Hillary Clinton Likens Herself to Churchill, Implies Trump Is Like...

P. Gardner Goldsmith | July 2, 2018
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The human capacity to feel pity, to show care, to check anger and disgust, and, instead, try to perform the Christian act of loving thy neighbor, is infinite but variable. It rises and falls above a horizontal axis like a sine wave, and our stores of kindness can become depleted when continually tested by arrogant, hubristic, irksome, dangerous people.

Like Hillary Clinton.

Last week, she went to Swansea, England, for an interview with Decca Aitkenhead of the UK Guardian, where she felt compelled to liken herself to…

Winston Churchill.

Blathering and bloviating on Trump’s immigration policy, and evidently hoping the interviewer and readers would have such squirrel-like memories they’d forget her own finger-to-the-wind support for precisely the same kind of policy, and her work for a President who took kids away from parents and stuffed them in cramped conditions, Mrs. Clinton responded to the question on many lips:

Was she going to stop making a public spectacle of herself, and, out of respect for our sanity, stop shrieking like a harridan in the political arena?

Aitkenhead was a bit more delicate:

Has she ever considered the possibility that her most effective contribution to healing the country’s divisions would be to withdraw from public life?

And Mrs. Clinton’s response was classic HRC, a study in hubristic egotism and manipulation. First, she likened herself to Churchill.

From the UK Guardian article:

‘I’m sure they said that about Churchill between the wars, didn’t they?’ she flashes back sharply, a fraction too quickly for the line to sound spontaneous.”

And then she said that she wasn’t comparing herself to Churchill, but, in fact, reiterated… that she should be likened to Churchill.

I mean, I’m not comparing myself, but I’m just saying people said that, but he was right about Hitler, and a lot of people in England were wrong. And Churchill was a pain. He kept popping up all the time.

So she’s not only likening herself to Churchill, she is, through implication, likening Donald Trump to Hitler.

One wonders whether to applaud her for her childish, ham-fisted attempt to self-congratulate while hyperbolically comparing her enemy to Hitler, or feel sorry for her seemingly genetic inability to know when to step back and have some damned dignity.

One thing’s for sure, if she thought she was comparing herself to a perfect hero, she doesn’t know much about Winston Churchill.

It’s worth taking time to note that the record for Mr. Churchill is not as sparklingly clean as Mrs. Clinton’s mythology might purport, and many historians know this.

Switching parties twice, Churchill’s economic and political principles seemed quite variable. Today seen by many neoconservatives as a stalwart of economic conservatism and laissez faire free trade, Churchill actually opened the door to the current British Welfare state that is strangling it. As Adam Young writes for the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

...Churchill as a prominent member of the Liberal party government, naturally played a role in the hijacking of liberalism from its roots in individualism, laissez-faire, free trade and bourgeois morality, to its transformation into the 'New Liberalism' as a proxy for socialism and the omnipotent state in Britain and in America.

Indeed, on the big political-philosophical level, Churchill actually praised fascism mixed with social welfare spending. Young notes:

One of the reasons why Churchill admired Italian Fascism was Churchill believed that Mussolini had found a formula that would neutralize the appeal of communism, namely super-nationalism with a social welfarist appeal…  Churchill went so far as to say that Fascism 'proved the necessary antidote to the Communist poison.'

In fact, Churchill was a big booster of socialist domestic programs, many of which are putting UK citizens in tax slavery today. Writes Young:

In 1908, Churchill announced in a speech in Dundee: 'I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective sentiment should be introduced into the State and the municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions.' Churchill even said: 'I go farther; I should like to see the State embark on various novel and adventurous experiments.'

And he helped hobble the economy even further by pushing for special union privileges that inspired thuggery:

He was a leading supporter of the Trades Disputes Act of 1906, which reversed the judicial decisions that had held unions responsible for property damage and injuries committed by their agents on the union’s behalf, in effect granting unions a privileged position exempting them from the ordinary law of the land. It is ironic that the immense power of the British labor unions that made Britain the 'Sick Man of Europe' for two generations and became the foil of Margaret Thatcher, originated with the enthusiastic help of her hero, Winston Churchill.

There is much, much more of Churchill’s checkered past, but Mrs. Clinton is likely unaware of it, or, perhaps, she is counting on the public to be unaware, and thus feels perfectly comfortable performing her mystical comparison.

One thing is certain, she doesn’t have a clue about fascism. As Aitkenhead observed, in her UK travels, Mrs. Clinton has been quoting from Madeline Albright’s new waste of paper, “Fascism: A Warning.”

She's actually been citing statements about fascism from a book by the woman who, when asked if “regime change” in Iraq was worth the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, replied, “the price is worth it,”

Amazing, but par for the course for Mrs. Clinton. Not only does she not know when to step away from the stage, she insists on patting herself on the back with hands that Lady Macbeth couldn’t get clean.

For Hillary Clinton to try to liken Trump to Hitler and attach herself to some noble, anti-fascist cause is sad and laughable.

Though, not unsurprising.

 

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