Is Hillary O.K.?

I have been lying in bed for nigh on 10 days, having been smitten to the floor by this quote from my local newspaper, "But the Bush administration's pledge to stay in Iraq 'until the job is done' gives Iraqis 'an open ended invitation not to take care of themselves.'" The words in the little subquotes belong to one Hillary Rodham Clinton, the same Hillary Rodham Clinton who said that it takes a village to raise a child, although, of course, no one should expect her to be in the kitchen making chocolate chip cookies for said child (remember the great recipe debate). I guess that some lessor woman should be doing the manual labor of making cookies for kids, and not someone like Hillary, who actually needs to feel fulfilled, which apparently means not raising children, raising them with limited particpation, or hiring an illegal to bake cookies.

In any case, the socialist village woman that we all thought Hillary to be has now apparently become a defender of individual initiative (wait, gasp...heart rate escalating...breathing rapid...can't think, comprehend...alien transformation of humanoid senator...). Can someone please help me? Have I entered into a bizarro world where a leftist now speaks in a conservative tongue? Could she possibly have meant what she said? Surely this is just another instance where the press has taken a quote out of context? How is it possible that a Democrat can be appalled by an open-ended invitation not to take care of oneself? Isn't this what Democrats live for--the utter dependency of people on them for relief from everything, from being insulted (institute a speech code) to lack of self control (free marijuana and abortions for all!)? Hillary belongs to the party that despises self-reliance, that most sacred of American values, and instead worships, no, needs permanent dependency of the people in order to exist.

So why does it bother Hillary that Iraqis might want to enjoy the same thing that Democrats advocate for their own constituency, which is an open-ended invitation not to ever have to take care of yourself, ever suffer a let down of any sort, ever be challenged on any level about anything but always whine, whine, whine when your fellow citizens have not given you enough and sue, sue, sue if you sense discrimination (i.e., personal slight of the minutest magnitude)? Democrats depend for their livelihoods on permanently disgruntled people never taking the initiative to change or solve their own problems, much less learning to actually, say, run a business, which requires great personal initiative and risk, so why would they want Iraqis to run their own country? Wouldn't 25 million more dependents just be icing on the Democratic cake? Yes, Democrats are the party of Peter Pan, where child-like dependency extends forever, as the elite of the left haggle over the fine points of socialist or communist theories in Washington and New York salons. But, alas, we all know that childhood should not last forever except in Peter Pan's artificial world, and that is why there are conservatives--so that there will be grown ups. Perhaps Hillary is finally gowing up?