IN THE AGE OF ALL THINGS HILLARY

“You gotta do what you gotta do.”

                 Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, circa 1996

“Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

                 Hillary Clinton, April, 2015

Question: what grown up person would attempt to entice potential followers with such transparently phony goo? Answer: someone who will say or do anything to get what she wants.

We are now in the age of “All things Hillary” and its major pastime – Hillary speculation – what will be her latest “brand”, who will her Republican opponent be, what about the deleted emails, can she keep Bill in tow, will she win?  The speculation pushes down, down to the depths of dark suspicion when one contemplates “the details” of what is known about what Hillary actually does – the lies (“the convenience of one [email] device,” “We were under fire in Bosnia”), the opportunism (support for gay marriage in 2013), and hypocrisy (women’s equality and Saudi money for the Clinton Foundation), the incompetence (healthcare reform, early 1990s, Russia, Benghazi),  – and, when one begins to wonder just how many unknown crooked deals, suborned henchmen, and destroyed lives have followed in her wake. Like Husband Bill, she does what she thinks she’s gotta do.   

Consider the breath-taking arrogance of this motif combined with a Jonathan Gruber-like contempt for the “average American” voter in the crosshairs of Ms. Clinton’s cynical campaign positioning.  Gruber and the former First Lady possess some of the same hefty integrity deficits – the conviction that their vastly superior intelligence substitutes perfectly for honesty and transparency, and an irresistible impulse of venality -- favors and influence in exchange for cash. Gruber lined his pockets as a highly paid consultant, aka, front man, for the Democrats early in Obama’s first term as they crafted the Obama Care deception, now immortalized by the President’s infamous imprimatur of dishonesty, “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.” Gruber was later captured on a You Tube video bragging about his duplicity and sneering at the rubes he thought he so easily snookered.  Hillary and her spouse have raked in millions of dollars with their Clinton Foundation by fronting for causes whose beneficiaries could only be deeply embarrassed by how the Clinton’s many gross and hypocritical personal and professional dealings openly clash with their façade of philanthropy and mock the humanitarian ideals they pretend to care about. The sometimes comical but troubling conjunction of Hillary’s lofty passion for women’s rights and well-being and Bill’s “un-lofty” passion for women would make for a fascinating study in social pathology – who enables whom?   

No high powered, code-breaking apparatus need be employed to decipher what Hillary has in mind as a “champion for the little guy,” check, I mean “little gal.”  Like her former Boss in the White House she operates with a remarkably unselfconscious, delusional air of superiority and condescension, unable to comprehend how ludicrous the notion is that everyday Americans need or want her or anyone remotely like her in any serious capacity. The ego-charged condescension perfected by President Obama, perhaps is best captured by his humble confession to House Democrats back in 2008: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”   

For both Obama and Hillary America is in a terrible slump out of which only they can lift us. How did their egos become so bloated and how did they achieve such a thorough inoculation from reality? Surrounding themselves by sycophants and power gruppies no doubt richly contributed to the massive ego warping. Also, the years of marinating in the juices of a leftist ideology turns politics into a search for the oppressed and the invention of victim classes – manipulated, helpless, blameless – victims who do not fully grasp the reality of their exploitation, and most importantly, need champions, as Hillary puts it, to affirm their status as victims, stir their righteous resentment and focus it on the oppressors. Resentment mixed with self-righteousness produces the potent cocktail served by the left.  Subtract the resentment, envy, and demonization of the opposition that fuels the post-1970s leftist politics, all that remains is corruption and cynicism. “Everyday Americans need a champion” is Hillary at the apex of her mountainous cynicism.  And the vapid, silly script indicates how stupid she believes the voters must be.   

Perhaps the theme song of the Hillary Clinton campaign should be a 70s tune lifted from the repertoire of one of Bill Clinton’s many “friends”, Barbra Streisand, “People Who Need People” suitably arranged to express the unique Clintonesque sense of noblesse oblige: “We the helpless, average people desperately need Hillary and her special anointed people to be our champions.”  Hillary “in charge” at the helm of the Ship of State means that we will all be “the luckiest people in the world” – lucky, maybe, just like Libyan Ambassador, Chris Stevens and the other three Americans who died in Benghazi – eulogized by Hillary’s “What difference does it make”? or the legion of Clinton associates over the years from Little Rock to Washington DC who ended up dead or in prison – James McDougal, convicted White Water partner, Vince Foster, Hillary Law Partner, Ed Willey – Clinton fund raiser, and Dan Lassater, Clinton supporter and fund-raiser to name a few. 

