God help us if this scary woman (and her husband) returns to the White House

The total rout of George Bush's Republicans was completed yesterday when the last Senate vote to be counted in America's midterm elections gave victory to the Democrats in Virginia.

The result gave the Democrats an effective 51-49 majority to add to a landslide win in the House of Representatives and presented Bush with the prospect of being a lame-duck President for his final two years in power.

After years of ignoring his political opponents, it was a time for fence-mending yesterday as the President invited Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi to a White House lunch to discuss how they might work together and, crucially, solve the crisis in Iraq.

With the 66-year-old mother-of-five now holding power on Capitol Hill, Mrs Pelosi met a once antagonistic President whom she has variously described as 'dangerous', 'in denial' and 'an emperor with no clothes'.

The humbled President admitted he was 'open to any idea' which might help him end the unpopular war. After the lunch, he congratulated Mrs Pelosi on becoming America's first female House Speaker.

For her part, she said she was looking forward to a series of 'confidence-building' meetings with Bush, adding: 'We are extending the hand of friendship.' But as the Mail reports here, another woman holds the real key to America's future...

An old anti-Clinton joke is doing the rounds again: 'If Clinton were the Titanic, it would have been the iceberg which sank.' Only this time it's being applied to his wife.

As someone who's been on the campaign trial with them both over the years, I've been constantly amazed at the utter unsinkability of the Clintons.

I would often wonder just how many more financial scandals the pair could survive — White-watergate, Futuresgate, Chickengate, Travelgate, Filegate — which always involved her. And sexual scandals, such as the Monica Lewinsky affair, which always involved him.

By the time he relinquished his presidency, Bill had been impeached, and then compounded his sins by granting presidential pardons to assorted criminal cronies.

The day he left office, I wrote: 'It seems almost unbelievable that the greatest political soap opera of the century is over — as its star, Big Bubba Bill, waddles off the political stage, grinning, biting his lip, twinkling his seductive smile, allowing a sentimental tear to fall from his eyes, knowing full well that he's still a winner.

'If the Constitution allowed it, the majority of Americans say they would vote for him again.'

Well, the soap opera ain't over yet. Hillary Clinton has just won a landslide in the mid-term elections and kept her Senate seat. The band played 'You ain't seen nothin' yet!' and Bill was celebrating alongside his fierce, ecstatic, yellow-suited wife.

Everyone knows she'll be running for President in 2008. As Dick Morris, Bill's former campaign adviser and now an implacable foe of the couple, put it: 'The order of succession to the presidency in this poor benighted country may well be Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton.'

She's already jokingly told friends that Bill, who used to refer to himself as 'The Comeback Kid', will be called 'The First Mate'.

The thought of the Clinton duo back in the White House fills many with utter gloom. 'Hillary's smile could curdle embalming fluid.' 'If elephants can do without ankles, why not Hillary?' 'Don't let the Wicked Witch back into the White House!'

SHE always intended to become President — only her gender stood in the way. So she married a good ole Suth'n boy, oozing with charm, whom she met at law school. No one could see what he saw in her. 'Hell, she was ugly — and frankly, looked dirty,' said a fellow law student. 'And not dirty in a sexy way — just dirty!'

A Left-wing feminist, Hillary had greasy, unkempt hair, bottle-lensed glasses and wore charity-shop clothes. But they both recognised in each other a fierce political ambition which would eventually propel them into power.

Bill had grown up with a poor, dysfunctional family, but as an eight-year-old, he told his primary school teacher that if he'd been in charge of the Roman Empire, it would never have fallen. And that he was going to become, first, Governor of Arkansas, and then President.

And Hillary always intended that his presidency would be a joint one: 'Buy one, get one free!'

When her husband first ran for the presidency, she told her close friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason that the couple's dream was 'Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill!'

According to Dick Morris, Bill has always been frightened of Hillary and many of his 'scrapes' were compounded by terror of his wife's fury.

Her former business partner, Susan MacDougal, who ended up in jail (and was pardoned by Bill), said: 'Hillary is one of the most focused, most driven, most goal-oriented women I have ever met. I mean, she is a scary woman!'

One of their former advisers told me: 'Bill's always had the character of tapioca, no real ideology, nothing but a general neediness to be loved and huge amounts of charisma. He was always indecisive and undisciplined, but she never was. She's not needy, she's highly ideological, highly liberal, highly focused, and she's always provided the backbone for him.'

I interviewed members of her White House staff who, off the record, spoke of the pair's volcanic rages (and her often foul mouth).

'No one is scared of him, but everyone's scared of her. He has a terrible temper, screams and shouts, and there are bodies all over the floor — but then the sun comes out, and the storm is over.

