THE LOW POST: Hill on Fire

So much for being a martyr. Hillary officially stopped being a victim with that stunt, finally completing her self-propelled transformation into just another soulless stuffed suit willing to do anything to keep a job. There are thousands of these types in Washington, huge crowds of faceless drones in glasses and blue suits, each raised on DVD boxed sets of The West Wing and each willing to suck off a whole field of racehorses for the right internship or committee appointment. Collectively they represent the least interesting group of people on the planet Earth, and once-compelling Hillary is their champion now.

The Iraq war has surely produced many landmark moments in the history of American cynicism -- Bob Ney storming the House cafeteria to crusade against French fries before jetting off to a Scottish golf junket with Jack Abramoff is a particular favorite of mine -- but no one in the whole course of this conflict, not even George Bush, has yet sunk as low as Hillary's Democrats are sinking now. They're making a conscious effort to try to cash in politically on the Iraq catastrophe without making any admission of culpability or responsibility, hoping to limp across the finish line first in the midterm elections with nothing but a semantic absurdity -- for the invasion, against its "execution" -- for a war policy.

To milk the blood of soldiers and innocent civilians for the principle of rank careerism is surely lower even than sacrificing young lives for oil or money, but the Democrats will get away with it, because American voters have always been too afraid to contemplate the reality of their monolithic system of government.

The only kind of change most dissenting voters in this country can contemplate is the rejection of an openly drooling imperialist like Joe Lieberman, whose real crime was not his war stance but his refusal to participate in the kind of craven cover-your-ass posturing the Hillarys and Joe Bidens and John Kerrys have indulged in this election season. Had Lieberman merely pretended to be antiwar once things went wrong in Baghdad, he almost certainly could have counted on the pusillanimity of the American voter to carry him to yet another Connecticut landslide.

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something. That's the real platform the Democrats are running on this November.

>>Talk back to Taibbi: What's so bad about Hillary? Plus: Check out Taibbi's latest Road Rage column, "Lieberman: Bush's Favorite Democrat."