if you're not bitter, you haven't been paying attention

I know that Hillary Clinton needs to pounce on any little thing she can in order to magnify her increasingly microscopic chances at the Democratic nomination, but I'm sorry: "Bittergate" is just too much for me.

(Actually, I'm pretty sick of gate entirely. Can we just put gate out of its misery? It's had a long life, a prosperous life, a useful life. But I think its spark of originality went out at least twenty years ago. We need to find a new scandal suffix. I nominate "Bush.")

Enough pundits have weighed in by now that there is probably no new ground left to cover, but damn it I'm angry. And when I get angry I either blow off steam by writing a diary or I turn into this hideous giant green thing that tramples everything in its path. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

Obama is under attack for saying that some people who have been stomped upon by the economic policies of the last twenty years, especially the last eight, are bitter? He is out of touch and elitist because he said that people are righteously pissed off at the unfulfilled promises coming from Washington and at the neocon Party Time that has made corporations and their CEO's wealthier while making them, the middle and working class, have to struggle even harder to figure out a way to get by? He's being demeaning when he suggests that it is this pent-up anger that causes people to vote not about pocketbook issues they don't believe the politicians will solve anyway but about faith and guns?

Excuse me, Hillary. Look around you: what bloody country are you trying to be President of? Which candidate is suddenly all fluffy light and sweetness, all squadrons of angels and peace and love and happiness? Good God, is this the woman who, scant weeks ago, ridiculed Obama for those very qualities? And now she has the audacity to stand there and pretend that all she sees is happy happy joy joy when she looks into the faces of the working classes? Is she now the hugs and warmth candidate? Has she suddenly morphed into Barney?

This is George Bush's America. It is the Land of Missed Opportunity. It is the Home of the Brave Investors. It is the country in which "morning in America" has been obscured by dark, ugly clouds for far too long. It is a place where that "giant sucking sound" is the sound of our money being siphoned into the wallets and accounts of the very richest among us. It is the nation that Big Oil bought, and it is still paying dividends for them as the oil executives get richer and richer and gas has tripled in price at the pump under the Bush administration. It is the Former Center of Human Rights on Earth, now relegated to watching from the sidelines as others condemn us for violations of basic morality. It is the country that everyone briefly loved and felt sympathy for after 9/11, only to have those emotions replaced within months by loathing and disdain for the unilateral–and don't give me that "coalition of the willing" bull***t–attack on a sovereign nation that had done nothing to us. It is one of the few western countries in which the money people run the health care system. (Maybe it's the only one. Seems like a peculiarly American concept.) It is the land of school attacks, racial hatred, religious hypocrisy, gay bashing, corruption and scandal among our leaders, increasing poverty, a widening gap between the poor and the wealthy, and still-present misogyny. It is a land in which our leaders have conspired to provide tax breaks for the rich to the tune of billions of dollars while seeking to appease the rest of us with $600 and pretending that this is a wonderful opportunity for us all. It is a country spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on a war of choice in a far-off land when we have starving children, crumbling infrastructure, fractured health care, hyper-expensive college tuitions, and you name it here at home.

This is not the America we grew up loving.

"Bitter," Hillary? You pander to the right wing, playing a Republican-inspired "all is right with America" card while the country is dissolving around you and you condemn Barack Obama for wondering why some people are bitter? Maybe the better question is: why the hell aren't you bitter, Hillary? Why are you so blind that you don't even see the bitterness?

Oh, yes: maybe it is a bit difficult to find the bitterness when you have to look through eyes worth $109 million. I don't begrudge you your money–God knows I wish I had it–but come on: Barack Obama is elitist? The black guy who grew up in a single-parent home? The one who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia? The one who made his first living on the streets of Chicago? That guy? Not McCain of the Civil War McCains? Not (gulp) Hillary of the unimaginable-to-the-common-man salary?

There is bitterness, all right, Hillary. It's everywhere. It's in an America that yearns to be better than what this President has turned us into. It's in an America that knows it has been wrong and hates being a part of that. It's in an America that desperately wants to solve its financial crises and right its economic boat so that it can return to what it ought to be: elite among nations, powerful, charitable, strong and respected. We can't do these things by pretending we have already done them or that the bitterness and anger don't exist. We can only do them by recognizing our flaws and demanding that our leaders work with us to fix them. Barack Obama has said that he sees them.

Hillary, take your blinders off. There is more to be bitter about than losing an election. And most of the rest of this country knows it.