Hillary Clinton’s vaulting presidential ambitions are doomed.
Her flaws are many and genuine.
Her virtues are few and concocted.
Like Sampson shorn of hair, Ms. Clinton will lose her political strength when exposed to unrelenting sunshine.
Her political career spans more than two decades. She served as First Lady from 1993-2001; U.S. senator from 2001-09; and Secretary of State from 2009-13. She unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
Ms. Clinton has also authored “It Takes A Village” and “Hard Choices” (probably with outside assistance first cousin to Sarah Palin’s “cheat-sheet” on her palm).
Despite ample opportunities to shine with intellectual or political genius or character, Hillary Rodham Clinton has demonstrated mediocrity, hypocrisy, opportunism and vindictiveness in every chapter of her life.
Not a single utterance has been either memorable or insightful. The strongest candidate showcased by the fawning media is Ms. Clinton’s jejune 1995 assertion at the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing that, “[W]omen’s rights are human rights.” Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights beat Ms. Clinton to the punch by 47 years. And Mary Wollstencraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 far more eloquently championed equality between the sexes.
“Hard Choices” soporifically careens for 600 tortuous pages between platitudes, blather and drivel. “It Takes A Village” expounds on the obvious that every parent has known since the beginning of time. Children are influenced by peer pressure and social cues outside the home. But enlightened parenting steels children with moral philosophy to resist external temptations to vice. While fathers and mothers can’t change the world, they can endow youngsters with virtue by example and instruction.
Ms. Clinton enthusiastically concurs with Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ childish assertion that, “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.” But the correlation between political greatness and child-rearing skills is nil. Winston Churchill was a terrible parent. His youngest daughter, Mary Soames, quipped: “Father always came first, second, and third.” Yet he was worth hundreds of battalions in lifting the yolk of Nazism from the neck of Europe.
Ms. Clinton is equally clueless about economics. Last month, she absurdly maintained: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” A nanosecond of Google research shows Ms. Clinton was off by more than 120 million — a flunking grade even at Yale.
She repeated her economic ignorance in a different dimension few days later apparently after brushing up with spark notes: “Let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades: Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in an America where workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out — not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas.”
But the idea that good-paying jobs incommensurate with employee productivity are the engines of economic growth is as looney as Karl Marx’s labor theory of value. It is a road to economic ruin as in France or Greece where wages exceed value added. And Ms. Clinton’s disparagement of outsourcing in a globalized economy is as daft as the geocentric theory of the universe. Components of manufactured end products are typically sourced from many countries. There is no longer an “American car” or a “Japanese car.” To end outsourcing today would be akin to the protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariffs that helped ignite the Great Depression.
Ms. Clinton exhibited equal intellectual laziness or irresponsibility as a senator. In 2002, she voted to authorize President George W. Bush’s Iraq war caper in search of imaginary weapons of mass destruction without even reading the full classified National Intelligence Estimate delivered 10 days earlier. An authorization for war is the most important decision Congress makes. The wars then-Sen. Clinton supported in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other things, will cost the nation $6 trillion or more. Yet she treated her Iraq war vote like a vote on an appropriations bill for roads and bridges.
In 1998 on “The Today Show” with Matt Lauer, the then-First Lady intemperately and erroneously attributed her husband’s notorious philandering with Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and endless others and lying under oath about Monica to a federal judge to a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
She professes to empathize with the working poor and the financially pinched middle class while demanding $300,000 speaking fees from UCLA and other public universities and treatment with the obsequiousness that typically attends queens.
In sum, Hillary Clinton is intellectually vacuous, politically sub-mediocre and personally disagreeable.
She will never become president of the United States.
For more information on Bruce Fein, visit brucefeinlaw.
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