A Ramble on Hillary By Richard Sale

     I don’t care for Hilary Clinton as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency for reasons I will shortly make clear, but I admire her attempt to overcome the male hogwash that has so long been part of our national life.

     What sort of male hogwash? I sometimes try and realize the obstacles that the prejudices of pigheaded men have put in the path of Hillary from the beginning. In our national history, women have been consistently slighted, underrated and slandered.  We have all heard the arguments. Women are not on an equal footing with our glorious males. A woman was worth only 3/5^th of a man.  (You can add up any way you wish, but the total remains the same.) Women were not made for strenuous mental or physical efforts. Women are childish, silly and shortsighted. A woman’s life is supposed to be trivial and easy going. Women cannot reason; women are not able to reflect.  They are inferior to men in terms of things like fairness, honesty, conscientiousness, and insight. Women are mental myopics. Women don’t have original ideas. They get their ideas from men.  Women are incapable of being objective. Women have a tendency to run away with their feelings. Women are guilty of perjury much more than men. Women are a stunted, narrow shouldered. Broad-hipped and short-legged breed. And even when women band together, they don’t command the mental power of men.  A woman’s whole purpose in life is to propagate the race.

   All of this is vile.

     On the other hand to elect a woman to be president on the ground that she is a woman, strikes me as racist. We should vote for merit and not sex.

    

But to elect a woman to the Presidency merely because she is a woman, strikes me as a racist view.

 

Unscrupulousness as Policy

 

     The want of any sort of moral principle or intellectual scruple is often the main engine that drives a candidate’s rampant desire to become a dominating public figure. The politicians who thirst and burn for distinction are very often commonplace in those areas sheltered from the public view. In fact, the inner characters of such leaders display their deficiencies by the very nature of what they yearn to have. The leader who wants to succeed at any price, like Hillary Clinton, is a slave of the concepts of Public Eminence, High Station, the Worship of Collective Human Power and Military Force. Such leaders hunger for fame in bold, proud letters; they hunger to see their names plastered atop every official building and every monument.

     There are few things as ugly as this rampant self-worship. Under its gaze, ordinary life shrivels and diminishes. The vast universe contracts to a mere tawdry bauble kicked to and fro by contending rivals. Hillary has eyes only for those circumstances, facts and incidents that suit and confirm her own biases and which advance her own designs, however morally dubious they may be. Self-worship like hers is not blind in the least-- her temperament, her disposition, her power of analysis, enables her to select people whose ideals and ambition and desires are similar to her own. A political leader estimates his or her allies based on their usefulness in furthering the leader’s designs and schemes. Think of the people who occupy high positions in her campaign: her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, or her deputy chiefs, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, loyalists all, all working to cover up the e-mail scandal, a scandal that clearly threatens Hillary’s viability as a candidate. Staffers like hers bend the rules until they break. One suspects that aanything or anyone that doesn’t serve Clinton’s appetite for public power is cast aside, belittled, scoffed at, undermined or marooned. A political leader like her, sees people as furniture, objects to be moved here, moved there, placed where they will do the leader the most good. A close supporter of a leader has no will or desires or designs of their own. They suspend such things in the hope that their subjugation will be generously rewarded. They accept that their purpose in life is to be used by someone greater, someone who will prove a generous giver of favors, advancement, money and prestige. In other words, their destiny is to be the tool of another’s more powerful and decided will. 

     Leaders like Hillary despise the minds of the people that they court. She sees her supporters as a means, not an end. Hillary coldly gauges their gullibility, their credulity and addiction to hearsay and vague, incomplete ideas of life and the trivial events as conveyed by the TV news. Unfortunately, her public has become receptive only to the obvious because they sadly lack the culture and knowledge and wit that would enable them to cross-examine and discredit the spurious things she asserts. This is why her fans applaud and approve whatever nonsense she utters. They are blank sheets to be written on.

     The sad and inevitable fact is that members of any political party always end up firmly in the grip of its leader. Members of a crowd don’t dare to diverge from what its leader asserts. There is a kind of mental contagion that prompts them to support the self-proclaimed strong against the feeble and weak. The followers seem not realize that any Government is a kind of barter system, a vast connivance, an organized trading of favors in a rigged game. The strength of a party leader is not talent -- it consists mainly of access to inside information. The leader knows when or where a big gain in support is coming and from what quarter, and who is going to deliver it. There are only a few choice spots open to the ambitious, but with the right backers and influence, you could be one of them. And of course, once a choice position was gained, its occupier will use it for the ruthless furtherance of his or her own personal interests. The Hillary followers know from the beginning which side is safe to back. They know who works the levers that set the whole machine in motion. If the party had performed its work efficiently, almost all the guesswork had been taken out, everyone figuring out a way to sell everyone to everybody.

