Tom Hayden’s Wife Screams at Hillary on the TV, But Does She Scream at McCain Too?

Tom Hayden says that his wife screams at the television every time she sees and hears Hillary Clinton. Hayden says that at first that he thought the hate Hillary froth from his wife was irrational and even abnormal. Not anymore, he now hints that he might well join her in screeching at Hillary whenever her mug appears on the screen. But Hayden and the Mrs.’s reflexive and certifiable Hillary loathe is a clinical malady that he shares with thousands of others who, like him, call themselves progressives.

Before Clinton tossed her hat in the presidential rink in January 2007, the Nation where Hayden’s anti-Clinton hit piece appeared, Move-On Org, Mother Jones, dailykos, Alternet, In These Times, Extra, and a legion of Huff Post writers, and nearly every assorted left and progressive blog around kept up a non-stop, drumbeat assault on Bush and his appointee’s bumbles, fumbles, stumbles, misdeeds, misconduct, and borderline criminal acts. They pounded away in print and on their webs on the shambles and devastation of Bush’s foreign and domestic policies. Enter Clinton.

In Orwell’s 1984 novel on totalitarian mind manipulation, Big Brother commands the crowd to switch their hate and death chants literally in mid-sentence from Eurasia (the former enemy) to Eastasia (the former ally now turned enemy). Like the 1984 crowd, progressive writers and pundits did a stop on a dime and went from hammering Bush and company to hammering Clinton. The volte face would have made Big Brother smile.

Clinton (and Bill) in short order became an evil incarnate political con artist, a bag woman for corporate lobbyists, a consummate Democratic Party schemer and manipulator, and pathological liar. When the campaign heated up and progressive’s Obama love fest sprung full bloom, progressives’ collective amnesia about Bush’s sins worsened. They were no longer the headline, page turning items on their sites and in their publications.

The evidence has mounted and continues to mount with more fresh revelations that Obama shamelessly cut deal with lobbyists, influence peddled for his pals and campaign contributors such as businessman and contributor Robert Blackwell, Jr. who he helped get lucrative state grants for his tourism and gaming operations, has been notoriously MIA on major Senate votes (no accountability trail), orchestrated sneaky negative Clinton attacks (the MLK and Lyndon Johnson flap) and launched the initial smutty and personal character attacks on Clinton in the early debates. He has run false and misleading ads and shoveled in a king’s ransom in contributions from oil companies through their PACs, and corporate top brass, all the while claiming to be a political St. Paul and Mother Teresa when it comes to purity toward oil companies, corporations, and lobbyists.

Yet, Hayden, who of all people should know better from his long stint in the California legislature, and other progressives continue to delude themselves with the fiction that Obama is a new breed, breath of fresh air, progressive politician.

This is no small point. Hillary’s most grievous mortal sin in Hayden’s eye is that she supposedly betrayed her ultra-liberal even flirt with radicalism fling in the 1960s by dumping on Obama for his connection with ex-Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and fiery cleric Jeremiah Wright. Hayden is locked in a dreamy and by-gone time warp. Clinton was a 20 ish something college girl then who like so many others of that age and generation joined or cheered radical groups and causes. She was no different than thousands of other lefties and liberals of that generation who aged, prospered, became professionals and corporate businesspersons and grew into good Democrats and Republicans. When Hayden and a handful of others became politicians they dumped their Mao and Marxist tracts in the attic (or fireplace) cut deals, compromised, and took corporate campaign dollars. The same things they rag on Clinton for doing.
Then there’s McCain. If progressives have developed a bad case of collective amnesia about Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors, they’ve become downright lobotomized on McCain. They have taken only the most feeble, token, and perfunctory jabs at McCain. Hayden and his wife and the others that scream at Hillary would never dare publicly say it but the unmistakable inference from their ruthless Clinton bash is if Obama’s not the chosen one than better a McCain than a Clinton in the White House.

Now Back to Obama. His deal making and the betrayal of his alleged progressive leanings means nothing to Hayden. He exhorts progressives to stop the Clinton “self-destructive spiral” (let’s check to see if Hayden has ever coupled those words with McCain’s name) choke off the dollar supply, write letters and pound on doors to get the Democrat’s to muzzle her.

A final question: When Hayden and his wife get through screaming their lungs out at Hillary do they have any wind left in their pipes to scream at McCain?