the long but certain exit, as predicted, is getting uglier by the day. i could understand if she's staying in the race for some moral reason, but she seems to be aimlessly hacking at everyone along the way, enlisting her diehard supporters to accelerate the madness. it doesn't make any sense anymore, which is why we all keep asking: what is the REAL reason she stays in?
could it be that she just wants to raise enough money to pay off her debts?
here's a very good post that you should read in its entirety.
tpm: Here's an Memorial Day appropriate analogy for the historically minded. By the time Robert E. Lee got to Appomattox, the Army of Northern Virginia was down to about 25,000 diehards. These were men who stuck it out because of personal devotion to Lee, to the Noble Cause of continued slavery or just because they didn't want to say they left before it was over. Around the campfires, there was a lot of dark crazy talk being bandied about over their starvation rations, talk of guerrilla warfare that could have set the South, and maybe the whole country, ablaze with murder and bushwhacking and, inevitably, assassination, for generations. That talk had to have pushed a lot of guys who'd been with Lee since the Seven Days into desertion on that last march which only had the effect of removing voices of reason from the circle.
Sound familiar, anybody?
The one signal service of Robert E. Lee to the United States and the world, after succession occurred in April, 1965 when he firmly put all of his almost supernatural prestige with these men on the line to put a stop to that talk. At Appomattox, Lee recoiled from the vision of an endless guerrilla war and told his diehards that it was over, that what they were talking about was futile and repulsive, and that they should go home. And they did.
There was no fairy tale ending to that war, of course. The violence and the anger were turned from the Yankees to the freed slaves, both metaphorically and actually, for another century and more. But it could have been far worse for everyone. Look at the Congo or Afghanistan or Columbia, and then scale up, if you want to see how much worse.
My point here is that if you are a real leader and a person of character and you are losing the fight, you don't fan the flames of grievance among the diehards, you stamp 'em out. If you are leader and a person of character, you face it when the greater good you wanted to accomplish is irretreivably lost and put the best good available over your own personal interests and ego.
