By Kyle Smith
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Hillary Clinton is “one of the finest public servants
this country has produced” and “a person of extraordinary integrity,” says
Mayor de Blasio.
He is completely confident that “measures were taken to
comply with the letter and the spirit of the law,” so no biggie that Clinton
hid her official e-mail correspondence on her own private servers where they
could be protected from scrutiny and/or deleted.
De Blasio may have an undeclared interest at stake: Maybe
he’d like to be a cabinet secretary under President Hillary. But his
unqualified defense of Hillary’s secretive and likely illegal off-the-books
communication system is typical of even those members of his party who have
little to gain from covering for her.
Hillary is infallible. Hillary is above reproach. She
can’t ever, ever have done anything wrong, ever, and even when she has been
shown to have done something ethically revolting, the reason we know it’s no
big deal is that it is said to be a big deal by those slimy Republicans.
Associated Press? The New York Times? Obvious GOP front
groups.
As Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin put it, “People have
different ways of communicating. I have a granddaughter who does nothing but
text. You’ll never find a letter written with her. So everybody’s different.”
Right, and Bernie Madoff? He just had a different way of
managing a hedge fund.
The Democratic Party, with whose members Hillary has had
an approval rating of 88% or higher since 2009, has the attitude of passengers
on a storm-tossed ship that only one person can steer. “O Captain, my Captain!”
Except they aren’t aboard the ship. The ship is still in
the dock. It doesn’t sail for more than a year. The Party isn’t stuck with
Capt. Hillary. It could find another leader.
So, why the fervent loyalty to someone with such a
troubled ethics record? A woman whose foundation accepted donations from
foreign countries while she was Secretary of State? A woman who is such a poor
communicator that her approval rating actually dropped while she was on a book
tour last year?
So oblivious of her own record that she is trying to make
an issue of the gender pay gap despite having run a Senate office in which
women were paid 72 cents on the dollar compared to men?
Democrats behave as if Hillary is the only conceivable
presidential candidate with sufficient stature, but any Democratic elected
official who became the nominee would naturally rake in donations from the
usual left-wing groups, massive media exposure and the national high profile
that comes with it.
Democrats say Hillary has been a public figure for so
long that she’s already been “vetted,” i.e., no more scandals about her can
possibly emerge. Never mind the two major, and brand-new, scandals that have
emerged in just the last two weeks. The percentage of voters who view her as
honest has plunged 10 points since April, according to Fox News polling.
The real reason Hillary commands such tribal loyalty is
that she is, apart from the non-candidate Elizabeth Warren, the only political
“celebrity” available, and Democrats are obsessed with star quality.
Republicans are currently debating the merits of competent, proven leaders like
Scott Walker, John Kasich and Mike Pence, who stand little to no chance of
being recognized by the average waitress, much less attracting adoring throngs
when they walk down the street.
As recently as 1992, the Democratic nominee could be the
little-known governor of a tiny state, but today only celebrities need apply.
The party of government can’t very well make the case, as Republicans might,
that their leader is simply the more competent manager of bureaucratic
institutions. Democrats have to make the very idea of governance romantic,
transformational, inspirational, even millennial.
They don’t believe in heaven but they feel perpetually on
the verge of an ecstatic, all-redeeming breakthrough to a higher plane of
consciousness that will arrive if we just pass another fossil-fuel tax or one
more equal-pay mandate.
Only an icon of liberalism can light the path to this new
and better land.
If there is one ship’s captain Hillary does resemble it’s
the skipper of the Apollo, the converted troop transport that puttered around
the Mediterranean in the 1970s. At the helm, L. Ron Hubbard demanded total
unthinking allegiance, treated his bedazzled Scientology followers more harshly
than an admiral treats the lowliest swabby and punished real or perceived
infractions without mercy.
But don’t take my word for it: Even David Axelrod has
noticed the scary zealotry of the Church of Hillarology.
“There’s this cult of personality growing up [around
her], and that’s dangerous,” Axelrod has said. “She’s going to have to correct
that when she’s a candidate.”
“Correct that”? When she’s a candidate she is going to
positively revel in it.
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