The Real Danger of a Presidential Faker: Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo Presidency

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 1.6.02 | Mia T

[Mia T]

The Real Danger of a Presidential Faker:

Post-9/11 Reconsideration of The Placebo Presidency

by Mia T, 1.06.02

 

In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled &emdash; giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.

They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected...

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

Just look around this chamber. We have members from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And America is stronger for it. But as we have seen, these differences all too often spark hatred and division, even here at home. . . This is not the American way. We must draw the line. Without delay, we must pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

bill clinton, State of Union Speech, January 27, 2000

"I'm sorry, but the president is one of the crudest men I have ever encountered in government service," says one female agent. "He has no respect for women."

Among the comments clinton made in presence of Secret Service agents:

. Frequent speculation on the oral sex skills of women

the president saw or met in receiving lines;

. References to the size of a woman's breasts, legs or figure;

. Sexual jokes.

After the Monica Lewinsky story broke, however, clinton toned down his rhetoric and behavior in front of his Secret Service agents, but those who guarded the president say enough of them saw and heard things which could be damaging to clinton.

"It depends on who Ken Starr calls," says one ex-agent. "The people who are on the job today are not necessarily the ones who know the most."

Turnover In clinton's Secret Service Detail 'Highest That Anyone Can Remember'

In the months that follow, reporters drop the issue. Feminists say little or nothing. Rape crisis center workers acknowledge that Broaddrick's case, including her reluctance to come forward, is typical of victims of sexual assault. But they decline to speak against clinton. Some cite the federal funding they receive as a result of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into law by clinton.

Why does the press continue to ignore the Juanita Broaddrick story?

 

 

The Placebo President:

How a Rapist can be a Policy Feminist

 

placebo effect n.

A beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment

that arises from the patient's expectations concerning

the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.

 

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

----Sylvia Plath

 

The placebo effect immediately came to mind

as I listened to Shelby Steele,

a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,

debunk the following pernicious spin intended to save clinton.

To wit:

A proven felon and utter reprobate can remain president;

clinton can be a failed human being but a good president.

 

The error in these statements arises, says Steele,

from the belief that

virtuousness is separate from personal responsibility

so that one's virtuousness as an individual is determined by

one's political positions on issues rather than on

whether or not in one's personal life there is a

consistency and a responsibility.

 

Steele's contention is that this compartmentalization,

rather than being the amazing advantage

the clintons would have us believe,

in fact, spills toxicity into, corrupts, the culture.

 

If mere identification with good policies is what makes one virtuous

then those policies become, what Steele calls, iconographic,

that is to say they just represent virtuousness.

They don't necessarily do virtuous things.

 

If clinton's semantic parsing strips meaning from our words,

clinton's iconographic policies strip meaning from our society,

systematically deconstructing our society as a democracy. . .

 

I would take Shelby Steele's thesis one step further.

I maintain that iconographic policy functions like a placebo,

producing a real, physiological and social effects.

 

The placebo effect is, after all, the brain's triumph over reality.

Expectation alone can produce powerful physiological results.

The placebo effect was, at one time, an evolutionary advantage:

act now, think later

 

bill clinton is the paradigmatic Placebo President.

Placebo is Latin for "I shall please."

And please he does

doling out sham treatments, iconographs, with abandon.

To please, to placate, to numb, to deflect.

Ultimately to showcase his imagined virtue.

Or to confute his genuine vice.

 

clinton will dispense sugar pills (or bombs)

at the drop of a high-heeled shoe...

or at the hint of high treason...

 

clinton's charlatanry mimics that of primitive medicine.

Through the 1940s, doctors had little effective medicine to offer

so they deliberately attempted to induce the placebo response.

 

The efficaciousness of today's medicines

does not diminish the power of the placebo.

A recent review of placebo-controlled studies

found that placebos and genuine treatments

are often equally effective.

If you expect to get better, you will.

 

Which brings me back to the original question:

Can clinton be a failed human being but a good president?

