The vaulting ambition of America's Lady Macbeth (Hillary)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2566485,00.html ^

[LC HOGHEAD]

The vaulting ambition of America's Lady Macbeth Gerard Baker

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 skilfully 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 exercise 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.

[LC HOGHEAD]

Sadly a Brit sees what many Americans dont

[acapesket]

How incredibly spot on.
A Brit who understands sheer ruthlessness explains it to his Yank cousins.

[Louis Foxwell]

THIS is a keeper.

[maica]

Wow! Gerard Baker really nails Ms Clinton!

[Redcloak]

the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress.

Kinda gives the phrase "Out damned spot!" new meaning.

[Cincinna]

There is already a thread on this article.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1773968/posts

[digger48]

bttt

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[popdonnelly]

What American "journalist" would have the guts to write this?

[popdonnelly]

What American "journalist" would have the guts to write this?

[Volunteer]

"Out! Out damned spot!"

Anyone think that is what Hillary screamed at the Gap cocktail dress that Intern #1, Monica, owned?

Hillary, all the perfumes in Arabia can't make you smell sweet.

[EagleUSA]

Sadly a Brit sees what many Americans dont
-----
Oh, but many of us do. It is not ambition...it is fanaticism. A fanatic, Marxist-style obsession with power and to live ont the goverment dole. The article does nail her perfectly. Too bad that half the voting public is braindead to it, and just plainly does not give a s--t.

[NDpapajoe]

TimesOnline "News Around the Kindom" 01-19-2008

TimesOnline Reporter Commits Suicide

Scotland Yard is reporting that TimesOnline reporter Gerard Baker's body was found in Fort Marcy Hill Park, Wilshire yesterday evening, with a gunshot wound to the head.

The death is being investigated as apparent suicide, although the handgun found in his hand had not been fired, the calibre of the wounds did not appear to be consistent with the weapon, the body was found to be in a posed funeral position with arms folded neatly on his chest, the gun in his right hand, finger on the trigger, and very little blood was found at the scene.

Mr Baker's automobile was found in the parking lot of the park with an apparent unsigned suicide note, printed from Microsoft word:

"I can no longer live with myself, having ridiculed Hillary Clinton for the 3rd Time, and then learning to my dismay that Hillary! is really the most intelligent, experienced, and beloved Presidential candidate in all of History.

I just hope in some small way that my death can help one more person decide to contribute the Hillary!'s Campaign, via www.hillaryforpresident.gov, so that the US can be made great once again, for the children. The site accepts Visa/Mastercard, Amex, Diner's Club and Cash.

America is on the wrong track, and it will take a village, with Hillary leading the way, to "Bring the Dream Alive Again". Goodbye and God Bless.

--Gerald Baker, from my automobile in the parking lot of Fort Mary Hill Park, Wilshire, UK (just before committing suicide by hangun)

Hmph,
Papa Joe

[justiceseeker93]

This Gerard Miller guy is pretty much correct so far as he goes in ripping into HRC, but he is holding back too many important punches.

There is at least one signigficant error, though. "Fifteen years ago there was a principled ... politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton," Miller states. Hogwash! Fifteen years ago would put us back to January 1992 and the beginning of the presidential primary season that year. By then, the cattle futures deal had gone down, and so did Whitewater, just to name a few unprincipled doings in her Arkansas days.

And as Papa Joe points out to us in post number 14, there was a longtime law partner and probable paramour of HRC who came up from Little Rock to DC with the Clintons, and who was rubbed out (mob style) several months later, his body dumped in Fort Marcy Park. This was followed a massive government cover-up of the crime, with no bona fide official investigation. One doesn't need to be a modern day Sherlock Holmes to figure out who the hot suspects in that case are.

This is more than another slimy politician involved in a "Grand Deceit." This is an unindicted repeat felon.

[justiceseeker93]

Thanks for posting this important thread earlier. Please see my post # 15 here.

[justiceseeker93]

What American "journalist" would have the guts to write this?

Unfortunately, not very many. But she is carrying so much baggage that Miller is merely scaratching the surface in this piece.

[SunkenCiv]

selfping

[plainspeaker]

Hey, a really great piece that will never see the light of day in the MSM. We expect our politicians to be liars, even thieves, masterful deceivers. Her husband, the late Bubba, Lyndon Baines Johnson and all that ilk, read the same book. Most of us idealists are still seeking the honest man, and we came very close with GW, and you see how he is being treated. There is hope, however, that as time wears on in this presidential race, some of this stuff will surface and come to haunt her. And then we have Super Dope, none other than Jimmy, who opened the door to all the Mideast turmoil when he allowed a handful of radicals in Iran to take over the embassy and make fools of us. It showed that we were passive, and the opportunity was there to start the Holy War that continues to this day with our money funding the whole mess. I am sure his security advisors told him not to rock the oil boat, to solve the problem 'politically'. This is the same idiot that told the American Public to use less energy, that things would get worse, and we all laughed. His subsequent efforts were just window dressing, and Bubba tried the same smokescreen. I guess we are a simple, peace-loving people to have swallowed all this bilge. Perhaps it is too late, and we will never get another chance to pull ourselves together again, at least if the Dems get the rest of the control for another 8 years or so. We learn nothing from history that has been revised, and our fine institutions of higher learning are filled with gutless, do nothing, liberal instructors (propagandists)whose dreams of socialism will wrest them from their safe, well-paid positions into the 'common man's world. We can only pray!