That Voice
By Joan Swirsky
CanadaFreePress.com
So many issues, so little time, which is why I am
studiously avoiding any issues about Hillary other
than that voice!
I am definitely not going into the terminal
dishonesty thing, you know, when she told the
American public, and also the parents of the
murdered victims in Benghazi, that the four patriots
who lost their lives to a savage Islamic attack was
because of an anti-Islam video; that Wall St. and
specifically Goldman-Sachs
is not donating to her campaign and that,
according to Dick Morris, FEC reports say that
Hillary has received $21.4 million from the
financial and insurance industry—almost 15 percent
of the total $157.8 million she raised, and she’s
still trolling them for big money.”
How about that she won a smashing victory in Iowa
(by six coin tosses that magically landed in her
favor)? Dozens of websites have
catalogued Hillary’s lies, starting decades ago
with her debut on the political scene. Also
here and
here and
don’t miss this one. Not going there.
I’m definitely not going into the incompetence
thing, the colossal failure of her
secretly-conducted socialized-medicine initiative as
First Lady, her stunning lack of accomplishments in
the U.S. Senate, or, most damning, the dangerous
state of the entire world under her tenure as
Secretary of State, which has resulted in a chaotic,
devolving Europe, saturated in Islamic-terrorism; a
catastrophic Middle East, also inundated with
Islamic terrorism; and the mysterious loss of
six-billion dollars! Uh uh, not going there.
Also definitely not going into the crook thing, the
perjury thing, the slush fund thing vis-à-vis The
Clinton Foundation and the zillions she
extorted—oops, accepted—from thug nations and
tin-pot dictators throughout the world while, ahem,
representing our country. Or the e-mail thing and
the threats to our national security her
fecklessness brought about, or the laughable
denials, or looming Leavenworth. Not going there.
Most definitely not going into the abused-wife
syndrome, the paranoid streak, the harassment and
attempts to destroy the women assaulted by her,
ahem, better half, or the laughable notion of her
being a role model for any woman, much less the
millions of American women who earned their way
without the taint of scandal and criminality. Sooo
not going there!
And definitely not going into Hillary’s disturbing
laugh, which according to writer Elspeth Reeve, has
been covered extensively. A few years ago, Reeve
cited the National Journal which
compiled “The Comprehensive Supercut of Hillary
Clinton Laughing Awkwardly with Reporters” and
The Washington Free Beacon, which
created “Hillary Clinton’s Interview Tour: A
Laughing Matter,” to name but two out of hundreds of
articles that have covered Hillary’s aberrational
trait over the years. Nope, not going there.
WHERE I AM GOING
For years I’ve wondered what that
clap-your-hands-over-your-ears assault weapon is
that emanates from Hillary Clinton’s mouth,
specifically her wince-evoking, cringe-producing,
decibel-shattering voice.
I don’t mean ear-splitting shrillness or the screech
of a banshee, although God knows those are
prominently featured in her vocal repertoire, but
rather the shriek-like, hectoring tone that suggests
that Hillary was born without the normal fluttering
of the vocal cords, a function that helps to
moderate speech sounds. This results in campaign
speech in which every promise sounds menacing. Quite
a feat!
I’m going to produce more jobs, Hillary says, get
incomes rising again, make Obamacare work, improve
early-childhood education, pay down student debt,
fight for more abortions (oops, “defend a woman’s
right to make her own health care decisions”), on
and on, and yet every word comes out sounding like
the patronizing, finger-wagging lecture of a
screech-owl harpy.
Hillary fan Geraldo Rivera speculates that this
unfortunate trait might result from a hearing loss,
the kind that makes people who don’t hear very well
think that other people need to be shrieked at to
hear their message.
Steven Hayward from Powerline.com simply describes
her pronouncements as “cackling.”
Writer Elspeth Reeve asks:
why do so many people hate the sound of Hillary’s
voice? “It’s just so loud and annoying. Or maybe
it’s like a nagging wife…inauthentic‚Äîthat phony
Southern accent! Those flat Midwestern vowels!
Whatever it is, her voice is burned into your
brain.” Maybe “she sometimes SPEAKS SO LOUDLY in
hopes of conveying ENERGY and FORCEFULNESS.”
