Caught at Three A.M. With the Secretary

Caught at Three A.M. With the Secretary

By Jay D. Homnick on 12.3.10 American Spectator

First she was Miss, then Ms., and eventually Missus. Now the correct honorific might be Myth Hillary Clinton. If honorific is the word I want.

Readers of this journal knew this termagant well even before her terms in the Senate. They did not need Harry Reasoner and Dan Rather to identify this harridan. They recognized her vulgarity, her venality, her pettiness, her pettifoggery, her vindictiveness, her shrillness and such other virtues as she might bring to the fore for special occasions.

This was the woman who as a young lawyer for the Democrat members of the Watergate Committee wrote a brief arguing that Richard Nixon was not entitled to an attorney in an impeachment proceeding. This was the woman tasked with improving the Arkansas education system who drove it down to 49th place among the 50 states. This was the woman who campaigned for Senate using the Presidential airplane and blatantly bought both votes and campaign cash with Presidential pardons.

Whence sprang the myth of the super-competent Wonder Woman who strides confidently through the corridors of power dispensing wisdom and judiciousness in equal parts? It was invented by her own campaign staff, in an ad suggesting that lonely heads of state could find relief by calling her, toll-free, at three o'clock in the morning. She would whisper sweet nothings into their ears and they would emerge from their crises with a new, fresh outlook on life.

She never made it to Pennsylvania Avenue but she benefited from this time spent on Madison Avenue. Like Josephine with Comet or Rosie with Bounty, people believed she could scour and mop up the trouble spots without raising a sweat. This image hypnotized even Republican types whose critiques have locked into the disagree-but-admire mode for quite some time. All I could do was save up pejorative adjectives in an old pickle jar, knowing they would come in handy before very long. For now, she had become apotheosized into an international stateswoman.

To which it is time for us to assert, with the help of Julian Assange: baloney. Adding a D for Democrat after "shrew" does not equal shrewd. The woman is a know-nothing know-it-all; this front she put on is an effrontery. She comes from two states (Illinois, Arkansas) which end in silence but she just keeps getting noisier.

Let us review in brief some of the revelations about Madame Secretary in the recently publicized diplomatic cables she authored. She ordered espionage by her diplomats against high-ranking UN officials, including gathering fingerprints and DNA. She asked diplomatic staff in Argentina how President Fernandez was "managing her nerves and anxiety." She called (or allowed her people to call) Sarkozy thin-skinned and authoritarian; Merkel risk averse and rarely creative; Berlusconi feckless and vain. The list goes on. When word of this leaked, her response was unequivocal: "This is an attack on America."

She is right about that last, indisputably so. It attacks America as a place which promotes shallow people because their backers have deep pockets. It attacks America as a place which promotes hollow people who are full only of themselves. It attacks America as a place which promotes on the basis of glitz and hype and spin and façade and veneer and gab and patter and spiel and, ultimately, mythology.

This woman has no business being in high office, whether elected or appointed. She is small and defined by her smallness. The only person who should call her at three o'clock in the morning is the Mayflower man to move her portfolio out of Foggy Bottom. If we made her great, if we made her the face of this country, we have no right to protest when that face is covered in egg.

May I offer a solution? She was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, as she famously lied, later blaming her mother for telling her the lie. She could be our permanent ambassador to Mount Everest. Now that is a much more romantic backdrop for a myth.

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/03/caught-at-three-am-with-the-se/print