Sultan Knish
Hardly a week goes by without Hillary Clinton receiving another award.
Last
month she was named a "Global Champion" by the International Medical
Corps at a gala Beverly Hills event crowded with celebrities, received
the American Patriot Award
at the National Defense University Foundation in the Ronald Reagan
Building and the Hermandad Award from the Mexican American Leadership
Initiative.
Considering that Hillary Clinton is as much of an American patriot as is
she is a Mexican-American leader... both awards seem equally deserved.
Hillary was honored by Malaria No More for taking the controversial
position of being against malaria and by the Lantos Foundation for Human
Rights and Justice for supporting internet freedom. Because nothing
says a deep commitment to internet freedom like sending a man to jail
for a year over a YouTube video that offended Muslims.
The President of Georgia (the one in the Caucasus) honored her with the Order of the Golden Fleece.
That's considered a high honor in Georgia, but back in the United
States it just reminds everyone of Whitewater and the Rose Law Firm.
The Queen of Spain gave Hillary Clinton and Antonio Banderas gold medals and Oceana honored her for
saving the oceans. And that was a slow month after Yale Law School gave
her its Award of Merit, Chatham House gave her a prize and Citizens for
Research in Epilepsy honored her for taking a courageous stand by
opposing epilepsy.
The American Bar Association had already given Hillary its highest honor
for "her immense accomplishments as a lawyer". The National
Constitution Center awarded her the Liberty Medal (an honor she shares
with such Constitutional scholars as Bono, Hamid Karzai and her husband)
and Elton John gave her an award for fighting AIDS declaring himself
"honoured to honour her".
(If you’re keeping track, Hillary has come out against malaria, epilepsy
and AIDS. No word on her position on shingles—but reportedly she’s
against it.)
At this rate, if a bunch of elderly left-wing Norwegians toss her the
Nobel Peace Prize early on, the way they did to Obama, it will barely
rate mention among all the other glittering trophies that have been
bestowed on a woman whose only actual accomplishment was being married
to a crooked governor with good political instincts and sharp elbows.
Hillary Clinton's accomplishments as a lawyer, like her accomplishments
as a senator and a secretary of state, don't actually exist. The more
awards Hillary gets, the fewer people will wonder about her
qualifications. Like the fake doctor with 200 equally fake diplomas on
the wall; the award blitz is a pathetic case of overcompensation. The
giant pile of awards creates the illusion of qualification for someone
who never even won political office on her own merits—let alone did
anything worthwhile or interesting while there.
It's been a while since there was an inevitable candidate in American
politics four years before an actual presidential election. It's been
even longer since there was a candidate so barren of actual
accomplishments and so devoid of anything resembling content.
Hillary traipses around the country and the world picking up awards and
delivering speeches for six figures a pop; but the only words that come
out of her mouth are boring cliches.
Receiving an AIDS award from Elton John's foundation, she announced
insightfully, "We still have a long way to go." Strangely enough this is
what people who have never had AIDS or treated AIDS have been saying
while receiving AIDS awards since the disease first became a celebrity
cause.
At Oceana, Hillary declared, "More and more people appreciate what
oceans mean to them." At the University of Buffalo, she expressed the
hope that we could "move away from the slash and burn politics, the name
calling, the excessive partisanship" and at the Women of the World
summit declared that the United States had "come so far, but there is
still work to be done."
You might even say... there's a long way to go.
The more you listen to Hillary, the more you realize that she doesn't
have ideas, she has cliches. String together a bunch of cliches and you
have a Hillary speech. String together a bunch of Hillary speeches and
you have a candidacy that is as empty as it is inevitable. Hillary isn't
even Chauncey Gardiner. Her cliches lack even accidental poetry.
Instead they're as empty as she is.
What does Hillary stand for? A casual observer would be forgiven for
assuming that she stands for nothing. After eight years in the senate,
the only thing about her time there that anyone bothers to mention is
her vote on the Iraq War. That's because there isn't anything to
mention.
If Hillary had not accidentally taken what would become a controversial
position, while trying to cast a safe vote, all that anyone would
remember about her time in the Senate is that she was inducted into the
National Women's Hall of Fame for "opening new pathways for women in
leadership".
That was quite an accomplishment considering that she was the 32nd female senator.
At the awards ceremony, Hillary coined the wholly original phrase, "I
don't think there has ever been a better time to be a woman than in the
United States of America in the 21st century."
But Hillary is always being honored as a revolutionary leader for just
showing up. If she has something positive to say about the oceans,
teaching little girls or fighting AIDS; there’s an award in it for her.
If Hillary daringly says that reading is good today; tomorrow she wins a
Pulitzer. That’s how low the Hillary bar has been set.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton traveled a lot. The National Constitution Center honored her because,
in their words, "she traveled to more countries than any other
Secretary of State”. Also because she "used social media to engage
citizens". It certainly sounds better than honoring her for abusing the
State Department to prep for a presidential run with a non-stop world
tour while neglecting desperate pleas for help from the Benghazi mission
which had been under siege for months.
And that's the best that can be said about a term that wrapped up with
that election shakedown that had been her endgame all along, the murder
of four Americans and Hillary pounding the table and demanding to know
what difference it made. As every foundation, think-tank, university,
charity and non-profit that has rushed to cover her in golden medals,
orders and awards will tell you... none at all.