     Political campaigns clearly retail all sorts of hollow promises. The supporters of a leader forget that any party acts at its own peril. They may embrace the current promises, but the outcome is not preordained. Political alliances are a way to escape the perils of uncertainty which is why supporters work so frantically to elect their chiefs. The philosopher John Dewey observed that in most people, “…judgment and belief regarding actions to be performed can never attain more than a precarious probability.” In other words, any practical activity, domestic or foreign, deals with individualized and unique situations which are incapable of being duplicated, yet to a voter’s mind, faith in a leader is fundamentally connected with a desire for a certainty which shall be absolute and unshakeable. Yet history proves again and again, that any leader is brutally surprised by the unforeseen challenges that attend their triumph.   

   I believe that if Hillary is elected as President, she will become more domineering and unscrupulous. Her will is imperial. She is ambitious as Macbeth. She not only wants to rule, she wants to reign. One can only imagine how docile, obliging, suppliant, and weak her cabinet officials would be, and how quickly they would hand over any store of their own critical judgment and self-reliance to her. It is clear that Hillary suffers from a temperamental impatience which renders her more peremptory and shameless. She and Trump suffer from the same defects. They are brusque with inferiors because either they are tools, or, if not, they merely stand in their way. In Hillary’s case, her chief interest is her career and her family. She loves money, however it is obtained. Since her habitual thought aims at station and power and subjugation, such things as honor, conscience and humanity merely stand in her way.

     Will her election change Hillary? “The designing knave may sometimes wear a visor to beguile but watch him narrowly, and you will detect him behind his mask,” Hazlitt said. Success will not act to change Hillary from a hard, unfeeling, insolence character and transform it into one of openness and generosity because of improved circumstances. Again, as Hazlitt noted, “A flat face doesn’t become an oval one or a pug nose into a Roman one” because you have acquired a new office. Successes endorses your usual way of thinking and doing. “Things won are done,” said Shakespeare

     Hillary is at heart vulgar soul. She is never going to be convulsed by conscience. She does not want to be mild, just and beloved; in fact, she despises such things as weakness. She is immune from contrition. Nothing -- no setback, no defeat, no attack, no annoyance or scandal is going to move her to relinquish her designs, to abandon her shady deals or odd connections. She embodies a narrow single track of combative will. A fixed pugnacity sits at the center of her nature.

     It is deeply unfortunate that our political candidates never talk from the heart. They don’t unveil their deepest urges or traits. What they say is fashioned with a purpose – it doesn’t have to be true because its real purpose is to convince. Hillary would have us believe that the popular is the profound. The truth isn’t really true because in an election, it only needs to sound like the truth. One is prompted to wonder how much Hillary knows about the workings of her own mind. If Ambition erases the ability to have second thoughts, Success obliterates them entirely. Hillary’s desires may prove triumphant, but one suspects that they are founded on the corrupt, the greedy, the exploitive, the ruthless, and the unsound. Hillary reads the terrain of political conflict better than her rivals. But she is devoid of the ability to question herself.

     Hillary touts her wide experience. She praises her powers of judgment because of that spacious experience. But having experience doesn’t make you smart, and the new leader has to have a mind free from stubborn prejudges if you want to achieve real insight. Only the gifts and capacities of the candidates mind, if they are excellent and outstanding, can they provide the ability to administer foreign policy. The standout qualities of Hillary as a leader is her immense, pitiless and stubborn will, a will that wants to carry the day, in spite of the fact that the triumph will bring unexpected dilemmas and perils. The key question that should be asked, has her experienced produced in her any strategic soundness? Look at Libya. Look at Iraq. The brazen hollowness of Hillary’s, "We can do it" attitude may sound brave and vigorous, but such an attitude can disguise her own incompetence and persistent defects of analysis. Banal slogans like “keeping the country safe, upending the Iran deal, snuggling closer to Israel, shows how little we have advanced in the debate over how to advance actual U.S. national interests versus our compulsion to impose democracy in foreign countries.

