Wednesday, April 16, 2008

She's got nerve anyway

I gotta give it to Clinton, she's got some nerve.
She has the stones to go after Obama for his "connections" to William Ayers, which essentially amount to sitting on the board of a charity with the guy. Under other circumstances, that might be a "whatever" moment. But these are not other circumstances. They are the very strange circumstances that obtain in this strangest of primary seasons.

And those circumstances include Clinton having sat on Wal-Mart's board of directors (enthusiastically) with John Tate, the virulently anti-labor executive VP.

Pardon me, I meant John "Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living" Tate.
(*Ahem*)


This is Wal-Mart, a corporation that has come to embody that anti-labor sentiment. And as pointed out in the video above, even while she was on the board, it was pretty clearly bad on labor and trade. And she praised "our company" for its ability to do what it does better than anyone else. When what "it does" is screw workers (here and abroad!).

Yes, Clinton's repudiated Wal-Mart's anti-labor actions, but if she's going to get in Obama's face about who he served on boards of directors with, she should be given the same treatment.

Update: The more I think of it, there seems to be a subtext along the lines that Obama sitting on the charity board with Ayers is something that McCain can take him on about, whereas Clinton's participation in a virulently anti-labor enterprise like Wal-Mart won't be on the table since Republicans agree with the Wal-Mart position. It would still be fair game in the "where do you get off lecturing us on fair labor and trade policy when you sat on the Wal-Mart board with Tate" sense. But leaving that aside, ceding ground to Republicans on as important (and quintessentially Democratic) a set of issues as labor and fair trade is not something I relish our nominee having to do. But I'm silly like that.

1 comment:

Rehctaw said...

You're watching a parasite picnic.
The parasites have the field. They have the ball.

Those of us in the cheap seats would prefer the game end. For reasons unexplainable, we think we're playing too.

COB,CEO,Prez,VP,Union Negotiator, Senator, Debate moderator, talking head, lobbyist, bureaucrat...

If they all vanished in a puff of logic today, tomorrow the stores would open, the plants would fire up and life would go on.

At least warlords would be reasonable negotiators...