Sunday, July 31, 2016

The Womanhood of Hillary Clinton

There is this threefer at National Review.
"You can be a woman and do a hell of a lot better job running PepsiCo than Mrs. Clinton did running the State Department."
A Woman, Sure, but This Woman?  "A favorite National Review chengyu is “tallest building in Wichita,” which is derived from William F. Buckley’s response to Gary Wills’s claim that Lillian Hellman, the blacklisted Hollywood Communist, was “America’s greatest living female playwright.” That’s a lot of modifiers separating “greatest” and “playwright.” Hillary Rodham Clinton is without a doubt the greatest current female American major-party presidential nominee.

"There is some symbolic importance to Obama’s election and Mrs. Clinton’s nomination, to be sure. But black Americans are not today remarkably better off than before Obama’s inauguration, and it is not clear at all that Obama’s presidency did anything to improve race relations in the United States; there is in fact much more evidence that his habit of cynically and stupidly fanning the flames of racial resentment for his own political ends made things worse." . . .


My God, She’s Running as Hillary Clinton  . . . "Barack Obama was a blank slate for most Americans, so his status as the first black nominee and president was inextricably part of his identity. Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. She’s Nixon in a pantsuit. She’s been a tedious, grating, cynical, corrupt presence in our lives for nearly three decades." . . .
Clinton an Abortion Right Absolutist, Second Amendment Relativist "Hillary Clinton squirmed quite a bit today when questioned by Chris Wallace about whether she believes the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun.  "She reluctantly conceded the point (if one believes her) but then quickly added that the right is subject to government regulation. From the interview:" . . .

The Hillary Mystique  "The weakest part of the 2016 Democratic National Convention was the speech delivered by the party’s nominee for president. Four nights of impressive stagecraft and at times moving rhetoric preceded Hillary Clinton’s paint-by-numbers, plodding address. It lacked the passion of Michelle Obama’s or Bernie Sanders’s speeches, had nothing of Joe Biden’s instinctual feel for middle-class language and anxieties, did not achieve the valedictory heights of Barack Obama’s appearance. Clinton did not speak from the political center, as Michael Bloomberg did, nor has she experienced loss like that of the Khan family, whose son was killed in battle in Iraq. Like many of the speakers at the convention, Clinton attacked Donald Trump. But her criticisms of the Republican nominee were not novel, or funny, or memorable." . . .


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