Where are serious leaders? Sometimes politics is so out of touch you have to laugh or cry, shout or get silent, shake your head, and try to imagine what is in theirs. Well, it just happened again.
Remember Nixon declaring “I am not a crook,” Bill Clinton saying, “It [sex] depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” and Biden saying, “I’m not stupid” (Feb. 2023), then a year later, “My memory is fine,” while calling Egypt’s president Mexico’s (Feb. 2024)? Right, right, right.
Now comes the old first lady, Hillary Clinton, that odds-beating trader of cow futures, Whitewater real estate magnate, paragon of integrity who pocketed millions from nations whose wishes she granted as Secretary of State, creator of the “Russia collusion” probe, cat among the pigeons, crusher of her 30,000-email server, only to be crushed herself in 2016.
Ms. Clinton, who styles herself worthy of first-name status, like “Madonna,” “Cher,” maybe “Plato,” or “Bonnie” of “Bonnie and Clyde,” has reappeared like a bad dream or circling storm, maybe just a perennial gadfly, so out of touch she has no idea that people think she is already gone, until back.
Always and forever climbing, circling, resenting what is not, attacking what is, emblematic of what happens to those who feel spurned and then, unfulfilled, learn the wrong lesson – full-on venality.
When she reappears, popping up like an old ache in the knee, this hard-hearted pol has nothing positive to say, so always gets caught in the vortex of her own making., She seems never happy just to “be,” grateful for the chance to have served, is instead grim, sour, resentful, and all about power.
So, what is her latest gift, wisdom from this oracle, somewhere between Harold Stassen, who forever hoped he might be president, and Seba Smith’s fictional nag, the schoolmarm?
Ms. Clinton’s gift to America, this jack-in-the-box after Trump and Fox, is another broadside against American voters, all of them this time, offered on “The Tonight Show.”
As if she had not offended enough with her antics in the 1990s, calling traditionalists “deplorables,” leaving heroes dead in Benghazi, or her “Russia collusion” fake, she now offers us more wisdom.
Wisdom? Yes, right to the point, as she knows our failing: “Get over yourselves.” She thinks the choice between Biden and Trump is easy, so we must “get over yourselves.” What does she mean? Just this, she likes Biden, hates Trump, and that’s that.
Go figure. The guy who beat her in 2016 is not her favorite. The guy who called her out for illegal behavior, whom she slimed with “Russia collusion,” bogus nonsense packaged as a national security threat, is not her cup of tea. Well, okay.
That settled, tell us how you really feel, Madame Almost President. Is Biden sharp, steady, and ready, this “elderly man with a poor memory,” to close the border, and address China, Iran, and Russia?
As if her opinions were not stomach-churning enough, she arrived on “The Tonight Show” in “an enormous black feathered-festooned hat,” and “a flowery pink one for Jimmy Fallon.”
The irony, like so much about Ms. Clinton, is lost on her. The feathery hats were not for Easter. On Easter, they were for “women’s suffrage” – the same day Biden called Easter “Transgender Visibility Day,” displacing women’s DNA. Think about it, can the world be more upside down?
Utterly lost in her feather-topped head, Hillary told us to “get over yourselves.” That is a good summary of modern politics, entirely out of whack, content to clap for an ironic sad sack. Where are serious leaders?
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