 

Clearly he cannot.

These two propositions are mutually exclusive.

clinton's fundamental failure is a complete lack of integrity.

He has violated his covenant with the American people.

 

Because clinton has destroyed his moral authority as a leader,

he can no longer function even as a quack;

the placebo effect is gone.

And so the Placebo President must now go, too.

 

 

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

The Sunday Times (U.K.)

01/06/2002

Posted on 1/5/02 4:11 PM Pacific by Pokey78

 

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton turned down at least three offers involving foreign governments to help to seize Osama Bin Laden after he was identified as a terrorist who was threatening America, according to sources in Washington and the Middle East.

Clinton himself, according to one Washington source, has described the refusal to accept the first of the offers as "the biggest mistake" of his presidency.

The main reasons were legal: there was no evidence that could be brought against Bin Laden in an American court. But former senior intelligence sources accuse the administration of a lack of commitment to the fight against terrorism.

When Sudanese officials claimed late last year that Washington had spurned Bin Laden's secret extradition from Khartoum in 1996, former White House officials said they had no recollection of the offer. Senior sources in the former administration now confirm that it was true.

An Insight investigation has revealed that far from being an isolated incident this was the first in a series of missed opportunities right up to Clinton's last year in office. One of these involved a Gulf state; another would have relied on the assistance of Saudi Arabia.

In early 1996 America was putting strong pressure on Sudan's Islamic government to expel Bin Laden, who had been living there since 1991. Sources now reveal that Khartoum sent a former intelligence officer with Central Intelligence Agency connections to Washington with an offer to hand over Bin Laden &emdash; just as it had put another terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, into French hands in 1994.

At the time the State Department was describing Bin Laden as "the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world" and was accusing Sudan of harbouring terrorists. The extradition offer was turned down, however. A former senior White House source said: "There simply was not the evidence to prosecute Osama Bin Laden. He could not be indicted, so it would serve no purpose for him to have been brought into US custody."

A former figure in American counterterrorist intelligence claims, however, that there was "clear and convincing" proof of Bin Laden's conspiracy against America.

In May, 1996, American diplomats were informed in a Sudanese government fax that Bin Laden was about to be expelled &emdash; giving Washington another chance to seize him. The decision not to do so went to the very top of the White House, according to former administration sources.

They say that the clear focus of American policy was to discourage the state sponsorship of terrorism. So persuading Khartoum to expel Bin Laden was in itself counted as a clear victory. The administration was "delighted".

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

Barely a month later, on June 25, a 5,000lb truck bomb ripped apart the front of Khobar Towers, a US military housing complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The explosion killed 19 American servicemen. Bin Laden was immediately suspected.

Clinton is reported to have admitted how things went wrong in Sudan at a private dinner at a Manhattan restaurant shortly after September 11 last year. According to a witness, Clinton told a dinner companion that the decision to let Bin Laden go was probably "the biggest mistake of my presidency".

Clinton could not be reached for comment yesterday, but a
former senior White House official acknowledged that the Sudan episode had been a "screw-up".

A second offer to get Bin Laden came unofficially from Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American millionaire who was a donor to Clinton's election campaign in 1996. On July 6, 2000, he visited John Podesta, then the president's chief of staff, to say that intelligence officers from a Gulf state were offering to help to extract Bin Laden.

Details of the meeting are confirmed in an exchange of e-mails between the White House and Ijaz, which have been seen by The Sunday Times. According to Ijaz, the offer involved setting up an Islamic relief fund to aid Afghanistan in return for the Taliban handing over Bin Laden to the Gulf state. America could then extract Bin Laden from there.

The Sunday Times has established that after a fierce internal row about the sincerity of the offer, the White House responded by sending Richard Clarke, Clinton's most senior counterterrorism adviser, to meet the rulers of the United Arab Emirates. They denied there was any such offer. Ijaz, however, maintained that the White House had thereby destroyed the deal, which was to have been arranged only through unofficial channels. Ijaz said that weeks later on a return trip to the Gulf he was taken on a late-night ride into the desert by his contact who told him that Clarke's front-door approach had upset a delicate internal balance and blown the deal. "Your government has missed a major opportunity," he recalls being told.

