So it is a snow day, and I was using the time for pointless leisure activities rather than doing anything that really NEEDS to be done simply because I am tired, and I really needed this break. Idly checking on my news feeds I happened upon several linking to this Fox News story:
Gridlock in Congress Hurts Obama’s Global Image, Clinton Says
Since it is a snow day, I am able to surf over to CSPAN and watch as the Republicans vote in a solid NAY on an intelligence programs resolution. That is a fact, not an opinion, and Secretary Clinton’s testimony regarding the overseas perception of such party-line intransigence is very probably accurate since she spends so much of her time either overseas or dealing with foreign governments from here. It seems reasonable that her statements are accurate. But that is not why we are here. We are here because of this picture, which I saved and filed yesterday from her Senate testimony.

When I filed it, I did so as “02-24-10-5” under the file rubric “HRC/Secretary_of_State/2010.” (I have resolved to be far more organized and assiduous this year than I was last year.) Running across the picture in the Fox News story, I right-clicked to “save as” and saw that I already had the picture, so did not need to save it again. But then something caught my eye – Fox’s file name for the picture. Get a load of this!

foxnews.com/static/managed/img/Politics/clinton_hillary_022410_monster_397x224.jpg
(Don’t just take my word for this. Click on my picture and look at the URL in your navigation bar, then click on the fox news picture and look at that URL, please do this before I ever hear or read another word about how harmless and OK they are – including their new, female acquisition.)
WHAT? What is that word after the date? Ooooohhhhhh!!!!!!! I get it! With their all-American-girl mouthpiece now esconced over there along with Huckabee, Fox is the official channel of the GOP mid-term election (with a running start toward 2012), and we are back to empty name-calling. Excuse me, “monster?” What?
If you had a chance to watch the Secretary of State before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee and the Foreign Relations Committee yesterday, you saw the prototypical HRC performance. Flawless, speedy, thorough, delivery of facts and rationales/arguments for budgetary revisions for 2011, broad and deep knowledge of the issues, and, as usual, consistency with NO hemming and hawing. Does THIS a “monster” make?
Performances like that on the Senate floor and on the campaign trail, those facts, so well organized in a steel-trap mind spitting out like machine-gun fire almost before the question was complete were what caused me to label HRC “scary-smart.” But I did not mean “scary” in a negative way. I meant that her mind accessed information faster than my computer can. And, God knows, after eight years of George W. Bush, I was (still am) very hungry for scary-smart that knows the answer without hesitation or prompting. Let me say here, before I am called on it, it was not simply the delivery that won me, of course. It was also the content of the answers.
I said all of the above in order to frame the purpose of this post: Fox News, the Homegirls are putting you on notice. Mind your p’s and q’s. We are watching. Even if you bury your name-calling, we will find it! When we do, we will expose it. We will not respond in kind, but as for the candidates you promote and your own personnel, we will not hesitate to label them truthfully, not with silly, indefinable names, but with accurate descriptors.
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