Republican pollster Frank Luntz explains to Sean
Hannity: “Forget the words. Listen to the way she
communicates. It’s ALL AT THE SAME LEVEL…her voice
turns people off. Because they feel like they’re
being lectured.”
Journalist Peggy Noonan
compares Hillary to an irritating landlord. “She
lately reminds me of the landlady yelling up the
stairs that your kids left their bikes in the hall
again.”
According to writer Kathy
Miller, Hillary
hired a voice and drama coach, Michael Sheehan,
after her last unsuccessful presidential run in
2008, paying him $7,500. Yoo hoo, Hillary, ever
consider a malpractice suit?
THEN THERE’S THE AFFECT THING
A person’s emotional affect is
simply the way they display their feelings. They can
be manic or flat, bubbly or dour, sincere or snarky,
relaxed or intense, serious or light-hearted, on and
on.
Once you see someone three or five or 10 times, you
“get” what they’re all about. Unless, they have
distinctly different affects…the stern executive
during the day and the party girl at night; the
all-American dad on the weekends and the internet
troller of child porn during his working day.
Most of us fall along this spectrum. But few of us,
in our travels, change our speech patterns when we
go from state to state.
Not so of Hillary, who segues from high-falutin’
Wellesley girl when she’s courting East Coast donors
to plantation Southerner when she’s addressing a
black audience, for instance when she cited the hymn
of James Cleveland: “Ah don’t feel nowhere tired….”
Talk about
cringe-producing!
Then there’s her affect of sincerity—eyes a little
too wide open, gaze a little too fixed, head a
little too bobbling, smile a little too plastered,
the tacit message a little too “get me away from
these irritating hicks!”
And there, too, is old Bubba,
standing behind her…stooped, skinny, wizened,
looking not a little out of the loop, applauding on
cue, still too narcissistic to want her to win, but
still counting on her to perpetuate the gigantic
Ponzi scheme they created.
NATURE VS. NURTURE?
Was Hillary born with that
weaponized voice of hers, or did she acquire it
along the way? My bet is on the latter. It’s not
uncommon for people who are essentially—when all the
layers of the onion are peeled back—inauthentic to
appropriate behaviors of other people, the better to
make themselves appear to be the real thing.
It’s as if Hillary looked around and observed how a
regular person or even an animated character acts
when he or she is angry or impassioned or wants to
get a point across or appeal to someone, and she
said to herself, “Aha, I’ll take Alec Baldwin’s
anger from Column A, Ida B. Robinson’s passion from
Column B, Johnny Appleseed’s ardor from Column C,”
on and on, and then adopts whichever behavior fits
the occasion.
But it never works, never comes
across as authentic because, well, it isn’t! Hence
the strangely hyena-like laugh, the hectoring tone,
the weird meet-and-greet affect, and, occasionally,
the bursts of raw anger—“What difference does it
make?”—in which the public gets a vivid and
decidedly unpretty picture of what lies beneath the
phony façade.
WHERE IS THIS ALL GOING?
Looming over the entire Clinton
agenda is ole genuine Bernie Sanders,
grabbing the young vote, the far-left vote, the
entitlement vote, the socialist and communist votes,
and now we learn the woman vote, effectively telling
the largely anti-Semitic world that American
Democrats prefer a Brooklyn-born Jew to a female
career-politician with an alienating affect, a
scandal-ridden past and present, and indictments of
downright treason hanging over her head,
Yes, Hillary’s dishonesty thing looms large with
voters, as does her incompetence thing and crook
thing and abused-wife thing and weird laugh thing,
But nothing is as predictive of her ultimate defeat
as the voice thing, even though she can’t help it,
anymore than someone afflicted with barnacles.
Millions of people may want a woman in the White
House, so much that they overlook Hillary’s Mt.
Everest heights of deficits and failures.
In and of itself, as even her advocates grudgingly
admit, living with that voice for the next four
years will compel every man in America to buy
earplugs and every woman in America to wonder what
the entire estrogen fetish was all about.
I predict that nothing—not the trendiest
public-relations firms or the most credentialed
drama coaches—will stop the American public from
voting against Ms. Hillary because of that
voice!
Joan Swirsky is an award winning author and
journalist. Her work can be found at
joanswirsky.com
and she can be reached at
joanswirsky@gmail.com.