Hillary as President will be in charge in an East German, Erich Honecker sort of way which in the crudest terms means: “we, the ruling class know what is best for you and you will do what we tell you to do.”  The East German way of equality and plenty for all for Honecker and his CP henchmen also meant for them the enjoyment of an enviable standard of living compared with the “average” East German – better schools for their children, better health care, a different (more flexible) set of rules to maneuver around – sound vaguely familiar? Smarter and highly virtuous, they were entitled to their lofty and comfortable perches and a requirement for telling the truth and following the rules that was just for them … optional. “Entitlement” is also a word often associated with Hillary. 

What might we expect from Hillary Clinton as a champion?  Again, her former Boss provides a preview best captured in his 2010 Univision broadcast to his followers:  “We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” No better concise description could be found for the modus operandi of the Clintons and their brass knuckle political style that seems to resemble a mix of the late Peróns, Juan and Eva, and that wonderful duo of graft and greed, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Volumes can and have been written about what happens to people who get in Hillary’s way and the occasional woman who deigns to object to Bill’s unwanted attention. Travelgate, for those who may have forgotten, maybe, is Hillary at her best as a champion for the little person. When taking over the White House in 1993 she ordered the firing of travel office director Billy Dale and other long time staffers with the trumped up accusation of “sloppy accounting.” Dale and his staffers were in Hillary’s way since she wanted to give the jobs to her “friends” from Arkansas. To the victors go the spoils, as it were. The staffers were innocent of any wrong doing, but lost their jobs and had their careers ruined. This is old history, but history with the Clintons, their history, does seem to repeat itself in a sleazy, predictable pattern. They do this sort of thing and always get away with it. Why would they change?  Grifting, trimming, lying are written into their political DNA.  It has worked well for them.  

Denied the triumphant return to the White House for the second time, by Trump's “deplorables” and “irredeemables” there is reason to hope that the Age of All Things Hillary is past.  Still, there is Jason in Halloween.   “She's back!” Oh my God!

Obama: The Projectionist and Chief

We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2010

We can teach our children the hazards of tribalism. We can teach our children to speak out against the casual slur. We can teach them there is no ‘them,’ there’s only ‘us.’”
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2014



Psychological Projection:  the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others

One of the formidable challenges in attempting to fathom just what kind of person the 44^th President of the United States is and what he actually believes is to reconcile the many stunning displays of self-contraction that emanate from his ubiquitous oratory such as the one cited above. This particular example is richly ironic with Mr. Obama’s tenderly expressed concern for the “hazards of tribalism” for our children, coming from a man who conducts his politics as tribal warfare (Chicago style), holds his opposition  in open contempt as benighted and corrupt, and routinely slurs them, sometimes casually, sometimes with great calculation. Consider our “post-partisan” President in 2011 drawing clear invidious boundaries of “us” and “them”.  In stark contrast to his aspirations for Americans to be healthy and employed, the Republican plan in his words was “let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance. So far at least, I feel better about my plan” – sarcasm in the service of moral superiority.   

Mr. Obama with his immense self-regard seems to have a strong affinity for first person pronouns – I, me, we, us. “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” Obama confessed to House Democrats back in 2008. These pronouns are not just his vehicles of self-infatuation they are also particularly useful to him as instruments of misdirection and obfuscation. Obama typically launches his insults, defamations or slurs with the “I”s, to set his starting point, the absolute, pristine clarity of his vision and purpose then to move to enlarge the moral universe of which he is the center and to complete the population of the community of the virtuous with his “we’s and “us’s”. Consider his comments after the Newtown school shooting, April of 2013.

 “When Newtown happened, I met with these families and I spoke to the community, and I said, something must be different right now.  We’re going to have to change.  That’s what the whole country said.”  

“I met… I spoke… I said…” – which evokes in pathetic comparison another triptych from a much earlier time and from a leader of many fewer words:  “I came. I saw. I conquered.” (veni, vidi, vici).  Caesar came, saw and announced that he had conquered: Obama met, spoke and announced that he had “said something.”  In this case, that “something” whatever it might be, must be different”, however that might be.  And lest we doubt the urgency, “right now.”  As with many of the President’s pronouncements, we know at the end of them what we knew at the beginning, that he is a very important person who says things, many things.

