Interesting Reaction to Hillary

Hi there, I wondered what T-Nation members would make of this piece of :“commentary”:

Hating Hillary Clinton by Bob Ellis

Last Monday Hillary Clinton said she’d “obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel and on Tuesday picked up some Jewish, redneck, gun-loving, wog-hating, duck-shooting, Catholic and early-dementia votes in nursing homes and by 10 per cent won handily the “rust-belt”, “lunch-bucket” and Amish-cluttered state of Pennsylvania in which she was leading by 30 per cent a month before.

“The road to the White House,” she then exulted to her weeping followers, “runs through Pennsylvania!” - later amending this to “the road to Pennsylvania Avenue runs through Pennsylvania!”

I’m getting to hate this woman.

Her towering frigidity, blazing hubris, bellowing mendacity, varying accent from region to region, her high school-standard acting and ceaseless haughty impersonation of Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown have got me properly simmering, and her confident thick-witted fist-in-the-face oratory, in a voice a Spectator columnist once well described as “a half-shout”, puts me in mind on some nights of the full moon like the one outside my window of the baleful, cruel contralto of my old lost love Bronwyn Bishop.

She is a stranger to consistency, sincerity and (at a guess) oral sex, a violent critic now and then of NAFTA which she and her husband thought up, and (it was wittily observed on CNN this week) knows in the end about as much about the inner workings of Executive Government as the White House pastry cook.

She went from being “honoured to be on a stage with Barack Obama” to declaiming “shame on you, Barack Obama!” in 30 hours, her beef being that Barack, a working politician, once spoke 10 words composed by someone else, who gave him permission to use them. Though I doubt the truth of the venomous rumour that she’s been for 20 years the lover of Madeleine Albright, her negative rating is above 50, her untrustworthiness rating irredeemable and Bill might have done better running Monica.

And yet she plugs on, fuming and smiling, big fibs billowing ahead of her like a spinnaker.

She said on Tuesday night a Congressional medal winner had sent her a photo of his honouring by President Truman in 1946 and in a spidery handwriting begged her to “keep fighting for us”. Oh really? What’s his name? Can we see the photo?

She said she was named after Edmund Hillary six years before he was first famous. She said she’d ducked sniper fire in Kosovo, had no idea Bill whanged waitresses, had no doubts Iraq had WMD when she voted for endless war but knew better now, and so on.

No sentence, no word, no syllable she utters rings wholly true, and this can be, some say, a political impediment. Even Peter Reith, even Tony Abbott sounds and looks more truthful. Check this out on You Tube yourself.

I have none of these reservations about her husband, who was, is, a politician of dizzying talent, as disarming face-to-face as Maxine McKew, and possessed (I believe) of an inner decency and a reservoir of human sympathy that his nagging wife could never approach.

It’s important one keep this distinction in mind. Hillary is not Bill. Elizabeth Taylor is not Richard Burton. Yoko Ono is not John Lennon.

I wouldn’t be so nettled were she not in current mortal contest with the finest presidential candidate and the best American orator since Lincoln, one who can truly bind up the nation’s wounds and unleash, if that’s the verb I want, the better angels of our nature.

It’s strange how telepathic some public figures are.

We knew somehow, we knew for sure and we always knew, that Colin Powell was a good and principled man surrounded by jabbering morons, and Condoleezza Rice as fraudulent in her every utterance as Uriah Heep.

We knew Al Gore was a good but inwardly constricted man full of self-doubt, messianic intentions, Hamlettish pessimism, Old Washington propriety, guilt (as the heir of a tobacco fortune) and sorrow at the death, from lung cancer, of his sister.

We knew, or we knew pretty soon, that George Bush was a brain-damaged rummy with a couple of crazed ideas (that God was his true father and Saddam Hussein an earthly Satan armed to the teeth with atomic bombs), a secret hip-flask of Jack Daniels and a wife who despised his born-again blitherings as much as his father and mother.

We knew John McCain was a great raw wound of a man, with fury and goodness mixed in him in dangerous, poignant proportions. We would not be surprised if he invited Bin Laden to the White House to talk peace and then re-invaded Vietnam. We know he’s a perfect summer storm of a man, full of perilous lightning and healing waters and his core honesty, unlike Hillary’s, is not in doubt.

And we know, yes, we know truly, because in his case the telepathy is mightily communicative, that Barack Obama is an intelligent, good and measured public man of, thus far, clean conscience.

We know he’s faithful to his wife.

We know he’s half-convinced, but no more, by his Christian religion.

We know he tries hard to be as truthful as he can, failing perhaps on those occasions of enforced politeness (“I love you back”) which no-one can escape on the campaign trail.

We know he’s done his policy homework, and his solutions are pretty good.

