Hillary Clinton & Nicholas Kristiof: Bringing Self-Pity and Self-Righteousness Together

To put your gag reflex to the ultimate test, try watching the entire 55-minute interview of Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World  Summit  Women conducted by New York Times columnist and fake humanitarian, Nicholas Kristof.  It is hard to say which of the two is more revolting.  Hillary Clinton,  just when we thought she might go away, like Jason in the Friday the 13^th horror franchise – is  back, or, Nicholas Kristof, the Walter Duranty of our time, a relentless self-promoter, a tireless virtue signaler and a full-time water carrier for Hillary.  

The New York Times was one of the leading propaganda outlets for Hillary’s most recent failed bid to become the North American counterpart to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentine (now, ex-) President, currently under indictment (Kirchner-corruption).  For those who don’t closely follow the horrors shows that make up South American politics, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner were the Bill and Hillary of the Pampas. This ambitious duo began as law school classmates. They married and quickly morphed into ruthless, leftist kleptocrats who ascended to the highest office in Argentina, governing as good Peronists always do, which is, to paraphrase President Obama  in 2010 addressing his adulators, “punish your enemies and reward your friends.”  

Cristina was luckier than Hillary, and not having the personality of an East German border guard probably didn’t hurt her either.  Unlike our own Lady Brezhnev of Chappaqua, la Señora Kirchner was able to succeed her husband, Nestor, as the first-elected woman President of Argentina in 2007.  He was bogged down by scandals and ill health and stepped aside after this first term for his wife to run. Nestor then in 2010 finally did his patriotic duty and died of a heart attack at age 60, leaving Cristina alone to complete the looting and exit office with multiple felonies hanging over her head.  One cannot help but wonder: if Hillary had won the recent election how soon Bill would have followed his Latin doppelganger to the great beyond.  The timing would have been perfect for her.  She no longer needed him. She never trusted him. She enjoys revenge and he did plenty to make her want it. Being a grieving widow for the Great Slickster would boost her poll numbers. No downside.

Back to the interview. The testosterone deficient Kristof who talks and comes off, for the lack of a better word, like a big sissy, one of those, goody-goody, suck-up-to-administration nerds from tenth grade student council, is always painful to watch.  A long-time Hillary court-lackey, Nicky was the right “woman” interlocutor in this Woman in the World Summit to bring out the inner-Hillary, the very best we have come to expect from the only Presidential candidate of a major party to run for office while under a major Federal investigation. 

Thus, he opens the conversation with the woman (shoe-in candidate) who shocked the world by losing to the man who Kristof spent months in his columns mocking as a clown, a buffoon, Mussolini-redux, who had no chance of winning: “We should offer you condolences, but maybe you should offer us condolences.”  This is vintage Kristof, oily, ingratiating, and, of course, needing to articulate at the beginning the premise of what this Summit is all about – holier-than-thou rituals of the privileged down-trodden, or as Bertrand Russell put it, the superior virtue of the oppressed.

Next comes the question we have all been breathlessly waiting for: “My social media followers want to know how Secretary Clinton is doing. So, [with a gentle therapist inflection] how are you doing?” Again, this is Kristof at his best.  Granted, he is a certified, high-placed Hillary-worshipper, but also being a Walter Duranty-style self-promoter, he wants everyone to know about his many “followers”.  He is not just any ordinary NYT leftwing know-it-all columnist like Tom Friedman: he feels your pain.  He is the voice of the voiceless, the personification of a movement.  Kristof knows well how his role in this encounter is to be played.  He must, Oprah-like, hit all the right therapeutic, inspirational cords.  Everyone has to feel good -- self-esteem can be fragile.  Shortly after the November election one of Kristof’s columns was “a 12 Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.”  In the interview Kristof also had to adroitly channel the audience’s warmth, admiration and affection, but most importantly, the appreciation for Hillary’s goodness and selflessness had to be enhanced.    

This lead-off question, the “humanizing” question, is also the entrée into the perfectly choreographed, perhaps, first ever coronation of a loser.  Hillary’s response is, well, very Hillary with a minute or two about “long walks in the woods”, being a grandmother and some smelling the roses falderal.  The irony, of course, is that Hillary’s efforts to humanize herself simply make her look even more like what she really is and always has been– a soulless, political robot. Her answer comes off as – “let me get this obligatory and annoying preliminary Grandma nonsense quickly out of the way, and get down to the fundamentals: how wonderful I am, how terrible for the country that I lost and how unfair it all is to me.”  Welcome to a vast, collective spectacle of self-righteous self-pity.