'She has a much slower fuse, but she's much more dangerous: she's very cold, very scathing, and doesn't forget, so you don't know when she'll get the knives out for you. In that way, she's much more difficult to deal with.'

Ruthlessly unsentimental, it was Hillary who, when reading a speech before delivery, would crisply inform Bill: 'We don't want to throw around words like "love".'

Hillary disliked the mawkishness, the touchy-feely empathising that he's always revelled in.

I was told by Carl Sforazza Anthony, an historian who likes her and admires her unswerving self-belief: 'Her attitude always is, never mind the torpedoes — full steam ahead!'

The woman we saw on television after this week's Senate win bears no resemblance to the 'ugly' woman law student Bill married. She once cared so little about clothes that she forgot to get a wedding dress and her mother had to rush round to a department store to buy one for her.

Hillary is now coiffed, heavily-Botoxed, well-dressed, and looks far younger than she is. But as Camille Paglia, author of Sex, Art And American Culture, points out: 'There is a bleached, sanitised, de-sexed, de-sensualised quality to Hillary's persona.'

There's little doubt that she will win the Democratic nomination for President. She has a massive war chest, a good reputation for hard work in the Senate, and has campaigned for other Democrats in their elections. They now owe her favours. But will she become the first woman President?

She was, at one time, the most hated — and divisive — woman in America. But she's learnt from her mistakes, and in her 'highly focused' way has moved firmly towards the centre; in New York state, she even won in deeply Republican wards.

The woman who began her joint-presidential career despising the military (soldiers who went to the White House complained that she 'treated us like dirt on her shoe') now praises them fulsomely, and she voted for war in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

She stresses her devotion to God (no godless candidate could ever hope to win office in America) and her deep patriotism. And, so far, it seems to be working.

And what of Bill? After all, he once told Dick Morris that he wanted to divorce her. Many times she would have been forgiven for wanting to divorce him. But she never had any intention of letting Bill get away from her: she'd invested too much in his career. And it's said that she still, despite everything, loves him deeply.

Yet they are rarely seen together in public and lead virtually separate lives. Bill's life involves earning huge amounts of money on lecture tours, travelling the world for pet causes and — unfortunately — yet more Good Ole Suth'n boy philandering. She once ruefully said of him: 'It's hard to keep this dog on the porch!'

She knows that he comes with baggage and, once she declares that she's running for President, all the old scandals will be dredged up again (and possibly new ones still to come). Just as she has distanced herself from the Left, so she has also distanced herself from her husband and his chronic misbehaviour.

Only when — and if (it's a big if) — she becomes President will we know whether this is the restoration of the 'Billary' presidency.

In 1994 in Clinton's second year of his presidency, the Republicans took 54 seats in the House, ending a 40 year Democrat reign.

This is the sixth year of the Bush administration. Check back to see what happened in the 1956 and 1986 House and Senate elections in the sixth year of the administrations of two immensely popular presidents, Eisenhower and Reagan. Their economies were good and we were not engaged in military combat.

It is my opinion that there would have been a traditional sixth year tidal wave of votes for the Dems if John Kerry had not insulted our troops.

I was thinking of sending him a small thank you gift, perhaps some cleaning fluid to freshen his CIA cap, the one he keeps in his briefcase to remind him of his "Nixon ordered" Christmas in Cambodia in "1969," and which he takes out to show witless female interviewers who then unembarrassedly refer to him as "primal john."

This is by no means the "blowout" predicted by the media whores nor is it indicative of a massive shift to the Left.

In Michigan, home of Ann Arbor, the center of sedition in the sixties, the people voted overwhelmingly to end affirmative action. The governor has called in the lawyers to overturn the will of the people. Good luck with that for future Dem elections in Michigan.

Over twenty states rejected same sex marriage and more voted for laws to protect property rights in response to the unConstitutional Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo case.

President Bush did not say what this reporter wrote. He said he welcomed any suggestions on "how to WIN the war in Iraq." Although it would have been more accurate for him to have said that he welcomed suggestions on cleaning up the wolf packs that threatened the first legitimately elected government in the thousands year history of Iraq.

There are a lot of people, mostly women, who think that the illiterate opinions expressed on the TV show "The View" by a group of repulsive, criminally stupid loud- mouths, are all they need to hear to walk into a voting booth and choose the government that Rosie O'Donnell FEELS serves her best.

They proudly declare that they are "Rosie O'Donnell Democrats" and it is my fervent wish that they use their clout to force the Dems to let Miss O'Donnell give the keynote speech at the 2008 Democrat convention, unless George McGovern has already been tapped. Perhaps they can share the podium. ("Send the balloons. Give us the balloons. Where are the g-ddamned balloons?" -- Floor Manager at 2004 Democrat Convention)

Are there stupid, ill-informed people in this country? Yes, as many proportionately as in any other country, and they are not all Democrats.

