First she was Miss, then Ms., and eventually Missus. Now the
correct honorific might be Myth Hillary Clinton. If honorific is
the word I want.
Readers of this journal knew this termagant well even
before her terms in the Senate. They did not need Harry Reasoner
and Dan Rather to identify this harridan. They recognized her
vulgarity, her venality, her pettiness, her pettifoggery, her
vindictiveness, her shrillness and such other virtues as she might
bring to the fore for special occasions.
This was the woman who as a young lawyer for the Democrat
members of the Watergate Committee wrote a brief arguing that
Richard Nixon was not entitled to an attorney in an impeachment
proceeding. This was the woman tasked with improving the Arkansas
education system who drove it down to 49th place among the 50
states. This was the woman who campaigned for Senate using the
Presidential airplane and blatantly bought both votes and campaign
cash with Presidential pardons.
Whence sprang the myth of the super-competent Wonder Woman
who strides confidently through the corridors of power dispensing
wisdom and judiciousness in equal parts? It was invented by her own
campaign staff, in an ad suggesting that lonely heads of state
could find relief by calling her, toll-free, at three o’clock in
the morning. She would whisper sweet nothings into their ears and
they would emerge from their crises with a new, fresh outlook on
life.
She never made it to Pennsylvania Avenue but she benefited
from this time spent on Madison Avenue. Like Josephine with Comet
or Rosie with Bounty, people believed she could scour and mop up
the trouble spots without raising a sweat. This image hypnotized
even Republican types whose critiques have locked into the
disagree-but-admire mode for quite some time. All I could do was
save up pejorative adjectives in an old pickle jar, knowing they
would come in handy before very long. For now, she had become
apotheosized into an international stateswoman.
To which it is time for us to assert, with the help of
Julian Assange: baloney. Adding a D for Democrat after “shrew” does
not equal shrewd. The woman is a know-nothing know-it-all; this
front she put on is an effrontery. She comes from two states
(Illinois, Arkansas) which end in silence but she just keeps
getting noisier.
Let us review in brief some of the revelations about Madame
Secretary in the recently publicized diplomatic cables she
authored. She ordered espionage by her diplomats against
high-ranking UN officials, including gathering fingerprints and
DNA. She asked diplomatic staff in Argentina how President
Fernandez was “managing her nerves and anxiety.” She called (or
allowed her people to call) Sarkozy thin-skinned and authoritarian;
Merkel risk averse and rarely creative; Berlusconi feckless and
vain. The list goes on. When word of this leaked, her response was
unequivocal: “This is an attack on America.”
She is right about that last, indisputably so. It attacks
America as a place which promotes shallow people because their
backers have deep pockets. It attacks America as a place which
promotes hollow people who are full only of themselves. It attacks
America as a place which promotes on the basis of glitz and hype
and spin and façade and veneer and gab and patter and spiel and,
ultimately, mythology.
This woman has no business being in high office, whether
elected or appointed. She is small and defined by her smallness.
The only person who should call her at three o’clock in the morning
is the Mayflower man to move her portfolio out of Foggy Bottom. If
we made her great, if we made her the face of this country, we have
no right to protest when that face is covered in egg.
May I offer a solution? She was named after Sir Edmund
Hillary, as she famously lied, later blaming her mother for telling
her the lie. She could be our permanent ambassador to Mount
Everest. Now that is a much more romantic backdrop for a
myth.