But despite the awards, there is very little enthusiasm even among
Democrats for President Hillary. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hollywood's leading
liberal, came out for her saying, "I think she’s the best candidate
currently available for either party." Considering that Hillary is
really the only Democrat semi-officially running now, not counting Joe
Biden, that's damning with faint praise.
There's a reason that liberals are fantasizing about an Elizabeth Warren
run. Warren is even less charismatic, more off-putting and more
cliche-prone than Hillary, but you do know what she stands for.
"Socialism today, Socialism tomorrow, Socialism forever." Hillary
Clinton stands for the same thing; but she has spent decades trying to
be discreet about it.
Instead of letting her "You didn't build that" freak flag fly in a safe
blue state like Warren did, Hillary Clinton has carefully crafted a
completely safe image. That was what undid her candidacy in 2008. Given a
choice between a candidate who stood for a whole range of things and
one who stood for being president; they chose Obama. Eight years later;
no one still has any idea what she stands for.
Hillary's calculated vacuousness smacks of paranoia. At a time when
Democrats want some red meat, she tries to be less partisan than Obama.
At all her award ceremonies, she speaks in cliches and stays away from
anything that anyone could find controversial or memorable. There's no
way that she can offend anyone if she spends all her time emitting
contentless cliches.
Beneath the bland rhetoric is a paranoid control freak obsessed with
controlling and shaping every aspect of her image. Her partner in this endeavor is Media Matters' David Brock;
a man whose legendary paranoia rivals her own, who had been
hospitalized for a mental breakdown after believing that people were
trying to kill him and who allegedly used an illegally armed security
team to protect him from "right-wing assassins".
Together Brock and Clinton have already shut down a number of friendly
film and television projects about Hillary while Brock peddles "The
Benghazi Hoax"; a book that smacks of Hillary Clinton's old obsession
with a vast right-wing conspiracy. A Hillary biopic in which the former
first lady is played by an actress capable of conveying actual human
emotion would do her image a lot more good than Brock's paranoid
rantings. But it would appear that Brock's paranoid mindset mirrors her
own.
Hillary Clinton has played the long game, moving slowly from one
position to another, with her eyes on the White House. But in her
calculating chess game, she has neglected the details of the present.
Hillary lost in 2008 because she was too busy building an inevitable
candidacy to give people an actual reason to vote for her. And now she's
making the same mistake all over again.
It's easy to be the inevitable candidate when no one is actually running
against you. The hypothetical inevitable candidate is rarely someone
that people actually want to vote for. Like Mitt Romney, they seem like
the sort of man or woman who is probably going to win because everyone
says so. When the race heats up, the inevitable candidate collapses and
is left behind.
America hasn't had inevitable presidents in a while. The men who have
actually managed to score two terms were absurdly unlikely candidates
with obvious flaws whose very prospects were met with ridicule. There
was nothing inevitable about Ronald Reagan, a former actor, Bill
Clinton, a sleazy draft dodger with infidelity issues, George W. Bush,
the son of a one-term president prone to mispronounce important words,
and Barack Obama, a political amateur and left-wing radical who defended
his racist pastor after the latter was caught screaming "God Damn
America" after 9/11.
Hillary Clinton's inevitable status is her weakness. Inevitable
candidates don't win elections. Just ask John McCain, an American hero
and liberal Republican, and Mitt Romney, a man who was born to play the
president on television. Or ask Michael Dukakis, the architect of the
Massachusetts Miracle, or John Kerry, a man who was not only born to
play the president, but who could run on his Vietnam service during
wartime.
There will come a time when the awards will stop, when the empty quotes
about how she is running because she cares about girls will run out and
when she will actually have to give real answers to difficult questions.
And that isn't Hillary's strong suit. It's not that Hillary doesn't
have any answers; it's that she's too paranoid and controlling to go
past her talking points and say what she really thinks.
As a debater, Hillary is rigidly unimaginative. As a politician, she's
vacant. And her charisma doesn't exist. The only way that she can get
through her own party's primaries and a national election is by scaring
away every potential rival by being the inevitable candidate. And that
is what the endless Hillary award season is really about.
Hillary Clinton's awards parade isn't meant to impress the voters; but
to scare away any opponents who might think that they can do to her in
2016 what Obama did to her in 2008. At galas and dinners, she dons an
armor made out of awards, prizes and trophies to manufacture the
consensus that she is an accomplished everything and that this will be
her election because her victory is inevitable.
But Hillary doesn't really believe that she is the inevitable candidate.
If she believed that, she would be less paranoid and controlling... and
more capable of relaxing and being herself; whoever that might be. A
Hillary with self-confidence wouldn't need David Brock whispering in her
ear and would be able to cut loose problematic figures like Huma Abedin
and Sidney Blumenthal whose presence is already harming her premature
campaign.
Hillary is obsessed with winning and certain that she will lose.
Everything she has done throughout the years was calculated to make
defeat as unlikely as possible... including taking the position of
Secretary of State while doing as little as possible in that role.
Instead of inspiring people, she has built up a bulletproof resume while
taking as few risks as possible. And that insecurity may be her
undoing.
For 13 years, Hillary has done little except abuse public office to map
out her future presidential run. By the time the election actually
takes place, she will have spent nearly two decades or a third of her
adult life focused on running for president.
At the Benghazi hearings, Hillary famously demanded to know what difference it made. The same can be said of her life.
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