Hillary Clinton is Her Own
Worst Enemy
by Daniel Greenfield
Hillary Clinton is her own
worst enemy. Just as Bill Clinton’s worst impulses did more to sabotage his
presidency than any Republican, his wife’s worst impulses have always
undermined her. Some couples balance out each other’s weaknesses, but Bill and
Hillary enable each other’s misbehaviors. While Hillary enabled her husband’s
abuse of women, Bill enabled her paranoia and obsessiveness.
Now her flailing campaign is
retreating into paranoia and conspiracy theories. The Intelligence Community
Inspector General, an Obama appointee, is accused of conspiring with
Republicans. The rise of Bernie Sanders is being attributed to “dark money” and
political enemies by Clintonworld.
Hillary Clinton has a
longstanding tendency to turn to a dark conspiratorial mindset when things
don’t go her way. She blamed her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on a
“vast right-wing conspiracy”. Her close friend’s papers reveal that Hillary
thought Bill had been “driven” to the affair by his “political adversaries”.
It was easier for Hillary to
blame her husband’s misbehavior on Republicans than to deal with reality. And
her campaign is showing that her worldview hasn’t changed any since then.
The entire FBI investigation
would not exist if Hillary Clinton had just followed the law. Instead she chose
to engage in a preemptive cover-up of her emails as preparation for her
presidential campaign.
The job of Secretary of State
had never meant anything to her except as a stepping stone to the White House.
She took it to fundraise and build up her resume while maintaining total
control over her emails, in violation of the law, while displaying no regard
for national security by storing highly classified materials on her own server.
But instead of protecting her campaign, the cover-up created its biggest
challenge.
The revelation that emails
containing beyond top secret intelligence from “special access programs” ended
up on her server, which according to a former CIA officer placed the lives of
intelligence sources in danger, shows that Hillary’s paranoia not only
endangered national security, but even risked lives.
The same thing happened once
again with Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton was so determined to avoid a
contested primary that she raised obscene amounts of money to intimidate
potential rivals. This desperate fundraising strategy instead backfired by
creating controversies around some of her donors and alienating the voters that
she was raising money to influence.
Instead of running a normal
campaign, Hillary Clinton was surrounded by corporate branding experts who
wanted to market her just like Coca Cola.
Meanwhile Hillary, who had
famously insisted that anyone appearing in a photo with her had to pose and
then wait for her to show up, not only avoided interviews, but had a rope line
to keep reporters away. Hillary’s corporate campaign was boring and
controlling. The Bernie Sanders campaign was a novelty and it didn’t try to
rope off reporters.
Now Hillary Clinton will do
just about any press, chasing after the reporters whom she had been keeping at
arm’s length, but it’s already too late. Hillary Clinton’s attempt to avoid a
competitive primary created the very conditions that made it into a competitive
primary. Her paranoia has been creating these self-fulfilling prophecies and
sabotaging her political ambitions all along.
The same thing happened with
the debates. To avoid a competitive primary, the debates were rigged to take
place when they would be least likely to be seen. Now the Clinton camp is
desperately trying to add more debates in which to attack Bernie Sanders. By
trying to avoid the debates, Hillary Clinton lost the opportunity to take the
fight to him. Now she is desperately trying to undo her own manufactured
crisis.
By trying to avoid a
competitive primary, Hillary Clinton actually ended up creating one. Her real
issue isn’t Bernie Sanders. It’s her own paranoia. Instead of using her huge
advantages in money and name recognition to better compete, she tried to use
them to completely shut down the process.
With both her emails and the
campaign, Hillary Clinton’s actions were unnecessary; they drew attention to
the things she was trying to conceal and brought about the very outcome that
she had tried to avoid.
And Hillary’s uncontrollable
paranoia raises more troubling questions about her fitness for the job. If
Hillary Clinton is so paranoid that she endangers national security and
subverts democracy just to get into the White House, what will she do if she
actually moves into the White House?
We have already seen Bill’s
White House, its decadence, corruption and abuses of power, but we haven’t seen
Hillary’s White House yet. Instead we’re getting a disturbing preview of it in
her troubled campaign. It’s a dark and paranoid White House whose mistress is
obsessed with phantom threats.
Hillary’s White House would be
a seething hive of preemptive cover-ups. Surrounded by angry conspiratorial
advisers like Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock who have spent many horrid
years feeding her paranoia, like drones shoving black rotten jelly into a queen
bee, her White House would be obsessed with domestic political threats from her
legion of enemies on the left and the right.
Decisions would be made by a
small inner circle. Outside voices would have little access to a shut-in White
House that would see political threats coming from every direction. Journalists
would be shut out. Transparency and accountability would be non-existent. Laws
would be broken left and right and every issue, from foreign policy to domestic
decisions, would be analyzed for a dark conspiratorial agenda.
Everyone working in the White
House and even anyone in the entire country might at any time be blamed for
another Hillary failure, tarred, targeted and imprisoned on dubious charges.
Every setback would be blamed on vast conspiracies by Hillary’s enemies. The
White House would spend most of its time fighting shadowy political threats and
resorting to illegal tactics to suppress scandals and shut down opponents.
Imagine four to eight years that play out like the last days of the Nixon
administration.
That’s what a Hillary
administration would look like.
Hillary Clinton has always
been Bill’s dark side, the shadow to his sunny disposition. A Hillary
administration would take the worst aspects of his White House and make them
into its mandate.
But paranoia is a
self-destructive trait. Hillary Clinton’s paranoia made her an unlikable figure
during her husband’s administration. Now it has made her an unlikable candidate.
Her uncontrollable paranoia drove her to create unnecessary scandals and turned
a ridiculous opponent into a viable competitor.
Hillary Clinton’s paranoia
would create a terrifyingly dark White House, but it’s also the attitude most
likely to keep her out of the White House. As the challenges, legal and
political, mount, Hillary will retreat deeper into her paranoia and her
campaign will become an ugly reflection of its mistress.
The fuzzy corporate branding
will give way to hysterical accusations and paranoid conspiracy theories. It
happened before and now it’s happening again.
Hillary Clinton has always
been her own worst enemy. And nothing has changed.
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