Senior former government sources said that Ijaz's offer had been treated in good faith but, with the denial of the UAE government, there was nothing to suggest it had credibility.

A third more mysterious offer to help came from the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, then led by Prince Turki al-Faisal, according to Washington sources. Details of the offer are still unclear although, by one account, Turki offered to help to place a tracking device in the luggage of Bin Laden's mother, who was seeking to make a trip to Afghanistan to see her son. The CIA did not take up the offer.

Richard Shelby, the leading Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said he was aware of a Saudi offer to help although, under rules protecting classified information, he was unable to discuss the details of any offer. Commenting generally, he said: "I don't believe that the fight against terrorism was the number one goal of the Clinton administration. I believe there were some lost opportunities."

Q ERTY4 + Q ERTY6 = rodham clinton REALITY CHECK!

 

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

 

 

Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president.*

---GEORGE WILL, Sleaze, the sequel

 

Had George Will written Sleaze, the sequel (the "sequel" is, of course, hillary) after 9-11-01, I suspect that he would have had to forgo the above conceit, as the doubt expressed in the setup phrase was, from that day forward, no longer operational.

Indeed, assessing the clinton presidency an abject failure is not inconsistent with commentary coming from the left, most recently the LA Times: "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize."

When the clintons left office, I predicted that the country would eventually learn--sadly, the hard way--that this depraved, self-absorbed and inept pair had placed America (and the world) in mortal danger. But I was thinking years, not months.

It is very significant that hillary clinton didn't deny clinton culpability for the terrorism. (Meet the Press, 12-09-01), notwithstanding tired tactics (if you can't pass the buck, spread the blame) and chronic self-exclusion. ("I knew nuttin'.")

If leftist pandering keeps the disenfranchized down in perpetuity, clinton pandering,("it's the economy, stupid"), kept the middle and upper classes wilfully ignorant for eight years.

And ironically, both results (leftist social policy and the clinton economy) are equally illusory, fraudulent. It is becoming increasingly clear that clinton assiduously avoided essential actions that would have negatively impacted the economy--the ultimate source of his continued power--actions like, say, going after the terrorists.

It is critically important that hillary clinton fail in her grasp for power; read Peggy Noonan's little book, 'The Case Against Hillary Clinton' and Barbara Olson's two books; it is critical that the West de-clintonize, but that will be automatic once it is understood that the clintons risked civilization itself in order to gain and retain power.

It shouldn't take books, however, to see that a leader is a dangerous, self-absorbed sicko. People should be able to figure that out for themselves. The electorate must be taught to think, to reason. It must be able to spot spin, especially in this age of the electronic demagogue.

I am not hopeful. As Bertrand Russell noted, "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. "

Mia T, hillary clinton blames hubby for terrorism

(SHE knew nuttin')

Meet the Press, 12-09-01

 

 

*George Will continues: There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip), and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and that. ... Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he, perhaps even more so, incarnates Clintonism

Q ERTY3 co-rapist  bump!

 

also:

 

CLINTON-WAS-AN-UTTER-FAILURE Containment Team Scheme Fails Again

Ollie North Laughs Ann Lewis Off Stage

 

Helen Thomas Syndrome: THE SYMPTOMS

 

Will Riefenstahl-esque "editing to perfection" resurrect the clintons?

 

WHOSE DOG WAS WAGGED?

 

Frankenstein, The Sequel:

'Black Hawk Down' Was Set to Blame Clinton for 9/11

 

hillary's head revisited:

hillary clinton's brain (such as it is) II

 

Buddy Death Report Raises More Questions Than It Answers

[Hurtgen]

Unfortunately, there is no conceivable way to pack 150 in a C-130. Been there, done that and it can't be done.

There must be a rest of the story somewhere.

