From “The Politics of Meaning” to “The Economics of Moment.”

Redstate.com ^ | 5 March 2007 | .cnI redruM

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Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have shifted paradigms. She still tilts far Left, she’s just a whole lot less honest about it. When she began her co-Presidency with that other guy, she drove hard for nationalizing medicine in a forthright and honest manner.

She used to claim Leftwing intellectual and non-traditional rabbi Michael Lerner as an intellectual guru. His book, The Politics of Meaning, gave Hillary a temporary mantra. Hillary’s screed against the greed died because she lied. This was made obvious when, her cattle futures dealings came to light.

Lerner’s gravaman rested on the old Marxian chestnut of alienation.

“Two processes were at work: (1) citizens are pacified by a distant, bureaucratic government which takes care of local responsibilities like welfare, thus severing the direct connection between taxpayer and recipient; (2) workers are spiritually alienated because they feel that their jobs are pointless, that they're not contributing to a greater good. Seventy percent of workers daydream about their sex lives or what they'll do once they leave work, according to Lerner. All too frequently, Americans escape from this day-to-day pain through TV or alcohol.”

Lerner proposed the following solution.

“One of Lerner's strategies is to apply the following litmus test to every government policy: "How much does this legislation address and support spiritual sensitivity and loving relationships?" As Lerner writes, "We need to encourage a shift in the dominant discourse so psychological and spiritual needs are no longer seen as `soft' or irrelevant, but rather as fundamental to what it is to be a human being."

Hillary learned from the experience and became much less philosophical. She didn’t stop with her antipathy towards economic freedom. She just developed a much more material outlook in her dialectical materialism. She became more dangerous, because of her ability to sell her diabolical brand of political coercion.

Hillary now jumps issues de jour and plays to the insecurities of Americans caught in a transitioning economy. She demonizes corporations that make money off the current high price of oil. When Hillary heard that Exxon-Mobil posted a record profit, she announced that she would “take those profits!”

This plays well at the polls. It plays particularly well with people who don’t understand how much more expensive gasoline would become if Exxon-Mobil couldn’t rake in a fortune by flooding the market. Rather than being pilloried as a thief and a Luddite for espousing such a policy, people marvel at how Hillary sticks up for ‘the little guy.’

This wasn’t the first time Hillary offered to take things away from people out of the goodness of her heart. In a speech that should have consigned both Hillary and Senator Barbara Boxer to the political slag heap, Hillary announced the following.

“Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Clinton said, according to the Associated Press. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you.

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Hillary hasn’t finished attempting to demolish the US economy for the good of the common man. She recently expressed concern that other countries were buying too many US Treasury bonds.

She argued in her letter to Paulson and Bernanke that Congress and the president had to “ensure foreign governments don't own too much of our public debt."

She warned in her letter to Paulson and Bernanke that “if China or Japan made a decision to decrease their massive holdings of U.S. dollars, there could be a currency crisis and the U.S. would have to raise interest rates and invite conditions for a recession.”

This would hold some logic, if Hillary Rodham Clinton were also in favor of cutting the spending growth that requires us to sell those bonds in the first place. As author of The Health Security Plan in 1993, her record on that issue is crystal clear.

So Hillary Clinton wants to increase Federal spending and decrease our reliance on external finance. This doesn’t leave her very many options except to start ‘taking things away from us for our own good.” She understands this good and well.

Hillary’s ultimate goal is not to make our lives better through government, but rather to make government more powerful, while she has the keys to its horsepower. If she really wanted national health care, energy independence, homeland security, or any of the other goals she’s offered as proxies to put her hand into our wallet, she wouldn’t insist on drying up sources of funding that didn’t come from the American taxpayer of the private sector.

Hillary Clinton understands well that a citizen’s power rises and falls with the amount of money that citizen holds and the burden of responsibility that each of us takes on personally. Thus her agenda to take our money and offer us respite from life’s responsibilities is not being offered for the common good. It’s being offered for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s personal accumulation of power. This is the only meaning that has ever driven Hillary’s political calculus.

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Hillary, she still wants to run your life, she just camos it up a little better.