The American Spectator

Special Report

The bipartisan cooing over Barack Obama's selection of Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State is a little hard to take. She hasn't become more conservative; Republicans have become more complacent -- and PC.

There was Condoleezza Rice on Monday extolling Hillary Clinton's "deep love" for America's "values." Which ones?

Hillary Clinton has long made it clear that she considers those values passé, preferring the Brave New World ideology of the internationalist elite to the philosophy of America's founding.

If anything, the State Department gives her a powerful perch to advance UN-style propaganda at the expense of American values. The striped-pants Strobe Talbotts she will select to work there find those values tiresome.

Yes, desperately needing to contrast herself with Obama, she faked up some populist concerns during the campaign, but the Hillary Clinton of the not-so-distant past oozed contempt for Americans who worried about the erosion of American traditions and the country's sovereignty under corrupting internationalist influence.

The Clinton administration's State Department might as well have been an annex of the UN. For example, Hillary's friend Timothy Wirth -- with what Newsweek described as his "silver bowl of condoms" in the foyer of his State Department office -- endeavored to reassure the international community that America would one day join the enlightened nations of the world and endorse all of the UN's population control plans. The Clinton State Department was constantly signaling to "the world" its embarrassment at America's values.

Hillary Clinton's State Department is more likely to let the world change America than America change the world. Her tendency has always been to support internationalizing practices that she feels the American people are too retrograde to accept on their own.

In the 1990s, she campaigned for an international right to abortion, endorsed collectivist "global" solutions to this or that "crisis" (now it is "climate change"), and offered more than a few nods to creeping models of quasi-world government proposed by UN ideologues.

America, among her other statements, had a great deal to learn from France's child-care programs. It takes a global village in her mind to change not just the family but America itself. 

NOW and NARAL should just open up offices at the State Department once she arrives. Bill Clinton's boon companions across the globe are probably the least of America's worries; it is Hillary's ideological ones at the UN, working in tandem with domestic liberals, who will do the most damage on the American taxpayers' dime.

Five years after the UN's infamous Cairo Conference, Hillary popped up at the Hague to praise the great advances made since it: "Now as you in this great auditorium know better than I, developing that historic consensus was not an easy task. Yet every nation and every NGO agreed to work to implement the common goals laid in the Cairo Program of Action: that by the year 2015 all governments will make access to reproductive health care and planning, family planning services, a basic right…"

As Secretary of State, she will have plenty of time to work on the 2015 goal. Neglected in all the hoopla is that Obama has just carefully paid off an enormous political debt, giving the abortion lobby that worked hard to elect him an ideal conduit for its ambitions.

That Hillary Clinton is now seen as "non-ideological" represents the triumph of the dominant media's left-wing brainwashing over American political culture. She is "non-ideological" and Bush is "radical"? It is the other way around.

If the start of Barack Obama's administration looks dismayingly to the media like Bush's third term, that's because Bush was never as conservative as the media claimed. No matter how PC the Bush administration strove to appear -- Condoleezza Rice presiding over domestic partnership ceremonies at the State Department, etc. -- the media was determined to hammer it as "radical," thereby pushing the whole political culture so far leftward that a Hillary Clinton could wake up one day a "centrist" and venerable custodian of American values.

topics:
Hillary Clinton, State Department