If the Obama years have produced an increasingly entitled sub-class that is content to trust in the continued largesse of the federal government, we are apparently also living with a Clinton-class, a sizeable portion of the U.S. population who will vote for Hillary Clinton no matter what legal, ethical or moral standards that she violates.
And it’s not like Clinton wields the sort of effervescent personality and sheer likeability that used to be a prerequisite for enjoying any degree of success in politics. No, Hillary is the anti-politician who sort of reminds you of the luckless villain in the Sinatra-version of The Manchurian Candidate, whose fellow soldiers had to be brainwashed by the Commies before they could say anything good about him.
So if you’re not impressed with her record in the Senate, or at State – places she sort of visited like a tourist compiling a list of hot travel spots – and you’re repelled by her venal approach to politics, then you won’t be swayed by her detachment from the great unwashed electorate either.
Ignoring the outer limits of bizarre conspiracy theorists who think Hillary is the latest in a series of lizard creatures who dominate world events, it is interesting that Neera Tanden, president of the ultra-liberal and solidly Democrat Center for American Progress, couldn’t quite isolate Hillary’s ever-illusive charm.
But Tanden was not without hope. In an email released on Friday morning as part of the WikiLeaks serial, Tanden wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and advocated a unique form of therapy. She suggests that habituating Hillary to personal contact with real people might achieve the desired objective of making her real too.
Hillary might thunder – in a voice truly reminiscent of Fred Flintstone’s mother-in-law – about Trump supporters requiring “intervention” but that’s sort of what Tanden envisioned for Clinton. While many voters think the authorities should lock up Clinton for her flagrant disregard for national security, Tanden offered a different perspective: “I would advise to stay at her and schedule multiple interviews soon! Lock her in. Eventually she will sound like a human.”
Well, unfortunately for the best intentions of some Democratic operatives, Hillary is still not consistently sounding human so we can only assume that Clinton resisted any personality-building exercises and probably headed for the bar with Huma Abedin in tow whenever threatened with reformation.
So that leaves us with the mystery of how this political force remains a political force and where she goes from here.
It is fascinating to hear the Democrats in Congress emit shrieks of outrage over the very thought that Clinton should be impeached if she – unthinkably – wins the presidency next week. That’s exactly what happened to Richard Nixon after he won the largest electoral college win in U.S. history in 1972. And the Watergate hearings were neither exclusive to Democrats or opposed by Republicans.
Yet the charges against Clinton really do pale when compared to Watergate, a grievous political error that might well have been just “a second-rate burglary” had not Nixon interfered, lied and made somebody else’s problem his own.
The Democrats might have had their headquarters ransacked but national security was never remotely threatened by Watergate. Secret information was not shared with foreign powers and American lives were not compromised or lost by Watergate.
Folks, it is no hyperbole to say that carelessly, selfishly or stupidly sharing State Department data on an unsecured server is bigger than Watergate.
And even if you don’t think Donald Trump is a moral paragon, a focused campaigner or even an ideologically pure conservative, if you vote for Clinton or don’t vote at all, you’re throwing Hillary a lifeline so she can continue to do what the Clintons do best: using public office for personal gain.
It’s worth some contemplation over the weekend.
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