Location: land of the Lilliputians, In the state of insanity
Posts: 24,185
London Times on Hillary
From the LONDON TIMES:
It is interesting to note what other people see when they look in our
sandbox....
(Quite a devastating column follows. Bear in mind that this is the London
Times, which certainly has no conservative partisan agenda to push. It was
published Jan. 31st, 2007. Most interesting.)
Subject: Hillary Clinton
QUOTE Hillary Clinton's shameless political reconstructive surgery: You can
measure the scale of an American president's troubles by the number of
skutniks he deploys during his State of the Union address.
Every year during his big set-piece speech to Congress, the president will
digress from the main thrust of his remarks to offer fulsome praise to some
member of the audience in the gallery. This person will have been carefully
selected in advance by the president's speechwriters as an exemplar of some
virtue and placed there for the purpose. The television producers will have
been alerted in advance so that at the right moment, as the president talks
about the heroics of this American Everyman, he or she can rise
self-consciously and receive the praise of a grateful nation.
This now obligatory part of a constitutional ritual is called a 'skutnik'
after the name of the first person so honoured. One January evening in
1982, Lenny Skutnik, a government employee, dived into the freezing waters
of the Potomac River to rescue a victim of a plane crash. Two weeks later,
during his second State of the Union address, with the US mired in
recession, Ronald Reagan had Mr. Skutnik sit in the gallery and paid a
moving tribute to his heroics.
This week, for his penultimate State of the Union, Mr. Bush had a veritable
galaxy of skutniks - soldiers, military people, a firefighter. Whatever you
might feel about the wisdom of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy or the feasibility of
his plans to wean Americans off petrol, you can't help but stand and cheer
the good works of a decent person.
But there was something unusual about this year's constellation of ordinary
American heroes, beyond the sheer numbers. Usually the skutnik is a
presidential privilege. But so intense already is the competition for the
2008 presidential race that others have muscled in.
And so Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had a skutnik of her own. She
arranged for the son of a New York policeman, sick with lung cancer, to be
there. As it happened, the man's father died that day, and the son's grief
became a sad and very visible coda to the event. This little incident, the
skillfully choreographed exploitation of a human tragedy, the cynically
manipulated deployment of public sympathy in service of a personal political
end, offered a timely insight into the character of the politician who this
week launched the most anticipated presidential election campaign in modern
history.
There are many reasons people think Mrs. Clinton will not be elected
president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American
people don't want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the
Clinton presidency.
But they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career
this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be
struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable
way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is
literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here,
finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician's trade,
the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical
conclusion.
Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and
unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who
aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue
their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried
to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have
made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take
time out from work to rear their children as "women who stay home and bake
cookies".
Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and
expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance. To grasp the scale
of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it
began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband
soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment,
all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was
brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs. Clinton,
who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.
And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as
an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding
a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly
by her husband.
After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient.
Her first Senate campaign was one long exrcise in political reconstructive
surgery. It went from the cosmetic - the sudden discovery of her Jewish
ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you've established a
reputation as a friend of Palestinians - to the radical: her sudden message
of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and
everything else she had stood for.
Once in the Senate, she published an absurd autobiography in which every
single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the
campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted
with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous
decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002.
This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea,
even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the
Iranians over their nuclear programme.
Now, you might say, hold on. Aren't all politicians veined with an
opportunistic streak? Why is she any different?
The difference is that Mrs. Clinton has raised that opportunism to an
animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.
All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary
price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy
is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person
who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing
more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.(UNQUOTE)
__________________
kaafir mushrik
Unintended consequences and God have one thing in common: Liberals don’t believe in either of them.
Location: On an Island in the west coast of New England
Posts: 13,132
RE: London Times on Hillary
Thanks Bernie for more info than I already need.
Truth is I couldn't vote for her based on the fact that she drove Bill to his affair with Monica...or was it Paula or then again Jenifer. Like sands through an hour glass there go the women in Bill's life. I bet she was hard to live with.
__________________
Too busy with fishing to spend much time here.
Now that international liberals are calling Hillary's BS charade for what it is, I wonder how long American Democrats will lookup to her for political and social salvation? I think the game is up for her, but she won't accept it until the night of the Primary.
London Times on Hillary