The key point, however, is the misdirection. “We’re going to have to change.”  Who exactly is the “we” that must change? There is no “we”.  He (Obama) doesn’t have to change nor do his camp followers.  The “we” in this clumsy, egotistical verbal bramble suddenly, however, turns into the voice of the “whole country” an absurdity given the fact presumably obvious to the President that the whole country is and has long been bitterly divided about guns. Obama clearly has change in mind, no mention of hope, and it is for “them”, the rural Pennsylvanians and the like he singled out during his 2008 campaign who did not vote for him, those “white folks”, as he calls them, who “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Here then is one of Obama’s more memorable and condescending slurs that gives full register to the deep grievances that fester within and occasionally slip out when he talks unguarded to his own “folks”.  Worth mentioning in this regard is that candidate Obama’s vicious stereotype was delivered in San Francisco in front of his glitzy Hollywood adulators and sycophants, the genuine “we” and “us” who stand apart and far above the back woods, fundamentalist, shotgun toting bigots who cannot rise above their antipathy.  This time when he spoke in California there was definitely an “us” and a “them”.

Mr. Obama disapproves not only of gun owners, except the ones that guard him and his family, but drivers of SUV’s, and people who deviate from his norms of diet and home heating temperatures. And so, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

Again, the phony “we,” along with one of his signature non-sequiturs, the misdirection to conceal his staggering sense of moral omniscience and his megalomaniacal drive to order everyone else’s life.  “WE can’t drive…” etc. really means “YOU … will drive, eat and adjust your thermostat according to my high standards and requirements in these matters.”  Behind these deceptive words one senses the channeling of Erich Honecker with an East-German-like mentality of someone who lives in a fundamentally bifurcated world of I-we, the enlightened who give the orders versus you-them, the unwashed and benighted who do what you are told.    

Barack Obama, however, is never more duplicitous and deceitful than when it comes to the topic of race.

 “I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.”  

This, of course, is Obama speaking his real mind, albeit in his typical inelegant, sophomore-ish style.  No misdirection or obfuscation in this. By itself and out of context there is nothing remarkable about this comment.  It reflects a perspective on race relations in this country that is widely held in certain circles, particularly on the part of the Left, the “diversity” industry and the grievance-mongering, race-careerist friends of Obama like Al Sharpton.

But then contrast this peevish and pessimistic plaint with the soaring rhetoric that put much of the nation in a swoon back in 2004.

“There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. 

True today; false tomorrow: welcome to the post-modern world and the post-modern Presidency. That was then and this is now.  So much for the The One, who besides healing the planet was going to escort America into an era that would transcend race and partisanship.  What we know now is that the President is the opposite of what the candidate appeared to be, and that much of what he says with the constant self-referencing is a continuation of the spectacular deception he worked in 2008. His second term ended with impotence and recrimination. We he departed, finally, showing himsel as he has always been, a vain and mean-spirited man, caught up in his own mendacity, incapable of viewing his critics and opposition as anyone but “enemies” whom he seeks to “punish”.  The lofty side of his rhetoric, such as the example above, with its invocation of toleration and sympathetic sense of being able to see ourselves in others is belied by what seems to be a deep ideological conviction premised on grievance and resentment –  “America is just a downright mean country” as echoed by the First Lady in 2008. The grievance and resentment that he harbors and sometimes fails to dissimulate make a vision of “us” versus “them” inevitable, and a politics of tribalism the normal order. One then perhaps would do well to understand the President’s gestures and language as classic “projection,” attributing to others those shortcomings and untoward impulses that he feels within himself.

STALIN & FDR's TRIUMVIRATE OF STOOGES

We are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have … Generations unborn will owe a great measure of freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people. Harry Hopkins, Madison Square Garden Speech (Quoted from, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008, 284)

Stalin gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise.  His grown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle.  A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. …  A wonderful and stimulating experiment is taking place in the Soviet Union…  The Soviet Union is doing wonderful things… Joseph Davies (Quoted from The Forsaken, 120, 142)

Henry Wallace is a pacifist, a dreamer who wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.

Harry Truman on Henry Wallace (Quoted from The Forsaken, 279) 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died seventy-two years ago two months after returning from his grueling journey to Yalta. With considerable unease one contemplates the famous photographs of a grey and gaunt FDR sitting between Churchill and Stalin, staring back at the camera with ghostly eyes sunken and lost, a dark cloak wrapped around his frail body.  Captured on film is a spent man leaning on death’s door doing exactly what? – negotiating the fate of millions of people with one of the 20^th century’s most cunning, deceitful and brutal personalities. Off to the side and out of camera range, providing counsel and support was ... Alger Hiss.