[gaspar]

I repeat, Osama Bin Laden was under indictment for the Trade Center bombing and his name was submitted by the US Government as a co-conspirator in February 1995 in the trail of US v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, et. al., (S5) 93 Cr. 181 (MBM) held in New York. The United States could legally have called for and accepted his extradition any time after that event. Thus the FBI, administration satrap, and Clinton claims that they didn't have the legal instrument or the proof to go after Bin Laden is a lie.

[no-s]

Hmm. What is the payload of a c-130? 35000-45000 lb? If a c-130 will hold 90+ equipped combat troops why not a party of 150 consisting primarily of women, children, and household goods? IANACM but I've been inside a c-130 before and there looks like enough room.

[Leisler]

Like the trucks they drive overthere they overload everything. I suspect they got say 100 inside and the rest uptop on the wing root.

[Hurtgen]

I've been in many myself, and for the life of me can't see getting much more than the 92 listed below,especially if they've brought any suitcases etc. Using the data below that gives each person a 21x21 inch square to crouch in.

Cargo Compartment: C-130E/H/J: length, 40 feet (12.31 meters); width, 119 inches (3.12 meters); height, 9 feet (2.74 meters). Rear ramp: length, 123 inches (3.12 meters); width, 119 inches (3.02 meters) Maximum Load: C-130E/H/J: 6 pallets or 74 litters or 16 CDS bundles or 92 combat troops or 64 paratroopers, or a combination of any of these up to the cargo compartment capacity or maximum allowable weight.

[Leisler]

....oh, yea, I forgot, wheel wells could each take 15 or so small people each. Plus the forward well for say another 5. Then if you use the rear loading ramp to say "squeeze", well it aint the Concord but beats a camel.

[no-s]

Well, I figured it would be tight, and unpleasant, and not impossible. Plus it's only an estimate and based on a news report. Therefore I do not think there is a credibility gap exposed here.

That's my point.

[Leisler]

I was just kidding. Don't pay attention to anything I say.

[Mia T]

Bin Laden took off from Khartoum on May 18 in a chartered C-130 plane with 150 of his followers, including his wives. He was bound for Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. On the way the plane refuelled in the Gulf state of Qatar, which has friendly relations with Washington, but he was allowed to proceed unhindered.

US missed three chances to seize Bin Laden

Unfortunately, there is no conceivable way to pack 150 in a C-130. Been there, done that and it can't be done.

There must be a rest of the story somewhere.

2 posted on 1/6/02 7:54 AM Pacific by Hurtgen

On the contrary, the C-130 Hercules is the perfect tactical transport for the polygamous, philoprogenitive terrorist cum entourage escaping from hostile territory of minimal infrastructure.

Using its aft loading ramp and door, the C-130 can accommodate a wide variety of oversized cargo, including everything from a 6' 5" terrorist to standard palletized, burqaed women, children and terrorist associates. In an aerial delivery role, it can air drop loads up to 42,000 pounds or use its high-floatation landing gear to land and deliver cargo on rough, dirt strips.

Moreover, the flexible design of the Hercules enables it to be rapidly reconfigured should the 6' 5" polygamous, philoprogenitive terrorist cum entourage acquire additional palletized, burqaed wives, children or terrorist associates on the fly (so to speak).

