An Open Letter to Hillary Conservatives

by Richard Poe Friday, February 29, 2008 10:52 pm Eastern Time

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I ADDRESS this column to that new breed of conservative, the Hillarycon. These are conservatives who support Hillary Clinton. Below I describe the three types of Hillarycon and explain why each is wrong.

TYPE 1: The Innocent Hillarycon

The first type is the most well-meaning, but possibly the most deluded. Innocent Hillarycons view Hillary as a weaker candidate than Obama, and thus seek to help Hillary win the nomination.

They are wrong. Hillary’s weakness is an illusion. She is playing rope-a-dope with Obama. By hanging on the ropes, and taking Obama’s punches, Hillary saves her strength for the knockout punch.

Rest assured, the knockout will come. No matter how many primaries Obama wins, Hillary will beat him at the convention. Backroom intrigue is her specialty.

Hillary will bully, bribe and blackmail the superdelegates to vote for her. She will claim disqualified delegates from Michigan and Florida. She will steal state delegates through litigation. At the appointed time, Hillary’s media operatives will ambush Obama with allegations of corruption, immorality and extremism.

Hillary has powerful patrons in all the right places. She will win the nomination.

The real purpose of Hillary’s rope-a-dope is to lull Republicans into complacency. In this, she has largely succeeded.

Conservative talk radio jocks have lost interest in Hillary. On February 11, Sean Hannity suspended his “Stop Hillary Express” campaign, arguing that Obama poses a greater threat. Rush Limbaugh told listeners on February 26, “the longer Hillary can stay in this the better for us.” He urged Republicans to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary in the primaries, “to keep that party at war with itself.”

Hillary’s rope-a-dope has paralyzed conservative book publishers, none of whom are assigning Hillary exposés. They fear she will drop from the race before their books hit the shelves.

“When I get anti-Hillary proposals, I tell them, ‘Just wait and see if she becomes president,’ ’’ says Marji Ross, president of Regnery Publishing. Regnery’s 2004 release Unfit for Command torpedoed John Kerry’s campaign.

No Unfit for Command will dog Hillary this election season. It is too late to assign such a research-intensive book. Hillary has outmaneuvered the dirt-diggers.

TYPE 2: The Crafty Hillarycon

The second type of Hillarycon supports her for Machiavellian reasons. A Hillary presidency would teach Americans a lesson, they say. Her extremist policies would shock the nation, driving voters into the conservative camp.

Nonsense. This is a formula for suicide. As president, Hillary would liquidate conservatives, unleashing the fury of America’s counterterror apparatus against us.

Most vulnerable are volunteer groups like the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which patrols the Mexican border to stop illegal crossings. Minutemen were outraged when President Bush called them “vigilantes”. But Bush never hampered their operations. President Hillary would handle them differently. She would declare the Minutemen “domestic terrorists” and send them to Gitmo for waterboarding.

If this sounds farfetched, consider the counterterror policies of the last Clinton regime. Barely a month after Bill Clinton took office, Muslim jihadists detonated a bomb beneath the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring thousands in February 1993. The Clintons responded by declaring war on “domestic terrorists“.

On February 28, 1993 — only two days after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — the Clintons laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. New York Governor Mario Cuomo told NBC on March 1 that our biggest security threat was, “Americans killing one another with guns”. Attorney General Janet Reno declared on March 13 that her number one priority would be protecting abortion clinics from terror attacks. Then came Project Megiddo, an FBI program targeting rightwing Christians.

TYPE 3: The Spiteful Hillarycon

The third type of Hillarycon supports Hillary out of spite. These are ideological purists whose hatred for President Bush has metastasized into hatred for all things Republican. Since they must vote Democrat or not vote at all, they choose Hillary, claiming she is more “conservative” than the rest.

Spiteful Hillarycons are the worst of the lot, because they are phonies. They know very well that Hillary has not a “conservative” bone in her body. But then, neither have the Spiteful Hillarycons.

What they share with Hillary is anger and vengefulness. They would gladly cast their votes for Mao Tse-Tung, if they thought it would vex President Bush. Their motives are psychological, not political.

This then is the Hillarycon agenda. It is neither a Republican agenda, nor a conservative agenda, nor a winning agenda. It is Hillary’s agenda. Surely we can do better than this.