Saturday, January 12, 2008

Hillary Haaates Men? Or is She Walking on the Wild Side?

Carl Bernstein has an excellent biography of Hillary Clinton called Woman in Charge. I had the chance to read the first chapter, entitled "Formative Years," which is an revealing excursion throught the Rodham/Howell marriage of her Welsh Methodist parents, her father only being a second-generation American.

Her father Hugh and her two younger brothers were all afflicted with some sort of hereditary depression. Hillary's uncle Russell was a medical doctor who flamed out into an alcoholic suicidal tailspin that ended his life prematurely as a Chicago bartender.

But both sides of the family had prolific begetting skills, with 9 siblings on her mother's side and 11 on her father's, making her book It Takes a Village perhaps a subtext on the extended family Hillary possessed.

Hillary's closest childhood relationship, according to the Bernstein chapter, was her mother's protective psychic and physical umbrella when her father---a former Naval Petty Officer---went from being a martinet to a physical one-man goon-squad. As Daddy's girl, Hillary was exempt from the physical beatings, but she saw her high-school QB brother berated because he only had ten completions out of eleven passes---you get the picture of a complete dictatorial perfectionist. Her brothers didn't measure up to these impossible standards and Hillary evidently regards male parenting as defective---at least from her first-hand experience.

There has to be a reason for her scofflaw statement that "There is no such thing as a woman illegal." Despite her efforts to spin it as a compassionate attempt to sympathize with a fellow human being, giving women some sort of legal immunity is simply absurd---or is this some sort of Oprahfication of her candidacy which will devolve into victimhood if Obama continues his remarkable campaign---one of unity and idealism rather than the class warfare of Edwards or the identity politics of Hillary?

I worked on the national staff of two Democratic and one Republican/Independent [John Anderson in '80]. I have seen the Democrats try to satisfy their constituencies in absurdly conflicting manners [blacks, unions, Hispanics, women, gender, anti-religious, & voting rights for convicted felons] to get any edge any way and anyhow in various contexts.

If Hillary begins down that road, she will go into the tailspin of other Dem candidates of the past and simply flame out.

As the Bernstein book demonstrates, she was a decent human being before Wellesley and Law School deformed her thinking and her spouse deformed her view of men permanently.

Will Clinton Inc. survive a couple more absurd remarks like "no such thing as....?"

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