Specifications

Primary Function: Tactical and intratheater airlift
Contractor: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company
Power Plant: C-130E: Four Allison T56-A-7 turboprops; 4,200 prop shaft horsepower
C-130H: Four Allison T56-A-15 turboprops; 4,591prop shaft horsepower
C-130J: Four Rolls-Royce AE 2100D3 turboprops; 4,591 horsepower
Length: C-130E/H/J: 97 feet, 9 inches (29.3 meters)
C-130J-30: 112 feet, 9 inches (34.69 meters)
Height: 38 feet, 3 inches (11.4 meters)
Wingspan: 132 feet, 7 inches (39.7 meters)
Cargo Compartment: C-130E/H/J: length, 40 feet (12.31 meters); width, 119 inches (3.12 meters); height, 9 feet (2.74 meters). Rear ramp: length, 123 inches (3.12 meters); width, 119 inches (3.02 meters)
C-130J-30: length, 55 feet (16.9 meters); width, 119 inches (3.12 meters); height, 9 feet (2.74 meters). Rear ramp: length, 123 inches (3.12 meters); width, 119 inches (3.02 meters)
Speed: C-130E: 345 mph/300 ktas (Mach 0.49) at 20,000 feet (6,060 meters)
C-130H: 366 mph/318 ktas (Mach 0.52) at 20,000 feet (6,060 meters)
C-130J: 417 mph/362 ktas (Mach 0.59) at 22,000 feet (6,706 meters)
C-130J-30: 410 mph/356 ktas (Mach 0.58) at 22,000 feet (6,706 meters)
Ceiling: 33,000 feet (10,000 meters) with 45,000 pounds (17,716 kilograms) payload
Maximum Takeoff Weight: C-130E/H/J: 155,000 pounds (69,750 kilograms)
C-130J-30: 164,000 pounds (74,393 kilograms)
Maximum Allowable Payload: C-130E, 45,050 pounds (20,434 kilograms); C-130H, 43,550 pounds (19,754 kilograms); C-130J, 46,631 pounds (21,151 kilograms); C-130J-30, 46,812 pounds (21,234 kilograms)
Maximum Normal Payload: C-130E, 36,720 pounds (16,656 kilograms); C-130H, 35,220 pounds (15,976 kilograms); C-130J, 38,301 pounds (17,373 kilograms); C-130J-30, 38,812 pounds (17,605 kilograms)
Range at Maximum Normal Payload: C-130E, 1,838 miles (1,597 nautical miles); C-130H, 2,006 miles (1,743 nautical miles); C-130J, 2,729 miles (2,371 nautical miles); C-130J-30, 2,897 miles (2,517 nautical miles)
Range with 35,000 pounds of Payload: C-130E, 1,968 miles (1,710 nautical miles); C-130H, 2,023 miles (1,758 nautical miles); C-130J, 3,062 miles (2,660 nautical miles); C-130J-30, 3,269 miles (2,830 nautical miles)
Maximum Load: C-130E/H/J: 6 pallets of 300 children or 150 burqaed wives or 100 terrorists, or a combination of any of these up to the cargo compartment capacity or maximum allowable weight.
C-130J-30: 8 pallets or 97 litters or 24 CDS bundles or 128 combat troops or 92 paratroopers, or a combination of any of these up to the cargo compartment capacity or maximum allowable weight.
Crew: C-130E/H: Five (two pilots, navigator, flight engineer and loadmaster)
C-130J/J-30: Three (two pilots and loadmaster)
Aeromedical Evacuation Role: Minimum medical crew of three is added (one flight nurse and two medical technicians). Medical crew may be increased to two flight nurses and four medical technicians as required by the needs of the patients.
Unit Cost: C-130E, $11.9, C-130H, $30.1, C-130J, $48.5 (FY 1998 constant dollars in millions)
Date Deployed: C-130A, Dec 1956; C-130B, May 1959; C-130E, Aug 1962; C-130H, Jun 1974; C-130J, Feb 1999
Inventory: Active force, 186; Air National Guard, 217; Air Force Reserve, 107

 

 

[Mia T]

Q ERTY6 palletized, burqaed women, children & terrorist associates PING!

MIDI - LONG COOL WOMAN IN A BLACK DRESS

She was a short squatty woman in a burqa…oh, my goodness, she smelled like my goat
I'm scared of what's inside that burqa…and my words you certainly may quote

-- doug from upland

Bravo, doug.

A knockoff? Similar stench, similar silhouette, similar scheme...

[Mia T]

Q ERTY6 palletized, burqaed women, children & terrorist associates PING!

