What do Hillary Clinton and time travel have in common? Let me tell you.
I saw the movie 'Timeline' this week as my holiday movie going experience. It's the story of an archaeology team studying a site in France that was the scene of a battle in 1357. It turns out that the corporation sponsoring the dig has also discovered time travel and sends the team back in time to the day of the battle. I had already read the book by Michael Crichton to kill a long day of airline business travel. The trailer looked good, so I went. And by and large it was good. I'd recommend it if you like historical romance with some Science Fiction thrown in.
About the science fiction: right before the impressive F/X shots of the cast being sucked back in time through a wormhole they get a warning. The billionaire geek CEO warns them that he's heard that it's intensely painful, but only for a moment or so. Flash to the pain ridden grimaces as the machine scrambles their DNA for the trip.
That was the movie. That was Thursday. Today I had my own version of that experience. As I sat down to surf my news sites I was unexpectedly flashed back in time to my early 1980's. It wasn't painful, but it is especially worrisome.
The occasion was an article from Reuters recapping Senator Hillary Clinton's Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad. One quote got to me, but more on that in a minute....
On a side note: for a non-presidential-candidate Hillary is certainly making better political moves than the announced 9 Democratic candidates. At least she is sucking up all the good media coverage.
- Here she is in Iowa, eclipsing all of the candidates in a fundraising rally. She's clearly the star.
- Here she is in Washington. While the Dem's are bashing Bush for not visiting wounded soldier's families, here's Hillary announcing that she visited secretly with families in a DC military hospital. (By the way, Bush was at Ft. Carson visiting families of soldiers killed in wounded in the helicopter crashes, but let's not let facts get in the way.)
- Finally, here she is on Thanksgiving in Iraq visiting the troops in parallel to Bush's surprise visit
For a stated non-candidate she sure looks like she's campaigning. For those of you not tuned into the internet newscycle: the latest theory is that she won't announce by the deadline but will step in to save the party and run if the Democratic convention bogs down in choosing a candidate after the first ballot.
Okay, back to the point. What was the quote? In a story which recapped Sen. Clinton's criticism to the troops of the Bush administration's policies and it's failure to "internationalize" the war she said this:
"It's no longer sufficient for our military to win battles, but they have to win the hearts and minds. It's a very big challenge,"
Hearts and Minds. No mistake there, that phrase. In fact I suspect it was either very deliberate or very natural for the Senator to utter.
I read that phrase and was sucked back, with the painful grimace, to 1980 when I saw a film called "Hearts and Minds". It was a propaganda documentary with an agenda, an anti-vietnam war agenda. It was a mock-u-mentary produced and filmed in the 70's to rally the "hearts and minds" not of the Vietnamese we were there to support, but of American's at home to rise up and get out of the war.
It was the first time I saw an activist documentary with a specific and aggressive point of view. And the point of view was decidedly left-wing, although I wasn't politically savvy enough as a moldable college student to be able to define left-wing and right-wing.
But I worked with a guy who was. He was an engineer and a radical. He was the first libertarian I ever met and he was hard-core. He was also a died-in-the wool "Hate America First" partisan. Every day as we worked he regaled me with tales of every evil thing the American government ever did and he did it with glee. If I didn't think "Hate America Firsters" existed, I did after I worked with Paul. And he's who recommended "Hearts and Minds" to me.
Was it a coincidence that Hillary, America's current premier left-winger on the road to power, rolled the phrase "hearts and minds" off of her tongue in Baghdad, in the war zone, in front of our troops?
Not by any means. And you should be shocked awake by that. I am.
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