What Did You Just Get Done Saying About Ignoring Nick Kristof?

Oh, good, a column about Hillary, Public Prayer, and the Jes' Folks of Yamhill. The man's a triple threat, the Orson Welles of sucking.

Of course, this approach works in her case only because her religious faith is longstanding. It didn't work for Howard Dean when he described the Book of Job as his favorite book in the New Testament. With a candidate like him, you'd worry that more talk about religion would lead to comments about how much he treasures the Twelfth Commandment.

First, why is it that folks who can't contain their hard-ons when God gets a shout out from public officials find it perfectly acceptable to impugn Dean's, or John Kerry's, religious sincerity? Second, Hillary's faith is longstanding? I don't doubt it, but it seems, I dunno, obvious might be the word, that her committment to talking about it in public is some freshly minted rebranding Nick thinks the Dems so desperately need. I don't recall her spending a whole lot of time addressing the nation's spiritual longings as First Lady. But I'm sure those folks on the West Coast of Heartlandia will see it just your way, Nick.

Democrats are usually more comfortable talking about sex than God. But that doesn't work in a country where 70 percent say that "presidents should have strong religious beliefs."

Sorry, I missed the poll. How many Americans think their president should abstain from sex?

I should have taken my own advice and just said "Fuck you" I suppose. But since when is rewriting John Birch Society slogans from the 60s ("You kin teach kids about Sex in schools but it's illegal to talk about God") a qualification for the Times' Op Ed page?

[snip obligatory disingenuous parsing of Times poll on abortion, followed immediately by liberal-cred backtracking]

Mrs. Clinton is also hard to dismiss as a screechy obstructionist because she's gone out of her way to be collegial in the Senate and to work with Republicans from Trent Lott to Sam Brownback.

Wow, there's a chasm few could span.

I use my hometown, the farming community of Yamhill, Ore., as my touchstone for the heartland, and I have a hard time imagining that she could do well there.

Okay, who cued the banjo player? Yamhill is wine grape country. I didn't see any mules when I was there, or a single bib and tucker, and I tried to find the Gen'r'l Store but I musta got lost.

Ambitious, high-achieving women are still a turnoff in many areas, particularly if they're liberal and feminist. And that's not just in America: Margaret Thatcher would never have been elected prime minister if she'd been in the Labor [sic] Party.

Now, this is the sort of thing that gives us liberal elitists such a bad name. Your run-of-the-mill Freeper could have packed that much stupidity into just one sentence, but with Nick it takes two, with colon. Could someone please tell Mr. Times Opinion Columnist that the Prime Minister of the UK is not an elected position? Unless he's suggesting that Mags could never have been elected leader of the Labour party, in which case I thank him for the keen insight.

Mrs. Clinton's negative ratings nationally were still around 40 percent at last count, and Hillary-hating thrives.

Yep, nobody with that sort of baggage could ever be President.

But it's just the right time for Democrats to be fretting about how to reconnect to the heartland, and they can't find a better model for how to do that than Mrs. Clinton.

We're doomed.