Mrs. President, Your Nose is Growing!

Frances Martel

One of my favorite commercials growing up was produced for a company that sold “Bill Clinton Growing Nose Watches.” Between the shady dealings of the Whitewater probe and the hilariously embarrassing (for America) Monica Lewinsky scandal, our federal government’s lack of integrity had developed into a bigger comedy phenomenon than any YouTube clip featuring Rick Astley or Alabama furniture stores could ever aspire to become. To me the watch was a metaphor for the culture in which I had begun the process of political maturity; the President’s flagrant disregard for laws of perjury, his lawyers’ pathetic attempt at redefining English linking verbs, the arbitrary Jesse Jackson cameo appearances—every little slight at the American public was just another glob of cartilage assuming its rightful place on the President’s lecherous face. About a decade later, however, as the 2008 election violently shifts the puzzle pieces that construct the Clinton family dynamic into place, it is rapidly becoming apparent that Bill may not be the most prolific fibber of his family. Nor is it Chelsea; she has yet to develop the ability to mask the years of arrogance her parents brainwashed into her, but it doesn’t matter, since mommy and daddy will make sure to punish any and all who dare to defy her immaculate image—just ask MSNBC’s David Shuster.

The mainstream television media never take very warmly to having their human interest maligned-but-loyal-housewife stories debunked, and perhaps this explains their somewhat quaint attacks against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It is not unfathomable to assume that if a white, male, Republican presidential nominee—say, Mitt Romney—would have lied about dodging bullets in Bosnia , joining the Marines , saving Northern Ireland from violence , and diverting Apocalyptic meteors from hitting Africa by hand , the response would have been, to put it mildly, swifter. This is not to the benefit of Romney’s image, which has already been tainted with sleazy partisan flip-flopping enough to keep him out of this ordeal, but, rather, to the detriment of the press that takes its preoccupation with tolerance, balance, and, most importantly, ratings to such an extreme as to give up its by a desperate campaign. It appears they’ve lost enough with the Dina Matos McGreevey threesome tales to swallow their pride and ruthlessly destroy Hillary Clinton’s reputation permanently for her shameless lies.

And so the Clinton charade rolls on, wasting millions of hours and dollars to send an empty message of negative experience to those too immersed in their own feminist agenda or too ignorant to question the baseless claim that the Clintons are good friends of the Latino community. This assertion is much like that of Bill Clinton being the first black president—it is rooted in a base-level tolerance for Arsenio Hall and the repeated use of catchphrases by the evil masterminds behind the Clinton campaigns, you know- those guys that run around name-calling anyone who considers the existence of a viable alternative to a second Clinton White House run a possibility. While certain individual factions within the media have spoken up against the latest Clinton shenanigans (in addition to the negative campaigning against winning opponent Barack Obama), particularly those that have been personally affected by the horrors of the first Clinton reign (most notably Fox News Correspondent Dick Morris), the majority of media outlets have spent their time concentrating on the race as if Clinton were not only a viable candidate, but a respectable one as well. It is in a travesty that in this regard satirical blog Wonkette has somehow become the most trusted name in news to young voters—voters who perhaps remember the Bill Clinton Growing Nose Watch with the same tenderness that I do.

If democracy and the delegate system of electing presidential nominees work honorably, the American people will have a milestone choice unlike that which most college students have seen in their lifetimes, and Clinton will be excluded from this. John McCain, while showing some worrying signs of dementia in confusing the Sunnis and Shiites and Purim with Halloween , he has yet to show some vicious claws and hurt his opponents in an overtly sleazy way. The same could be said of Barack Obama—despite not really having a platform based on concrete issues or any useful experience in executive positions, he has evoked an overwhelming positivity to get where he is today in the campaign. It is unfortunate for both of these candidates—and fringe candidates Mike Gravel and Ron Paul who continue to run in the sidelines—that their campaigns will be remembered in history alongside the first major female presidential candidate, who also happened to be a pathological liar. More concerning for America, however, is if democracy fails, and the so-called “superdelegates” that supposedly puppeteer the Democratic Party award Mrs. Clinton for her tenacity and will to leave all scruples behind on the road to the White House. If that’s the case, then we can only look forward to one thing in the next four years: newly minted Hillary Clinton Growing Nose Watches.