Thursday, February 25, 2016

You don't say!


Almost as if to echo my perspective last night on Hillary Clinton, Camille Paglia gives her - and the Democratic Party establishment - both barrels.

A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual – the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s.  What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast.  This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons.  This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.

. . .

A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic Party has become.  Perhaps there was a time, during the Hubert Humphrey era, when Democrats could claim to be populists, alive to the needs and concerns of working-class people.  But the party has become the playground of white, upper-middle-class professionals with elite-school degrees and me-first values.  These liberal poseurs mouth racial and ethnic platitudes, acquired like trophy kills at their p.c. campuses, but every word rings hollow, because it is based on condescension, a patronizing projection of victimhood onto those outside their privileged circle.  There is no better example of this arrogant class bias than Wellesley grad Hillary Clinton lapsing into her mush-mouthed, Southern-fried dialect when addressing African-American audiences.

There's more at the link.

Ms. Paglia is a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, as her article makes clear.  I'm not sure whether he'd be any better than Hillary Clinton as President, and I certainly wouldn't vote for him, but I'll say this for him:  he's honest.  He says what he believes, he doesn't waffle, and he sticks to his message.  That's more than most Republican candidates have done this election cycle - never mind Hillary!

Peter

3 comments:

Pawpaw said...

I am becoming more convinced, daily, that Hillary will be indicted before the Dem Convention. When that happens, it's a whole new ball game. This may be the most interesting political season in our lifetime. And, I was alive for Watergate. When the dominoes start falling, it will be very interesting indeed.

Bernie has a good shot at the nomination, because he is the only fellow running against Hillary. No one else wanted to take the chance, so he is likely to get the nod once Hillary does the perp-walk. The ancillary sideshow will be very interesting and may reach into the White House. How far that goes is till uncertain, but it bends credulity that a serving SecState did not correspond with some members of the White House team.

Anyone who ignores or attempts to circumvent national security systems does so at their peril. In earlier years, people were hanged for doing what Hillary is accused of. This reaches to the very center of national security.

It should be quite the show.

Anonymous said...

That is my impression of Sanders as well. Crazy as a loon if he expects people to convert to his political beliefs but honest - yeah, I take him at his word.

Cannot believe that ANYONE would vote a politician who is currently under investigation by the FBI. I mean not even in office and they are already making headlines for criminal behavior. Really speaks to the person who would vote for that - they just don't care as long as they aren't Republican.

Gordon Scott said...

Honest? Well, for a given value of honesty. Perhaps "as honest as a guy who never had a job outside politics." More honest than Hillary, maybe, but that's not exactly a high bar. But really, I've never met a socialist who was honest. When the first precept of your philosophy is "By any means necessary," I don't think it has good implications for honesty.