FDR is the closest thing Americans have to a modern, secular saint, the man who guided America through the Great Depression and saved the world from Adolf Hitler. His reputation is guarded by an impenetrable protective halo, the greatness and heroism of his Presidency forever guaranteed. To speak disparagingly of FDR puts one on the fringe. 

FDR’s halo shines particularly bright for Democrats for whom there is no higher praise in the political arena than to be likened in any way to the 32^nd President of the United States. Shortly after the 2008 election, Time magazine’s cover featured an eye-popping photo-shopped picture of President-elect Barack Obama accoutered in a signature FDR pose, teeth clenching the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle punctuating a broad, confident grin, head topped with the well-recognized fedora, perched casually behind the wheel of an open 1930s convertible ready, so to speak, to steer America out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Under the picture was the caption, “The New New Deal.”     

Eight years later with the vapors of Obama-mania long dissipated, a stagnant economy unemployment rate the new norm, and “Hope & Change” a forgotten campaign inanity, no one should confuse the  President with the 32nd, at least as secular saint. Obama’s descent from the state of his 2008 divinity (“He is sort of a God….” Evan Thomas, Newsweek) to fallible flesh is easily explained and sadly understood. But the continued awe and reverence for Franklin Roosevelt, entrenched and undeniable as it is, is somewhat harder to comprehend.

   

Whether FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression remains an extremely involved and complicated historical-political debate and his legacy and reputation in some relative sense rise and fall with the movement of that controversy. However, with the availability of primary source material in the form of declassified official U.S. documents and material from the former Soviet Union archives, FDR’s formulation and conduct of American foreign policy up to and including World War II must be judged as nothing less than a monumental disaster.  His terrible judgment and decisions with in dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union condemned tens of millions of people to decades of servitude and tyranny.        

The premises for making this case can be stated in two simple sentences, their truth, well documented and indisputable.

Joseph Stalin is one of history’s most brutal, lethal dictators.

FDR trusted Stalin as a decent, honorable man.

Once the God of the Communist world was finally and safely dead in March 1953 even his own protégés after a respectable time denounced him and evicted him from the mausoleum on Red Square.  Thanks to the great pioneering work of historians like Robert Conquest, later confirmed by opening of Soviet archives, we all know that Stalin was one of the most prolific mass-murderers in history, surpassing in sheer numbers his partner in the rape of Poland from 1939-1941, Adolf Hitler.  Moreover, while Hitler’s homicidal designs were focused primarily on Jews, Stalin’s terror-command state cut a much wider swath, was of a longer duration and spawned prolifically lethal emulators like Mao, Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot.    

It was FDR’s government, considerably influenced by the scurrilous, lying New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, which gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933. This was just the time when Stalin’s cadres were en masse forcibly extracting grain from the farmers in Ukraine. Stalin needed hard currency in order to capitalize Soviet industries through grain sales on the international markets. The result was mass-starvation, a terror-famine, as Conquest called it, which killed millions of Ukrainians including women and children. Driven to insanity by their savage hunger the Ukrainians began eating grass, bark, dirt and finally each other.  Country roadsides were littered with wasted corpses while the communist-guarded granaries were filled and readied for export.**  At that time there were from the outside a few witnesses to Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for the Stalin-made holocaust. Truth-tellers like Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge observed the starvation first hand and tried to tell the world, but the “blind-eye” was FDR’s preferred modus vivendi for the Soviet Union with the assist of organs like the New York Times and, even worse, with close personal advisors who assiduously enabled FDR’s view of Stalin as a tough but trustworthy sort of guy who only wanted the best for his own people.

In 1943 William Bullitt, the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936), a man who had had extensive first-hand experience with Soviet diplomacy and all of its duplicity and treachery tried to disabuse FDR of his benign view of Stalin. According to Bullitt’s memoirs FDR’s response was:

Bill, I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man.  Harry says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything in the world but security for his country, and I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.***

