The American Spectator

- “I think it does take a village to raise a child” (p. 76). Hillary on C-SPAN in 2005.

Although Hillary rarely expresses her political views in starkly socialist terms these days, her more traditional-sounding trope, “it takes a village to raise a child,” reflects the same totalitarian impulse to replace individuals and families with the state. Philosophers and politicians as disparate as Plato and Mao have known for centuries that the nuclear family represents the single greatest obstacle to their dreams of radically re-designing human society.

Hillary understands this too. And like all such “reformers,” she won’t let ordinary people, living their ordinary lives, get in the way of her “burning desire to do what I can, a desire to make the world around me… better for everybody” (p. 84). We can be sure that under a Hillary presidency, individual freedom and opportunity will take a back seat to more government agencies, bureaucracies, and regulations supposedly intended to make our lives “better,” but in fact only making them worse — and raising our taxes to boot!

Mr. Kuiper’s book also reveals the unprincipled opportunist who hides behind legal circumlocutions and other evasions whenever it suits her needs. Consider these gems:

Hillary, in her “autobiography” Living History, describing her work during law school at a well-known communist law firm, where she actually assisted with defending Black Panther cases: “I spent most of my time working for [an attorney] researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case” (p. 139).

Hillary denying that she received special treatment in her cattle futures trade that netted her $100,000 from a $1,000 investment. Interestingly, she did not report these gains, which she earned in 1980, until they were discovered by the press in 1994: “There’s no evidence of that” (p. 35).

Hillary in a 1996 statement admitting that, contrary to her original denials, she indeed shredded documents relating to the Whitewater investigation: “It appears I cooperated with this effort — to dispose of such files” (p. 33).

Hillary referring to Bill Clinton’s controversial eleventh-hour pardon of the wealthy fugitive from justice, whose ex-wife, Denise Rich, was a major Clinton contributor: “I never knew about Marc Rich at all. You know, people would hand me envelopes, I would just pass them….I knew nothing about the Marc Rich pardon until after it happened” (p. 46).

As these quotations make clear (and there are many more just like them in Mr. Kuiper’s book), Hillary is willing to twist and deny the truth whenever she believes doing so will protect her personal and political interests. There seems to be little Hillary won’t say, if she believes it necessary to promote her own position.

The most repugnant example of this is her comment, made shortly after Saddam Hussein’s capture in 2004, that “[o]n paper, women [under Saddam’s rule] had rights. They went to school, they participated in the professions….As long as they stayed out of [Saddam’s] way, they had considerable freedom of movement” (p. 108). Apparently, Hillary thinks rape rooms, torture chambers, and summary executions are acceptable tradeoffs for being able to “participate[] in the professions.” Why would Hillary make such a heinous comment? The conclusion is inescapable that in Hillary’s mind, political partisanship — and feminist ideology — trump the rights and dignity of ordinary human beings.

Which brings us right back to where we started: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a power-hungry utopian socialist who dreams of “remolding” American society into something that looks just like the sclerotic, dying polities of Western Europe: nationalized health care and day care, more taxes and regulations on business, a greater “redistribution” of income and wealth, a significantly diminished military capability, and entrenched political and economic elites who decide how the rest of us shall live. She must not be elected President of the United States. Mr. Kuiper’s enjoyable new book offers plenty of ammunition for opposing Hillary’s upcoming candidacy. I predict it will become one of the chief weapons in the anti-Hillary arsenal.