The 1960’s TV-program, The Time Tunnel, in which the central characters go back into the past and alter the course of history, was gripping science-fiction, at least gripping to me when I was eleven years old. But Hillary Clinton, who is older than I am by almost a decade, seems to have thought it was a reality show.
As I noted in an earlier post, her shifting position on the Iraq war is based upon the impossible idea—impossible except by entering the Time Tunnel—that if she knew what she knows now when she voted for the war, she would reverse her position and then our country (and her presidential candidacy) would be much better off.
Lo and behold, time-traveling is becoming a recurring theme in the Clinton campaign. Addressing an audience of Democratic activists in California on the weekend, the former first lady said “she wished she could turn the clock back to a different time.” In particular, she expressed a desire to “rewind the 21st century and just eliminate the Bush-Cheney administration, with all their mistakes and misjudgments.”
Fascinating possibilities for radical change are opening up here. Before the Bush-Cheney administration, there was the Clinton-Gore administration, during which, if I remember correctly, some mistakes and misjudgments were also made. If only we could enter the Time Tunnel, we could go back and stop Monica from drawing the President aside into a White House alcove and revealing her thong.
A whole chain of events followed from that suggestive action, including the bombing—possibly—of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan and the impeachment—not possibly, but definitely—of the President of the United States.
But one of the distinctive features of The Time Tunnel was that, try mightily as they did, the show’s protagonists never once succeeded in altering the course of history. Hillary’s wishes notwithstanding, we cannot rewind history, and, even if one agreed with Hillary that it would be desirable—which I do in the case of Monica’s thong and do not in the case of the Bush-Cheney administration—neither can be eliminated from the historical record. It is preposterous of Hillary to think otherwise.