We know too that he knows he is unique, black-white, poor-privileged, slum-savvy, Harvard-sleek, a Washington insider-outsider who can go beyond the usual slimed and tainted process and reach over it direct to the ordinary people, to Joe Lunchbox and Ellie-Mae Ironing Board as no-one since Franklin Roosevelt.

We know that he knows he may be assassinated; and he has this one chance.

To hear him give a whole speech (punch up Tuesday’s for instance), not an extract of it, is to have a great orchestral experience like Elgar, Walton, Holst or Parry at their most patriotic. As orators and speechwriters Churchill, Macaulay, Lincoln come near him, Cicero, Demosthenes, Freudenberg, Sorensen, Watson, Beazley, Noel Pearson, but none is better.

We know, we truly know that he knows too how to dare the rapids of race in America, to seem an acceptable black like Nat King Cole, not a dangerous one like Ray Charles, the sort of black a 48-year-old white rich woman would unhesitatingly invite to her dinner party.

We know that he knows, and knows all too well, that he must seem to love the America he will change root and branch, to make it, as he puts it, “an even more perfect union”. He knows he must love that America, love it to death.

He is, in short, the present world’s likely saviour if he makes it through November and this yapping troll at his ankle may yet bring him down.

For she is not done, you mark my words.

She may find a school friend to whom he once gave a joint.

She may find a letter he wrote once criticising God’s track record.

She may find a white girl, and there will be one, he once had sex with at college.

She may hope his Sirhan Sirhan will take him out on Bobby’s death-day, 40 years on, in June.

She’ll stick around, and keep carping and nudging, and falsely smiling, and see what turns up; what ill wind blows her way.

In other years I would not have said these rancid, ill-humoured things about Hillary. I would have thought her an adequate candidate in a corrupt and scary time who would do, at the least, some useful, competent, minimal things that needed doing in health, environment, Iraq.

But this year is different.

This is the year of Obama, if I may paraphrase the great film slogan, “This is the year of Spartacus”. And of the ringing cry of hope, “Yes we can.”

A particular freedom, long promised, a particular American freedom long yearned for, by Lincoln, Paul Robeson and Bobby Kennedy, may be imminent if he is elected �?? and if he survives �?? and some actual healing begin.

Let us hope this is so.

Or perhaps you disagree.
Last Monday Hillary Clinton said she’d “obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel and on Tuesday picked up some Jewish, redneck, gun-loving, wog-hating, duck-shooting, Catholic and early-dementia votes in nursing homes and by 10 per cent won handily the “rust-belt”, “lunch-bucket” and Amish-cluttered state of Pennsylvania in which she was leading by 30 per cent a month before.

“The road to the White House,” she then exulted to her weeping followers, “runs through Pennsylvania!” - later amending this to “the road to Pennsylvania Avenue runs through Pennsylvania!”

I’m getting to hate this woman.

Her towering frigidity, blazing hubris, bellowing mendacity, varying accent from region to region, her high school-standard acting and ceaseless haughty impersonation of Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown have got me properly simmering, and her confident thick-witted fist-in-the-face oratory, in a voice a Spectator columnist once well described as “a half-shout”, puts me in mind on some nights of the full moon like the one outside my window of the baleful, cruel contralto of my old lost love Bronwyn Bishop.

She is a stranger to consistency, sincerity and (at a guess) oral sex, a violent critic now and then of NAFTA which she and her husband thought up, and (it was wittily observed on CNN this week) knows in the end about as much about the inner workings of Executive Government as the White House pastry cook.

She went from being “honoured to be on a stage with Barack Obama” to declaiming “shame on you, Barack Obama!” in 30 hours, her beef being that Barack, a working politician, once spoke 10 words composed by someone else, who gave him permission to use them. Though I doubt the truth of the venomous rumour that she’s been for 20 years the lover of Madeleine Albright, her negative rating is above 50, her untrustworthiness rating irredeemable and Bill might have done better running Monica.

And yet she plugs on, fuming and smiling, big fibs billowing ahead of her like a spinnaker.

She said on Tuesday night a Congressional medal winner had sent her a photo of his honouring by President Truman in 1946 and in a spidery handwriting begged her to “keep fighting for us”. Oh really? What’s his name? Can we see the photo?

She said she was named after Edmund Hillary six years before he was first famous. She said she’d ducked sniper fire in Kosovo, had no idea Bill whanged waitresses, had no doubts Iraq had WMD when she voted for endless war but knew better now, and so on.

No sentence, no word, no syllable she utters rings wholly true, and this can be, some say, a political impediment. Even Peter Reith, even Tony Abbott sounds and looks more truthful. Check this out on You Tube yourself.

I have none of these reservations about her husband, who was, is, a politician of dizzying talent, as disarming face-to-face as Maxine McKew, and possessed (I believe) of an inner decency and a reservoir of human sympathy that his nagging wife could never approach.