   The gigantic and fatuous ocean of trite statements issued daily by the media, the unending tiresomeness about “the aspirations of the Iraqi people,” or “giving the Iraqis or Syrians democracy and a free market economy,” or “Give freedom to Syria’s opposition,” only make us gag. They numb the mind. The phrase “Syrian people,” used by U.S. politicians, is especially annoying because it is a species of theft, the infirm product of some mentally limping office-seeker who is laying claim to the authority to speak for millions of foreigners when in fact they know only a minute and obliging scatter of them. Frankly, the phrase “American people” is for weak-kneed and semi-literate phrase. The great poet Paul Valery once said that the only word that truly defined the phrase “the French people” was the word “mixture.” The latter word deflate a lot of grandeur from of the phrase, but it act to let the air out of common bombast. Deflating bombast is sorely needed in today’s world where so many shrill, tinsel voices often blare their loud rhetorical bugles while sitting on their high horses.

   Indeed, Hillary has learned a lot from working n a man’s world, says my wife.

Comments

[turcopolier]

mgj

nit picker. pl

[Richard Sale]

Thank you very much. I am writing about her "hawkish stances."

Richard

[Richard Sale]

I want to apologize for having repeated two paragraphs. I had deleted the article than found an earlier version.

Sorry for the sloppiness.

Richard Sale

[Tinly]

Clinton will "work for the benefit of the American people"?

Hoo boy. I have to wonder how many election cycles it will take before a meaningful percentage of the American electorate figures out that no mainstream candidate from either primary party will work for other than corporate/moneyed interests.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Richard Sale:

Can you name any person, belonging to either party in US, whom you could consider to be a better fit for the office of the Presidency of the United States?

Put another way, these complaints about the quality of candidates or even previous US Presidents - are they not, in essence, point to a systemic problem in the United States, or UK, or France or Italy?

In other words, can any decent, competent, knowledgeable, honest person be elected to public office in any of these 4 countries: US, UK, France, Italy?

[rjj]

nice way to play the geri card.

[rjj]

ironically they can also stigmatize Bernie via his youth support by making him the darling of the Social Justice Warriors. Everybody hates SJWs. Could compound that with the yoni card in the form of a Melissa Click endorsement.

[Matthew Saroff]

Damn you. You are forcing me to defend Hillary Clinton, and I do not want to.

I disagree with your characterization for a very simple reason: There have been no tell-all insider books published by people who work closely with her.

Even Bill had a few while president, and if one of Hillary's acolytes had an axe to grind, they would get a 7 figure book advance from Regenry or other right wing publishers.

If she used people as you asserted, there would already have been such a book published.

Heck, it would have been published in the mid 1990s.

I don't like Hillary, because she is a member of the largely Ivy League elites of this country who populate Washington and Wall Street and commute via a revolving, and she cannot conceive that "Her People" are a part of the problem. (The same applies to Barack Obama)

We either need someone who does not see these folks as "Their People" like Sanders, or someone who actively eschews "Their People" as Roosevelt did in the 1930s.

She is no more a narcissistic sociopath than anyone else who is a mainstream presidential candidate, which I know is a lot like saying, "Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play."

[Valissa]

"can any decent, competent, knowledgeable, honest person be elected to public office"

IMO, this is an issue of idealism versus reality. As a realist I find this question rather quaint as this is politicians we are talking about. Additionally one must think about how one ascends into higher positions of power in any country, which always involves accepting at least to some extent the groupthink of the group one wishes to be a part of.

Babak, I thought you were a realist.

[William R. Cumming]

There were two candidates in Iowa that needed a big win. One was Trump. More so HRC! Trump may yet make it but not HRC IMO. Why? She has been deserted by young woman who don't care if there are still GLASS CEILINGS!

[Medicine Man]

I don't know if that shoe precisely fits Sanders, rjj. His natural inclinations clearly run more in the direction of economic justice than social, as evidenced by his lukewarm response to the BLM-type protesters. I also don't see any of this hurting him in the Dem primaries.

[rjj]

Gonna post this here. Was wondering where are the stories about the Dem party outcome in Iowa. Is CorpsMedia FICing (gicing it the Fart In Church treatment)?

checked Google news timeline of articles.

https://news.google.com/news/rtc?ncl=dSd0UcXPYpGGKlMNs_RCfkh1HXKEM&authuser=0&topic=h

may not be significant. worth noting, tho.

[Richard Sale]

They do indeed.

Richard

[Richard Sale]

Have you?

Richard

[Richard Sale]

They point to deep, systematic failures in U.S. politics.

We are a great nation. Are Hillary and Trump the best Americans do?

Richard

[TG]

Wow. Well said. Well and powerfully said.

