I have no desire to magnify or dwell on Hillary Clinton’s failures and character flaws. She has reason to be miserable, just as Al Gore did; I really can’t imagine what it must be like to be either of them.
However, as Hyman Roth memorably said, “This is the life we have chosen!” Politics involves regular defeat and victory, compromises and disappointments, all under public scrutiny, with plaudits and jeers a routine part of the experience. If you can’t handle it, you’re in the wrong business. While I can be sympathetic to the stresses of the life, I also expect those who try to persuade us to bestow extraordinary honors, power and trust upon them to display extraordinary character or at least adequate character.
This Hillary Clinton has shown, repeatedly, she cannot do. The character is not there to display.
Here is what she said in part in a guest appearance on Kara Swisher’s New York Times Opinion podcast, “Sway,” after Swisher asked Clinton if she thought a woman president would handle the coronavirus pandemic more ably. [What an idiotic question, but that’s Kara Swisher for you…]
“I have no doubt, especially if it were me. I was born for that. I mean, that’s why I knew I’d be a good president. I was ready for crises and emergencies, and I would have done what you see these women leaders doing. You listen to the science. You bring in people in an open, inclusive way. You communicate constantly, you make the case by explaining why what you’re doing is in the long-term interests, not only of health, but also, of the economy. Yeah, I have no doubt in my mind at all that I would have stepped up to that crisis.”
Regarding the possibility of the President’s re-election, Clinton said,
“I can’t entertain the idea of him winning. It would cause cognitive dissonance of a grave degree…It makes me literally sick to my stomach to think that we’d have four more years of this abuse and destruction of our institutions, and damaging of our norms and our values, and lessening of our leadership, and the list goes on. But there’s no doubt that he would do everything he could to attack and punish anyone who was, in his view, an adversary … I don’t think he has any boundaries at all, Kara. I don’t think he has any conscience. He’s obviously not a moral, truthful man. So he will do whatever he can to lift himself up. And remember, as I said, he lives with this specter of illegitimacy. He knows more about how he got really elected than we still do. Hopefully, we’ll learn more in the years ahead.”
But Hillary says that it’s Trump who is obsessed with her:
“Well, I think I live rent-free in his head. He does not live rent-free in my head, because I have very little regard for him.”
Nah, she just has complained about losing the election to him more than any losing Presidential candidate in history. Far more—in fact, Clinton has acted as if her intention was to illustrate all of the worse sexist stereotypes about women being unable to compete without becoming emotionally involves and taking opposition as a personal affront. The rest of her lament has so many howlers that I don’t have space to do justice to them all. Clinton was so prepared to handle crises and emergencies that she couldn’t deal with the revelation of her illegal private server and the incompetent handling of classified emails, when all it required was telling the truth. A better interviewer than Swisher would have poked so many holes in her clichéd recipe for addressing the pandemic that listeners would have immediately remembered why Hillary lost. Listen to which science? What women leaders–Governor Whitmer? What does a virus care about “inclusivity”?
Won’t someone tell her? Clinton’s petty refusal to do what she insisted (when she thought she was going to win) was the solemn obligation of those who are defeated in American elections—accept defeat and pledge to do whatever is required to help a new administration succeed has been a prime factor in dividing the nation. I would say the prime factor. Incredibly, she still clings to the lie that the President was “really” elected by nefarious means. The assertion of anyone who loses a job that they, of course, would have solved all of the problems the real job-holder has struggled to solve is the essence of sour grapes and cheap boasting.
Hillary is doing her best to ensure that it will be generations before we see a woman elected President, because she is teaching aspiring young women the wrong way to handle competition, defeat and rejection.
But then so are her allies and supporters. Here was the chryon yesterday on Hillary’s fan-network, MSNBC:
“Republicans Celebrate Conservative Judges as Thousands Die“
Ethics Alarms 
“all it required was telling the truth.”
If you merely had to cross the street to tell the truth or travel ’round the world to tell a lie, some people will choose circumnavigation every time.
HRC’s one of ’em!
Sycophant and resident dimwit, Chris Hayes, at MSNBC has been beating the “GOP cheers new SCOTUS nominee as 200,000 die, and that’s the deal they willingly made in 2016” line of reasoning for this manic past month now.