What is so remarkable about this interview is how timeless it is, capturing Hillary as we have known her for decades.  There is not the slightest trace of humility. She always projects her short-comings on to her enemies who thwart her at every turn.  She appears to have no sense of responsibility for her failure and a barely dissimulated, pathological resentment for any and all who might question her sense of entitlement to power.  In her mind and in those of her followers, she did not lose the election. It was stolen from her.  She had underestimated the size of the “basket of deplorables” and the depths of its depravity.  A country with more of the right kind of people in it would have responded to her with a landslide. America last November was just not good enough for her.  With her superior virtue, talents, experience, whatever political legitimacy remains in the land rightfully belongs to her, and now, after a couple of “walks in the woods” she is rested and back. She intends to be “the real” President: Trump is the pretender.

Lest this be doubted, view the portion of the interview which is really the only piece in this self-serving farce that matters. Kristof finally gets to the point:  will you ever run for office again?  Everyone knows in advance what the real answer is.  Disappointing but entirely predictable is the artless response starting with fake hyperventilating, frantically clutching her bosom and some spastic head bobs, followed by several minutes of the usual sort of incoherent verbal smog that Hillary blows out whenever she gets a question she does not want to answer.

The question is not, will she run for office again, rather, it’s how much millage is left in the Clinton political machine.  As long the rich donors (foreign and domestic) give her money, potential rivals back off, and the stooges in the commentariat like Kristof continue to faun over her she will never give up.  There is nothing inside of her other than her sociopathic drive to be in power.  Right now it looks as if once again, we need to be Ready for Hillary.                   

              

Marquette University: the journey from Joe McCarthy to Angela Davis

                                                           

Is it possible to shame whoever is supposed to be in charge at Marquette University – The President, the Board of Trustees, a distinguished, influential Jesuit somewhere in residence, someone, anyone who might know even a little history from the last hundred years or so and understand what Communists do to Christians when they get power?  Not even remotely. The real operatives, the social justice “priests” at this pretend Catholic university apparently have deeply inhaled the same fetid vapors of the cultural Marxism that saturate every molecule of air at the most secular, anti-Christian universities such as Berkeley, or closer to home, the one in Madison.  From the MU website:

The Marquette Forum will host Dr. Angela Davis for a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, March 29 ….  Davis is a scholar, activist and sought-after speaker who has presented at dozens of universities….  This event is part of the Marquette Forum, a yearlong series of conversations inspired by visions of inclusion and a better world emerging from black freedom struggles.

Here is Orwell-inspired, DiversitySpeak perfected – anodyne, flawlessly crafted so as not to arouse suspicion that the foxes now guard the hen house, that the radicals at MU run the show and stage their phony PC-scripted lectures and discussions. No one can object to healthy “conversations”, especially ones “inspired by visions of inclusion.” Who could be opposed to “a better world” or cheering on the “freedom struggles” of anyone? This announcement in both content and style smacks of Soviet era agitprop, the technique of which is to show how morally immaculate you are by wrapping all the right words around yourself – “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” “democracy.” Communist East Germany (euphemistically, The German Democratic Republic), it might be recalled, was so just, democratic, free and prosperous, that the Stalinists in charge needed to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving and shot them whenever they tried.

What is omitted in the vapid, banal happy talk about the “scholar, activist and sought-after speaker” is that at 73 years of age, the life-long Marxist, Angela Davis, is not just some intellectually formidable village atheist imported to rattle the sheltered, complacent young Christians on campus.  Neither is she a 1960s-era, hallowed civil rights celebrity who happened to have mellowed out of a distant radical past and embraced American traditions and joined the Rotary Club. Her life’s mission continues to unfold with an unwavering, militant commitment to the destruction of what this 136 year-old Jesuit university is (supposed to be) all about. From Marquette University’s website:

Marquette University Guiding Values

Endorsed Dec. 8, 2014

In accordance with the Catholic, Jesuit mission and vision of Marquette University, we hold that all people and things are created to praise, reverence and serve God in our community and throughout the world, and thus every aspect of the university’s lifeblood and work holds this principle and foundation as its beginning and end. Therefore, we will enact the following values and behaviors in our lives and our work to serve the greater glory of God…