All politicians at that level must have a significant amount of ambition and vanity. But, of a nasty bunch, Hillary is far and away the most toxic. I have wondered that she does not get more support from the corporate press etc. - for someone like Obama, the email scandal would have vanished without a trace, and Bernie would get mentioned on page 37 next to a human interest piece on water-surfing squirrels, if at all. If I may indulge in a little 'Kremlinology", I think that Hillary scares even many of our corrupt elites. At least Obama and Biden etc. do as they are told. We have made the presidency very nearly imperial, the president can do almost anything without congress, and heaven help us all if Hillary Clinton gets her hands on that kind of unchecked power.

I can't think of anyone currently running for president that is more terrifying than Hillary. Trump is a loudmouth but bottom line is that he can make deals and work with people and he has no apparent desire to bankrupt the nation in order to spread chaos across much of the world. Cruz has a lot of rough edges but in the end he's a realist and Wall Street likes him so he's not as out there as he lets on, I should think. Rubio is a lightweight pretty boy corporate shill who won't rock any boats as he says one thing and does what he's paid to do. Bernie is far from perfect (the ghost of Woodrow Wilson haunts all overly-idealistic presidential candidates) but he may be the best of the bunch.

But Hillary is toxic almost beyond precedent in American history. I think in part she gets away with it because, if you consider her record objectively, it seems unreal, it's hard to believe in it. She overloads our ability to make critical judgements and we recoil as if from a bad dream.

[rjj]

One was confused until one realized thou wast using the royal first person pronoun.

[rjj]

I am not talking things as they are. I am talking about things as they are made out to be by CorpsMedia opinion misleaders.

[rjj]

Who would Bernie run WITH? HRC would actually be OK as vice-presidential candidate.

[Valissa]

Thank you for speaking up. I was thinking of saying something similar but couldn't motivate myself to defend Hillary as I am not a fan (will be voting 3rd party).

One thing I noticed even back in 2007-8 election, was Hillary seems to trigger "monsters from the id" in people who don't like her... or should I say who hate her. Have always been amazed at the level of emotional spewing disguised as rational analysis.

She's an ambitious, arrogant and power hungry elitist who has a crony network of similar elites. Well... how is this so unusual at her level or in the world as it is (as opposed to how we'd like to see the world). Also she and Bill have become quite rich since they first got in to politics, and I think many people resent them for this. This reminds me I need to look back in history and see when it was that people started expecting their politicians to be do-gooders or honorable noble public servants.

[Babak Makkinejad]

There is a parallel with Eastern Europe under Communism. Because of the brain drain and intellectuals leaving societies where there was little scope for them to flourish professionally and academically, what you had was not only and so much the 'Communists' being in charge, but the imbeciles being in control... And I mean it.

Intelligent people would refuse to join the Communist Party (CP), unless they were particularly cynical and opportunistic, in which case they would sell out. They would stay outside the Establishment and, more often than not, try to emigrate.

The CP would fast-track working-class members, bus drivers, etc. to the top, so that you ended up, more often than not, with mediocre conformists lording it over the rest of the population.

Eventually, you had armies of cretins in charge of the system, and the majority were not even ideological Communists by 1970/1980: they were just opportunists. You joined the CP as you join the civil service, for a quiet life and for power and privileges.

Perhaps the electorate among NATO States no longer values high-achieving independent thinkers among its political representatives, even more so women: that's not what the electorate wants or expects.

[rjj]

"Sanders' pie-in-the-sky pitch will never pass congress"

Seems to me "that it will never pass congress" is a feature and to whom it appeals is irrelevant.

[Martin Oline]

Richard:

Wonderfully powerful post. Thank you for correcting it.

rjj:

I saw your link and I'll raise you this one:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2016/02/02/some-democratic-precinct-results-unaccounted/79682184/

[JM Gavin]

Neither Cruz nor Trump appear to be insane to me, I just disagree with their politics. As for referring to anyone running for president as "raving morons," I will take that as hyperbole, but labeling candidates as "morons" does not lend credence to anyone's position.

I simply do not understand how anyone can look at Hillary Clinton's life and actions, and draw the conclusion that she "will work for the benefit of the American people. She will certainly work to benefit herself, her family, and those whose assistance she needs to advance her career. That much is obvious, based purely on her past actions.

Apparently you put no stock in COL Lang's assessment (shared by pretty much every military and intelligence professional in the world) that Hilary's email "issues" are problematic.

I have spent 25 years in the military/intelligence sector. This "email" thing is a big deal...a very, very big deal. She faces the possibility of thousands of years in prison, and deserves just that.

De Oppresso Liber...

[turcopolier]

JM Gavin

Yes, people don't understand how big a deal it is. DOL. PL