Are there stupid, self-serving liars and crazies dispensing the "non-news" of the day on TV? Well, think of the content of the news cycles leading up to the election this year: a sick freak obsessed with a dead little girl who alive, made up like a tart, competed in baby beauty pageants, confesses to her murder.

For weeks this truly unpleasant creature was swarmed by TV reporters and cameramen, hundreds of them, pleading and begging for one word, promising small fortunes for exclusive interviews, pressing their hands and faces against the windows of the limousines in which he was carried about like a princeling, while these sick media freaks abased themselves before him. Day after day, night after night.

Then there was the big story of a pathetic turncoat, a lifelong Democrat who became a Republican in order to run in a Republican district in Florida, who sent emails to young congressional pages with intent. Day after day, night after night.

Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were a big story for a while. What was that about, again? Oh, that's right, together with an avid media, they were going to bring down the Bush presidency, "frog march" the Republicans out of the White House, and "save our Constitution."

When it turned out to be more media rubbish, we were told by Wilson's media enablers, that "it is too complicated for the American people to understand." and they shut it down.

And the person who "leaked" Mrs. Wilson's name to the press, Richard Armitage, an opponent of Bush's war policies, gets a pass from the media and from the obssessed special prosecutor, and nobody will ask Armitage about the men with whom he discussed the "leaking" of Mrs. Wilson's name and how to play it to bring about a Constitutional crisis.

One of the men is still in government service; he graciously hosted a farewell party for another government service person who was involved in "the leak" when that government service person left for a teaching job at Harvard University. But it's really too complicated for you to follow so I shall not tax your brains further.

I think it is a mistake to engage in personal abuse of those with whom we may have to contend in the political arena. Jibes at Mrs. Clinton's physical appearance or her personality or her character may be interpreted by others as a lack of sound reasons for rejecting this woman as president.

Mark Steyn in his exellent book "America Alone" mentions an Arabic proverb: when the camel falls, the knives come out.

The biggest camel has stumbled, the knives are drawn. Will the camel fall?

I used to think Hillary! had no shot, and prayed that she would win the primary, so that she could go down in defeat.

Not anymore, not after the last election. This country has a voting public who, by and large, are not as well educated as your average FReeper with regards to politics and the system. We like to herald the demise of the MSM here on FR (and I do believe it's weakened over the years), but in reality, to the average soccer mom, or your bank teller, or your grocer, or your bar owner or your dry cleaner, or your kid's teacher, or your co-worker, they remain the only source of news. Nowadays, people may go online to read their articles, but that's not really using the Internet as a source, that's just accepting the MSM spin on your own time, instead of at 6:30 PM on the TV.

I don't know how to stop this continual slide into banal materialistic pleasure seeking that is the root cause of our nation's political apathy. People would rather keep up with their fantasy football, or the local gossip at the salon, or vote in their favorite American Idol than actually educate themselves about politics. "It's too much WORK, and they (politicians) are all the SAME anyway, so why bother?", they moan.

I've said this before on FR and got flamed for it. I think Nov 7th proved my assertion though. Until we, as a whole, convince our fellow Americans that it IS more important than fantasy football or American Idol, it's not really going to get much better.

Exactly. We have to find a way to minimize the damage the media is doing.

Good luck with that. If you are ever able to find someone that can get a bunch of conservatives pulling in the same direction at the same time, I'd give 'em a ceegar!

Another poster and I think even one of the popular conservative pundits said we need a charismatic leader to help spread the word of conservatism. Conservatives are at a genetic disadvantage when it comes to word games. If you think about it, even Ronald Reagan(God rest his soul) was not exactly a silver tongued orator although he gave some wonderful speeches. For whatever reasons, Pubbies as well as many Dims held the man in high esteem.

Anyway, I'm convinced liberals/leftists/socialists are wired differently than conservatives. They are the talkers and writers of the touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy, feel good stuff. Their appeal is to the emotions and they are fanatical about it. Conservatives on the other hand are the doers, the producers; hard wired to get things done -- instead of talking it to death. Critical thinkers for the most part and generally not susceptible to the leftists' effluent. I submit about a third of the population. Moonbats make up about a third which leaves about another third that vote but are unattached. These are the "swing" voters who are the real targets, or should be. What appeals to them? Warm and fuzzy? Often I suspect. Hard nosed conservatism? Sometimes. Maybe it's all in the delivery. I dunno.

"Compassionate" conservatism seems to have run its course; or has it? Maybe the delivery became stale. The constant pounding by the DBM and the Dims finally taking its toll?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't know... ;^)

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