It’s important one keep this distinction in mind. Hillary is not Bill. Elizabeth Taylor is not Richard Burton. Yoko Ono is not John Lennon.

I wouldn’t be so nettled were she not in current mortal contest with the finest presidential candidate and the best American orator since Lincoln, one who can truly bind up the nation’s wounds and unleash, if that’s the verb I want, the better angels of our nature.

It’s strange how telepathic some public figures are.

We knew somehow, we knew for sure and we always knew, that Colin Powell was a good and principled man surrounded by jabbering morons, and Condoleezza Rice as fraudulent in her every utterance as Uriah Heep.

We knew Al Gore was a good but inwardly constricted man full of self-doubt, messianic intentions, Hamlettish pessimism, Old Washington propriety, guilt (as the heir of a tobacco fortune) and sorrow at the death, from lung cancer, of his sister.

We knew, or we knew pretty soon, that George Bush was a brain-damaged rummy with a couple of crazed ideas (that God was his true father and Saddam Hussein an earthly Satan armed to the teeth with atomic bombs), a secret hip-flask of Jack Daniels and a wife who despised his born-again blitherings as much as his father and mother.

We knew John McCain was a great raw wound of a man, with fury and goodness mixed in him in dangerous, poignant proportions. We would not be surprised if he invited Bin Laden to the White House to talk peace and then re-invaded Vietnam. We know he’s a perfect summer storm of a man, full of perilous lightning and healing waters and his core honesty, unlike Hillary’s, is not in doubt.

And we know, yes, we know truly, because in his case the telepathy is mightily communicative, that Barack Obama is an intelligent, good and measured public man of, thus far, clean conscience.

We know he’s faithful to his wife.

We know he’s half-convinced, but no more, by his Christian religion.

We know he tries hard to be as truthful as he can, failing perhaps on those occasions of enforced politeness (“I love you back”) which no-one can escape on the campaign trail.

We know he’s done his policy homework, and his solutions are pretty good.

We know too that he knows he is unique, black-white, poor-privileged, slum-savvy, Harvard-sleek, a Washington insider-outsider who can go beyond the usual slimed and tainted process and reach over it direct to the ordinary people, to Joe Lunchbox and Ellie-Mae Ironing Board as no-one since Franklin Roosevelt.

We know that he knows he may be assassinated; and he has this one chance.

To hear him give a whole speech (punch up Tuesday’s for instance), not an extract of it, is to have a great orchestral experience like Elgar, Walton, Holst or Parry at their most patriotic. As orators and speechwriters Churchill, Macaulay, Lincoln come near him, Cicero, Demosthenes, Freudenberg, Sorensen, Watson, Beazley, Noel Pearson, but none is better.

We know, we truly know that he knows too how to dare the rapids of race in America, to seem an acceptable black like Nat King Cole, not a dangerous one like Ray Charles, the sort of black a 48-year-old white rich woman would unhesitatingly invite to her dinner party.

We know that he knows, and knows all too well, that he must seem to love the America he will change root and branch, to make it, as he puts it, “an even more perfect union”. He knows he must love that America, love it to death.

He is, in short, the present world’s likely saviour if he makes it through November and this yapping troll at his ankle may yet bring him down.

For she is not done, you mark my words.

She may find a school friend to whom he once gave a joint.

She may find a letter he wrote once criticising God’s track record.

She may find a white girl, and there will be one, he once had sex with at college.

She may hope his Sirhan Sirhan will take him out on Bobby’s death-day, 40 years on, in June.

She’ll stick around, and keep carping and nudging, and falsely smiling, and see what turns up; what ill wind blows her way.

In other years I would not have said these rancid, ill-humoured things about Hillary. I would have thought her an adequate candidate in a corrupt and scary time who would do, at the least, some useful, competent, minimal things that needed doing in health, environment, Iraq.

But this year is different.

This is the year of Obama, if I may paraphrase the great film slogan, “This is the year of Spartacus”. And of the ringing cry of hope, “Yes we can.”

A particular freedom, long promised, a particular American freedom long yearned for, by Lincoln, Paul Robeson and Bobby Kennedy, may be imminent if he is elected �?? and if he survives �?? and some actual healing begin.

Let us hope this is so.

Or perhaps you disagree.

[quote]'nuffsaid wrote:
Last Monday Hillary Clinton said she’d “obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel and on Tuesday picked up some Jewish, redneck, gun-loving, wog-hating, duck-shooting, Catholic and early-dementia votes in nursing homes and by 10 per cent won handily the “rust-belt”, “lunch-bucket” and Amish-cluttered state of Pennsylvania in which she was leading by 30 per cent a month before.
[/quote]

Elitist!