MIDI - LONG COOL WOMAN IN A BLACK DRESS

She was a short squatty woman in a burqa…oh, my goodness, she smelled like my goat
I'm scared of what's inside that burqa…and my words you certainly may quote

-- doug from upland

Bravo, doug.

A knockoff? Similar stench, similar silhouette, similar scheme...

[Squantos]

During the Evac of Saigon in April of 75 I saw the capacity for numbers of passengers exceeded to a point I didn't think possible for even the greatest aircraft ever made.........C-130 BTTT !!

Stay Safe Mia T !!

[aculeus]

Excellent!

[f.Christian]

Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

There is no sane respectful attempt to address, or admit, the serious reality of the situation. It should be a matter of legitimate serious concern that we have two brat graduates from 60s and 70s pathology with some very serious mental problems in the White House. We have people with very serious mental problems supporting them. They have thrust their psychotic inner theater of the absurd upon the nation, and there's not sufficient cultural integrity or sanity left to stop or counterbalance it.

Such is the evolved state of post-60s psychotic America.

The effect of the mental health crisis on the politics and government of this country has been both subtle and powerfully catastrophic.

First: The political atmosphere has become psychotic in that it follows no logic, consistency, or sense of reality. We have people in high office who are defiantly silly supported by defiantly silly constituents. There is no sense of the serious real. To some extent, what we have is goofy middle-aged kids who don't understand they are destroying the country, or couldn't care less.

Second: Personal and political freedom affords an exercise in vitality to a mentally healthy person. But, to someone who is depressed or preoccupied by internal turmoil, freedom becomes an unenjoyable useless quantity. Consequently, we now live in a society where many people no longer want or value freedom. Personal freedom and the responsibility that goes with it are abrasive intrusions or demands upon a crippled self-absorbed internal state.

Freedom has become transformed from a chance for opportunity, to being a threat to a depressive or confused inner personal condition. To a hospitalized schizophrenic, freedom is useless or unwanted. To many people, not hospitalized, but imprisoned or sentenced to psychological solitary confinement by their own internal pathological state, outside imprisonment or oppression is inconsequential or even welcomed. We are facing the serious problem that the mental health in this society is so degraded as to cause America's opportunities and economic advantages to be viewed as irrelevant.

Freedom in this country has come to be the equivalent of good food on a bad psychological tooth.

Demands for simple basic responsibility and maturity have become looked upon as impossible or as repressive as a oppressive communist society. Freedom and socialism/communism have become either subjectively equivalent, or the second preferable to the first if it promises a world of custodial care.

Until the mental health problems are culturally addressed, instead of culturally proselytized for the self-indulgence they offer, freedom and opportunity will be viewed as irrelevant, or even the enemy, in this society.

Third: The mental health crisis in this country has propelled us into the politics of torture, struggle, and torment. In my political life I want roads and bridges that are in good condition. I want national defense. I want competent educational systems that produce competent graduates. I want to hear understanding of rational monetary and economic analysis. I want to hear candidates articulating the principles of a free society. I want office holders who act with seriousness, honesty, and respect.

What is instead occurring is a political contest to see which candidate's form of mental disorder resonates with prevalent forms of mental disorder in the general population. Bill Clinton says he feels people's pain. Hillary Clinton is poised to snap up a seat as Senator from New York, and possibly the presidency, on the essential platform that the mess she has made of her personal life, and her angry warped rationalizations of it, resonate with the confused mess other people have made of their lives. People identify with Hillary's image of struggle, with her constant empty angry dynamism, and with her posturing and confrontational indignation. Bill and Hillary's empty marital relationship and sterility produce emotional resonance in millions of others leading similar lives with similar incapacities in an emotionally turbulent generation that has had a 60+ percent divorce rate and a 32 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate. Her pathology feeds into the prevalence of pathology in America.