One does not have to be a Jesuit-educated theologian or a philosopher to grasp that nowhere in any country that might have had the misfortune to be governed by this former Black Panther, FBI fugitive and Communist Party USA candidate for Vice President 1980 would any follower of MU’s Catholic, Jesuit mission – praising, revering and serving God – not find his life to be pure misery, assuming that he was not liquidated. Those at MU who extended the “distinguished lecture” invitation to Davis should review the video clip of her remarks in her pilgrimage in 1979 to Moscow where she accepted the Lenin Peace Prize, in her words,  “the esteemed peace prize bearing the glorious name of Vladimir Illich Lenin here on the soil where he led the great October Revolution.”  Sounds very reverential, doesn’t it? And, for a man whose violent hatred for religion could not be matched by anyone.
 

Davis was also feted in 1972 by the East German Stalinist, Erich Honecker, collecting honorary degrees, effusing praise and admiration for the GDR and denouncing her native land for its repression and racism. 

Most of those MU students who had hoped to be “inspired” by Davis’s “visions of inclusion” were likely unaware that after the “great October Revolution,” the “glorious” Lenin’s vision for the millions of Christians in the Russia he was about to turn into a “workers’ paradise” was somewhat less than inclusive.  In a 1922 letter to his ruling Politboro, Lenin outlined his approach to religious diversity in the young regime that was struggling to gain control over those who were somewhat less than enthusiastic about their prospects – show trials, followed by executions, public ones just to make sure everyone got the message.  “The result,” he wrote, “of the trial is to be the execution, by public shooting, of a large number of the Chuya Black Hundreds as well as the shooting of as many as possible from Moscow and other important religious centers…  The more we shoot, the better it will be for us.” [Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 125-26, emphasis added]  Not exactly encouraging for those who wanted "to serve the greater glory of God." Lenin, and then his disciple, Stalin went on to obliterate Russian Christianity with an unprecedented savagery, as well as to persecute Islam.  The pattern was repeated by Communist dictatorships across the world, as in China, Cuba and the Soviet block in Eastern and Central Europe.  

    

That an institution like Marquette University would host and honor a militant atheist like Angela Davis, an implacable enemy of its sacred teachings, its religious faith and aspirations, someone who has made a life-long, worshipful embrace of Lenin’s October Revolution and the failed Communist regimes through out the last century that repressed, tortured and murdered millions of Christians all over the world, is just one more piece of the depressing evidence that resistance to the cultural Marxism that pervades even our once conservative, religious institutions has utterly collapsed.  

One of the curious and largely unnoticed ironies of this debacle is that Marquette University, so eager and enthusiastic to welcome an aging Communist radical peddling all the standard Marxist tropes, is that it is the alma mater of perhaps the most famous anti-Communist of all, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a 1935 graduate of its school of law.  

 It is a safe bet that very few of the current students at Marquette University Law School (MULS) are even aware that Joe McCarthy is an alumnus (LL.B., 1935) of the law school. This unawareness, however, is excusable. The halls, offices, and classrooms of most law schools are teeming with portraits, plaques, and busts of prominent alumni. It is not uncommon for law schools to name buildings, classrooms, courtrooms, professorships, and scholarships after prominent graduates. At MULS, however, Joe McCarthy-undoubtedly the law school's most famous alumnus and a man Lyndon B. Johnson said "will never be forgotten"-is persona non grata. [From, Jeffry S. Kinsler, Marquette Law Review, #2, 2001]

Indeed, even more than ever, Senator McCarthy remains a persona non grata at MU.  However, the irony, of course, is that this most anti- of anti-communists is an embarrassment to the cognitive-dissonant Jesuit Catholics at MU who at the same time roll out the red carpet for a speaker whose long, illustrious CV describes someone who might well be called the perfect American Bolshevik, a life-long apologist for communist butchers (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro) across the globe. Those who refuse to recognize their enemies, especially ones who are so open, consistent and brazen as Angela Davis, are a hopeless, pathetic lot.    

The pattern of philo-communism and PC-enforced, leftist identity politics is not, of course, unique to MU. It is a pervasive feature of higher education. Recently, Young America’s Foundation’s spokeswoman Emily Jashinsky told staff at the National Review “that there has been a “disturbing pattern of suppressing conservativism” on Jesuit campuses, citing DePaul University and Gonzaga University as the most recent instances of conservative speakers receiving significant backlash from university faculty.  

For a parent seeking a Catholic university education for his child – some advice.  Skip Marquette University. Save the money and send the kid to a state university.  There is no difference.