No one needs to have it pointed out the absolute and abject dishonesty in that claim. But it is remarkable how incredibly low Chris Haye’s is here…and I’m not sure if the depths of depravity are in his intellectual capacity or his moral character.
I’m not sure how Hanlon’s razor applies.
Off topic, I need to make sure my computer hasn’t had it’s settings wonkified…but has the font system completely changed on Ethics Alarms?
Indeed. Fonts gone wild.
Michael, perhaps you need to wipe your computer, like with a cloth.
Seriously, though, the fonts have changed on the site. It’s not just you.
I tried that. Never do that again…I lost like 30,000 emails.
Check with the Russians; they probably got them.
Someone mentioned that they “had to get out the reading glasses” for the font Jack was using when the page margins were widened. Looks like it was an overcompensation for some but, for me, it’s perfect (for the line width). Probably depends on the size of computer screens in some cases … and definitely on the reader’s eyesight.
My (minor) grievance is that I no longer see a Search button at the top, and the previous and following posts are now at the bottom.
All these format changes just appeared. I’m in a crunch right now, but I’ll be bitching to WordPress soon.
I just made them larger, after something made them smaller.
The NYT podcast was a means to getting in another swipe at Trump, nothing more, because that’s what they do. Swisher was there to let Hillary run her mouth, not poke holes in what she said.
But your first sentence “…because that’s what they do” is NOT a “Julie Principle” declaration about the NYT, right? (Asking sincerely, for my own sanity’s sake – not trying to be sarcastic or “cute.”) I think almost every time I read or hear about something that’s in the NYT, these days, I react internally with the thought, “Thank GOD I don’t pay much attention to that ‘newspaper’ or most of the authors of its content!”
” ‘I think almost every time I read or hear about something that’s in the NYT, these days, I react internally with the thought, ‘Thank GOD I don’t pay much attention to that ‘newspaper’ or most of the authors of its content!’ ”
I’m with you there, Lucky, and it’s by no means limited to the NYT!
I think I can speak for the rest of the group when I say that I hadn’t thought of Hillary for months previous to this week, when she started trotting around the media circuit and cursed Kamala with that “Happy Birthday to this future Vice President” meme. I can’t remember the last time Trump mentioned her either, and his stream-of-consciousness ramblings gave him more than enough opportunity. No, that is projection.
The question, I think, is why anyone is giving her oxygen right now? Is she fishing for a cabinet position?
Desperately seeking relevance…
The Clintons are like cockroaches. You can’t kill ’em. I think it’s pretty likely she’ll be a member of a Harris cabinet. Maybe even Secretary of State.
As I said to Val, Hillary is an ethics corrupter.
Re: her assertion women would have handled the virus better: This reminds me of the campaign for gay marriage. The strategy throughout seemed to be that not only were gays and lesbians — Oooh. Check that — non-heteronormatives equal to heteronormatives, they are in fact SUPERIOR to the lowly heteronormatives. Why equal rights movements fall into this trap is beyond me.
Why does the left insist on insulting and annoying the people you’d think they’d want to be persuading? This seems to be some sort of Alinsky rule for radicals.
…just a few thousand votes in a handful of states rescued us from this election being re-election of HC. Of course, a long stated “fact” is the role of a woman in leadership of a nation would be “Kinder and gentler” than the knuckledragging males – at least those who are conservative. I am sure Maggie Thatcher is such an example. I have stated in the past that the Obama years showed a black man could screw up as good as a white man in the oval office. I would expect the same from a female.
Isn’t that Clinton, Hillar, AMAZING?! I mean, she has served as no less than the Secretary of State. And yet, she STILL lacks the diplomatic skill to use just a smidgen of deflection when it’s called for?
WHY did she NOT answer, “A woman President PROBABLY would handle the crisis DIFFERENTLY. Whether she would handle it more ably, depends on the woman and her team.”??
Every time I hear Hillary Clinton’s voice, I’m reminded of just how close we came to having her in the Oval Office. Hopefully, millions of others remember that, too, and vote against the party that tried to put her there.
Keep talking, Hillary!!