Hillary Clinton is Her Own Worst Enemy
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
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.