The deal-killer?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Hillary’s unfortunate reference to Bobby Kennedy. Having seen some of the videotape, it certainly seems like her intent was to use it as a reference point that people would recognize to establish that primaries have extended until June before.

Still, it was a weird reference. For anyone of her age, who lived as a teenager or young adult through nationally and internationally traumatic assassinations of John Kennedy (16), Bobby Kennedy (20), Martin Luther King (20) and Malcolm X (20), all in the space of five years, three in 1968 alone, and then John Lennon (32), with assassination attempts against George Wallace (23), Gerald Ford (twice in 1975, when Hillary was 26) and Ronald Reagan (32, just a few months after the Lennon murder), plus the murders of foreign peace-makers Olaf Palme (1986), Anwar Sadat (1981, less than a year after the attacks on Lennon and Reagan) and Yitzhak Rabin (1995) -- her ages in parentheses -- I would expect a primal shudder to consume her to the core of her very being before uttering the word “assassination” in the context of a Presidential election with video cameras rolling. We had assassinations or assassination attempts, predominantly against liberal world figures, by the way, in 1963, 1968, 1968, 1968, 1972, 1975, 1975, 1980, 1981, 1981, 1986 and 1995 -- one about every 2.5 years -- and she lets words like this rolloff her tongue?

If she were 40, and basically had only read about most of these horrible events, I would be inclined to cut some slack. As someone who lived through that myself, I simply do not comprehend how she could not treat the word "assassination," especially when we would by deduction be referring to another inspirational progressive figure who may well be the most popular person in the world right now, as a toxic word she would no more use outside of close personal acquaintances than a four letter word that begins with "f" and refers to sexual intercourse. How old, I wonder, were the members of that newspaper’s editorial staff? Someone under 40 years old hadn’t even been born in June 1968, and someone 55 would have only been 15 years old. For how many of them, in other words, would that have been a natural memory jogger for recognizing June as a time for primaries to still be in play?

I have defended Hillary fairly religiously, including, with conditions on messages, her right to stay in the race through the last primary. I have tried hard not to join the latest chorus of outrage without seeing the whole context for myself first, and have promoted the "dream team." But this was just weird. What the hell was up with that, anyway? I just don’t see any of the typical excuses – tired, misspoken, etc. – to fit here. I could see the Bosnia exaggeration as a misstep taken in a competitive environment – like puffing on a resume – but this one seems in a whole different class. It's darn close to a disqualifier from any consideration for anything.