Hillary Rodham Clinton receives Illinois award

Former secretary of state and potential 2016 Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton received the Order of Lincoln, the state's highest award, Saturday night, but stayed away from discussing brewing political events.

Clinton, who was born in Chicago and raised in Park Ridge, instead talked about growing up in the region during brief remarks at the Field Museum ceremony, which marked the 50th anniversary of the awards presented by the independent, nonpartisan Lincoln Academy. She was one of eight recipients this year.

Clinton received the honor a day after House Republicans announced a stepped-up investigation into the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, in which four Americans were killed.

The formation of a special House investigative committee and a move by a key Republican-led panel to subpoena current Secretary of State John Kerry to testify, after the release of White House emails, is the latest move by Republicans who allege Obama and Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, engaged in a politically oriented cover-up about the causes of the attack before the president's re-election............."

Progressive Narcissism - By David Horowitz, June 2000

“.......There is a superficial sense, of course, in which we were civil rights and peace activists — and that is certainly the way I would have described myself at the time, particularly if I were speaking to an audience that was not politically left. It is certainly the way Mrs. Clinton and my former comrades refer to themselves and their pasts in similar settings today.

But they are lying. When they defend racial preferences now, for example, a principle they denounced as “racist” and fought against as “civil rights” activists then, even they must know it.

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity, and often, therefore, without realizing that they are. The necessity for lying arises because it is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, if you were one of them, for example, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role as part of humanity’s vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth they could not “understand” and that would only servie to hold them back?

If you believed that others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called “peace” movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you concede – even long afterwards — that no, you were never really a “peace activist,” except in the sense that you were against America’s war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that you didn’t oppose the Communists’ war, and were happy when America’s enemies won?

What you were really against was not war, but American “imperialism” and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America’s democracy, which you knew to be a “sham” because it was controlled by money in the end. That’s why you wanted to “Bring The Troops Home.” Because if America’s troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be another step closer.

But you never had the honesty – then or now — to admit that. You told the lie then to gain influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren’t really committed to civil rights as Americans understand the meaning of the term – as rights granted not to groups but to individuals, not by government but “by their Creator”)? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the autonomous person – both of which you despise.

Since America is a democracy and the people endorse it, the left’s “progressive” agendas can only be achieved by lying to the people. The unenlightened must be kept ignorant until the revolution transforms them. The better world is only reachable through deception of the people who need to be saved.

Despite the homage it pays to post-modernist conceits, despite its belated and half-hearted display of anti-Communist sentiment, today’s left is very much the ideological heir of the Stalinist progressives who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves today as civil libertarians — opponents of McCarthy and victims of political witch-hunts. (Only the dialectical can even begin to understand this logic.)

To appreciate the continuity of the Communist mentality in the American left, consider how many cultural promotions of McCarthy’s victims and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes are premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today’s leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the head of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

Conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left’s own deceits. It also reflects the inability of conservatives to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. I’m sometimes asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in the academic and political culture. How can there be a Marxist left — even a kitsch Marxist left — without a Marxist party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small ‘c’) communist Idea. It is an idea as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build its own highway to Heaven. It is the idea of a return to the Earthly Paradise, the garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a Tikkun Olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: “Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God.”

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them – this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so righteous in their beliefs. It did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of a redemptive future that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist past.

It is the same idea that is found in the Social Gospel that impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. And it is the same idea that she later encountered in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Left editor of Tikkun magazine who introduced her to the “politics of meaning” after she had become First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and all the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.......”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Progressive%20Narcissism.htm

That’s great!

Here is another Horowitz piece and link:

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” - Barack Obama, election eve, 2008

...In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted her 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky’s theories (she interviewed him personally for the project). In her conclusion Hillary compared Alinsky to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King.

The title of Clinton’s thesis was “There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In this title she had identified the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause – his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words, the cause of a political action – whether civil rights or women’s rights – is never the real cause; women, blacks and other “victims” are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power.”

Guided by Alinsky principles, post-Communist radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is resources and power.......”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3095927/posts

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