Clintonite rage could burn Democratic hope

The Democratic insider will stand up at August's national convention and cast her vote for the candidate who suspended her bid on Saturday. And then Millstone will quit the party with which she is falling bitterly out of line.

"This isn't sour grapes. This is about the best candidate losing the nomination because she's a woman. It's the most blatant example of sexism in our society. This is about the party breaking my trust, women's trust. And that can't be fixed," she says.

Millstone hails the day in 2007 when Hillary Clinton announced she was smart enough, qualified enough and tough enough to be president.

"I had never heard those words come out of a woman's mouth and neither had anyone else," says the 49-year-old Boulder investment adviser who has spent 16 months volunteering on Clinton's national finance committee.

She pounded the pavement for 20 days in Iowa. And she has raised more than $300,000 for the campaign.

The shattering of Millstone's party loyalty came with what she deemed an all-out assault on Clinton "because she's a woman."

She winced when one biographer referred to Clinton's "thick ankles." She grumbled when NPR's political analyst likened the senator to the scorned stalker in "Fatal Attraction." And she grew incensed when talking-head Tucker Carlson said the mere sight of Clinton makes him "involuntarily cross my legs."

Millstone blames Barack Obama and party leaders for not rallying to Clinton's defense. And she slams them for trying to nudge the former first lady out of the race:

The final blow came last weekend, when Millstone stood in the rain protesting outside the hotel where party brass passed rules that she says threw Clinton overboard.

"First let me say that I have never been this angry in my life," she wrote in a dispatch from D.C.

There is no arguing with Millstone about whether Clinton was the most viable Democrat. She is unwavering that sexism cost her the race. Gender is the prism through which she views all things political. Any woman who doesn't, she says, is "deaf and blind."

History no doubt will have much to say about the attacks — both sexist and racist — that besmirched the 2008 primary race. And the party will spend years soul-searching about the jumbled rules by which it picks its nominees. Time will tell how many Clintonites ultimately flee the party.

Which brings me to Millstone's peculiar brand of identity politics and a group of feminists in the John Irving novel "The World According to Garp." In solidarity with Ellen James, a young girl whose tongue was cut off in a brutal rape, the so-called "Ellen Jamesians" cut out their tongues in symbolic protest.

Call me deaf and blind, as Millstone did more than once during our interview. But there is nothing at all feminist about quitting the party, refusing to vote Obama and threatening to back John McCain or any other candidate who opposes the values that drew devotees to Clinton in the first place.

Rather, it is the kind of hollow, self-defeating political overreaction that invokes the very stereotypes that cause women like Millstone to rise up in outrage.

I am of the mind that we can never again deploy our military into combat without the Constitutionally required "Declaration of War". Without it the "politicians" have to much wiggle room to squander the mission of war;

I agree! However, after reading so many of the biographies and histories of WWII and The War of Northern Aggression ;)...

I am oddly comforted by the opinion that every war has had its pacifist/appeasers, and it's only because and when the military returns a victory in spite of the politicians that "peace at any price" is avoided.

I, too, thought the WWII generation was different, but look up the macabre ultra-antiwar Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, 1939. Pearl Harbor did not change Trumbo/etal's peacenik stance. Indeed, during the first disaster at Kasserine Pass against Hitler, those voices got louder again ("Not our War" etc.)

And think of the Copperheads nearly bringing Honest Abe's war to a losing end.

Ike and Truman held Patton back to not go after Stalin....Lord know what disaster that might've brought....as it turned out....kill a bunch of our boys in Russia upfront, or let the Russians torment their own people for 60 years....no good choices in history. So do we run off and precipitate a full-on war of some dubious gain in the Middle East now, or let them simmer in their own juices until they fall of their own internal stress like the USSR**? No good choices.

One thing we must have learned....There is no such thing as a War to End All Wars.

** Yes, I realize the resurgent USSR on oil revenues and oil-rich middle east present some critical problems to what may be a lull rather than a collapse.

"For what it's worth....The Dems have something on Hillary AND IT'S BIG...And if it ever got out...It would take out half of the top dogs in the party."

I am getting tired of the stories that are supposedly out there. You know them all by now.

IF you have it, let it loose. Or send it it someone along with your back up.

Otherwise, let's stop this stuff.

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