One could not imagine a more stunning and jaw-dropping revelation of an utterly willful, delusional mind. A “hunch” no less that trumped more than a decade of evidence of systematic tyranny and perfidy on an unprecedented scale. The “Harry” in this retort was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who was FDR’s “White House live-in” chief foreign policy advisor during WWII.  It is difficult to know with complete certainty if Hopkins was a Soviet agent or merely a dupe. In her book, American Betrayal, Diana West makes a strong and compelling case for the former.  In any case, Hopkins’s approach to Stalin, which also became FDR’s, was open-ended, obliging, obsequious, admiring even. Hopkins encouraged FDR to open wide the spigots of Lend Lease, and … to ask in return?  Not much. At least this is what the President seemed to think.  In return, so the “reasoning” went, Stalin would like him. Whether or not Stalin liked anyone, we know for a fact that close proximity to him was frequently lethal, as his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Nikolai Bukharin, and many of his old Bolshevik colleagues discovered. The Studebaker trucks, heavy machinery and materials that FDR was sending to the Soviets to help them fight the Germans were also deployed in the Stalin’s Gulag to transport and maintain the slaves.       

The ambassador who replaced William Bullitt in Moscow was none other than Joseph Davies who, shortly after his arrival observed the first of three major Stalin-choreographed show trials and to the amazement of his own staff, including George Kennan, put his imprimatur on the farce.*  Much was made in the international press coverage of the high U.S. diplomatic presence at the trial, a legitimizing touch greatly appreciated by Stalin.* Davies spent the three years of his ambassadorial assignment fawning over and patronizing Stalin who was at the very time conducting a reign of terror that decimated the leadership of his own party and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.  His own wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, years after her return to the U.S., reported hearing from the windows of her Moscow apartment the screams of the victims being carried off late at night by the NKVD.*    

At this same time a heartbeat away from the Presidency was another Stalin-o-phile, Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace’s contribution to U.S. Soviet foreign policy and to FDR’s fantasy view of Stalin was to treck through the Gulag and render high praise for healthy, hardy “pioneers’ mining the gold and cutting the timber in Siberia.  “There are no more similar countries in the world than the Soviet Union and the United States of America,” enthused Wallace.  “Free people, born on free expanses, can never live in slavery.”* After his NKVD-managed 25 day tour of the vast Gulag slave colony, Wallace sent an open letter addressed to Comrade J.V. Stalin to convey his “deep gratitude for the splendid cordial hospitality shown to me.”* Stalin was nothing if not cordial and hospitable, especially to gullible, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, American politicians who would wildly rave about their Potemkin excursions and tell everyone back home how just how swell things were for the lunch pail gang in the Socialist Workers' Paradise.     

We now remember Stalin for his masterminding and executing of three monumental works of mass murder and slavery: the terror-famine, a holocaust claiming millions of victims; the terror-purge of 1936-38 that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people; and the Gulag, Stalin’s slave-empire, a hellish, murderous prison system, purposely designed and operated so as to subject his own people by the millions to maximum suffering and degradation and to forcibly extract as much labor from them as possible while simultaneously turning them into corpses.

But we should also remember that in these efforts, Stalin had the support and assistance of a triumvirate of stooges, Hopkins, Davies and Wallace, men who looked the other way, men who worked to provide American aide and assistance to  Stalin far beyond what he needed to fight off his former partner in depredation, Hitler. Wallace journeyed though the Gulag and managed to remain tenaciously oblivious to its reality. Davies sat in a front row seat in the Hall of Mirrors observing the Show Trials, yet somehow, like Wallace trooping through Kolyma missed its obvious features and purpose. Hopkins shuttled back and forth between Stalin and FDR, working tirelessly to give Stalin everything he wanted, eyes tightly closed to the many scenes and ample evidence of some of the worst atrocities in modern times.      

For FDR it is time to take him down from the pedestal and drop the reverence, time to look long and hard at the fools and Quislings he installed in high places and trusted. It is also time to write history that speaks forthrightly to his determined, invincible ignorance with regard to all things Russian. In the face of overwhelming evidence of Soviet finger prints on the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in Smolensk, FDR preferred to echo Stalin’s version. “[T]his is entirely German propaganda and a German plot.  I am absolutely convinced that the Russians did not do this.” *** He seemed to be “absolutely convinced” of many things that turned out to be the opposite of the way they actually were which means that his judgment was deeply flawed and that his decisions were tragic.  One does wonder if FDR had lived to see the fate of the Poles, the Baltic people, and the rest of the European countries that fell into the Soviet maw: would his ignorance and arrogance turned to regret?

_________________________________________

*See, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: an American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008

**See, Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford, 1986.

***Quoted from Diana West, American Betrayal, the Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character, St. Martins, 2013, 199, 212
Kudos to Tim Tzouliadis and Diana West for their significant work on FDR's stooges.