Hillary Clinton's qualification for any serious position would be considered ludicrous in a healthy rational society. To those increasingly few of us remaining who do not view posturing infantile temper tantrums as a form of intellectual brilliance, Hillary is not a particularly intelligent, talented, or deep woman. With the possible exception of abortion and allied 60s radical countercultural agenda that appeal to those who have never left, or grown beyond, 60s and 70s perpetually angry adolescence, Hillary Clinton has shown absolutely no knowledge of anything. But while abortion, internal sexual conflicts, and crummy shack jobs or marriages may be a personal obsession to many people in this country, they are not what makes this country run. Yet, every poll shows Hillary could walk into a state where she has never lived and be swept into office by a landslide ¾ entirely on the basis of alliance between her own and other people's personal problems, angry immaturity, mental disorders, and incompetence, without a demonstrated word of knowledge about anything that really makes the nation work.

Undoubtedly, handlers would feed her a cram course of superficial babble about military tactics and strategy, economic policy, geopolitics, or other areas to get her through staged public appearances during the campaign that would be seized upon as instant support for belief by the already neurotically captured or committed. If she can continue saying nothing substantial about anything and avoid all serious debate, she is in.

Fourth: Not long ago I talked with a woman about the source of so-called social problems in this country. Her eyes welled up as she talked about helplessness and desperation being the root cause of the problem. But these were assertions about people she had never met and knew nothing about. She was really projecting a history of her own miserable life and her own marriage. Describing other mythical people instead of herself allowed her to release the repressed backlog of emotion she was forbidden to realize and express more directly.

People are commingling and co-channeling their personal problems into interpretations of so-called social problems that are ungoverned by any mental discipline. The sad lyrical interpretations of life and the feeling of abstract struggle, described by the radical left, stimulate waiting feelings of desperation or struggle in people's personal lives and drive the afflicted to leftist philosophy and causes like dried emotional leaves before a storm. In the psychologically deteriorated condition of the country, many people are constantly on the verge of tears anyway, and the political left releases and re-focuses their diffuse sorrow and discontent into the political process. There is a complex system of language of double meaning that has evolved in which people using political language are also describing their personal condition.

In this sense the political left offers a vicarious false or symbolic sympathy and catharsis to the depressed or emotionally wounded in this society. The fact that socialism is intrinsically oppressive and economically catastrophic is secondary to its satisfaction of that catharsis and need. It also satisfies a suicidal bent that I have been convinced for more than 35 years exists deep in the leftist movement and personality.

In many cases the political left is an indirect plea for help forced upon others. These are often, on deep levels, suicidal people who defy the pain of personal realization and change, but are attempting to force others to take charge of them by threatening to commit suicide in such a way as take us with them. This is one reason why their political and social thrusts are destructive to themselves and everyone else.

They remind me a little of women who are self-destructive hoping that a man will care enough and show that he loves her enough to set her straight. Unfortunately, what they often wind up with is exploitation by cold sadists whom they defend. The political equivalent is Josef Stalin... liberals/liberalism."

[dennisw]

That's Hillary's buqua for sure. Halfway between a nun's habit (no disrespect intended to Catholics) and a Paula Poundstone power suit.

[f.Christian]

from the above...

"They obsess and carp constantly about how wrong this county has been and the necessity for political change. You can't argue with them intelligently and get agreement on anything because the argument is not really what the argument is about. The argument is really about their desire to attribute their personal problems to the culture instead of themselves. You may think you are discussing foreign or domestic policy with a woman when what she is really talking about is a symbol, or indirect emotional expression, of the fact somebody got her pregnant and left her. Until that hidden issue, the one she refuses to talk about, is settled, all logical discourse is doomed to failure. I have found this pattern to be typical of men and women in the political left over more than 35 years."

[Leisler]

I agree, but lacking any formal training save common sense I would never be able to express myself like you have other than to say, "those people are crazy." This didn't come quickly to me. It was a matter of the last option which explained their behavior. For years I tried to inform them, show them their factual error. It never, not once worked.

[Mudboy Slim]

Ms. T., you are my hero...MUD

[Incorrigible]

So much info, so little time to comprehend let alone compile.

Brilliant!