrates one of the many catch-22s of politics: When our passions get peaked, we pay attention and engage, but we do so on necessarily distorted perceptions. It's no coincidence the Bush administration is rolling out the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Gitmo "confession" story just as the U.S. attorney scandal and the Iraq debate -- maybe, finally? -- are heating up.

Which is why I can't help but daydream about what could happen if we were somehow able to purge all referents to 9/11 from the political discourse like so many no-longer-expedient prosecutors.

The fears stirred up by 9/11 can compel otherwise competent professionals to produce ridiculous, fallacious swill like this under the guise of journalism. How could our democracy NOT be better off without between-the-lines insinuations that because Barack Obama was exposed to Muslim doctrine as a child, he's somehow unfit to lead the country?

If any of this were about logic and serious concern over leadership competency, we'd be automatically disqualifying, questioning or we-report-you-deciding all the practicing Catholic candidates on the spectre of child molestation, or the Mormon candidate on polygamy, and on and on ad nauseum.

But this Obama-Muslim business is all about emotions and fear, not rational judgment, and the scary thing is it works, because it operates on an independent and unnervingly powerful level. It works the same way stereotypes do -- one doesn't have to believe them, one simply has to know their content for them to have their effect. So of course Obama's camp is going to react "defensively," it's patently obvious what such reportage serves to stir up.

I held my virtual tongue during that "madrasa" non-story inaccurately claiming Obama attended a radical Islamist school(/veritable terrorist training mill) as a kid because I thought maybe, just maybe, it was an isolated and malicious anomaly, not a sign of mainstream "arguments" to come.

But this just needs to stop. If receiving two hours of religious education a week for two years as a child under the age of 10 and playing with other kids at a mosque makes one a Muslim (and, in Obama's case, therefore also a liar), then I'm not really a "non-theist" at all but apparently just a few vows and a habit short of full-fledged Catholic nunnery.

Aren't there more tangible, sensical matters to be reported on? You know, like tracking down those "bugs" that supposedly ate Obama's school records and vetting them for ties to Al Qaeda or the Democratic Party or rich, gay, Hollywood liberals? Such shoddy journalism, it's a disgrace.

Getting overly possessive

Heads up, scribes and spectators, the whole "nonbinding resolution" thing has officially become cliched:

[Arkansas state Rep. Steve] Harrelson filed a resolution Tuesday to declare the correct possessive form of the state as "Arkansas's." The resolution carries no legal weight, Harrelson acknowledged, but said a family friend who works as a historian asked him to carry the grammar fight to the floor.

Now, I enjoy a good grammatical fracas as much as the next girl, but on a historical page on which there are so many question marks, the Iraq war is "just a comma" to its commander in chief and so much is hedged in quotes and etched between the lines, why exactly are lawmakers expending time and energy sanctioning the (merely suggested) use of aesthetically apocryphal apostrophes?

A small note of comfort for those beholden not just to punctuational brevity, but to freedom itself: "The non-binding resolution would not affect Arkansans' use of apostrophes in Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts or neighboring Texas."

Indeed, that's when we'd know the terrorists had won.