A little decency and wisdom from Bill Bradley
Andrew Sullivan offers us this wise observation by the last really decent man fucked over by the Clintons.
"The bigger the lie, the better the chance they think they’ve got. That’s been their whole approach. She’s going to lose a whole generation of people who got involved in politics believing it could be something different,"
- Bill Bradley on the Clintons.
What happens to people that they start to think about the world in this way? What happens to us to that we get so wrapped up in our own bullshit about ourselves that we'll sacrafice any honest principle in the name of that bullshit, and, in Hillary Clinton's case, in the name of power?
Who was the original guy, obsessed with power and with force as some kind of governing philosophy, who reasoned that the Big Lie was the one most likely to be believed and secure power? I bet you know. If you don't, you should.
Here's his psychological profile from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services:
"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. [3]"
What happens in the hearts of people who lose track of themselves like this?
How incredibly sad for us. Especially for folks like Ms. Clinton. But, really, for all of us.
2 comments:
Totally. But I totally know what you're saying, dude. It really is the whole nanny-state element of that equation that pisses me off. It's the condescension. The "I know what's best for you whether you fuckin' like it or not" even when she is disastrously wrong and unable to admit it part of her personality that just leaves me disgusted with her every time I see one more dishonest argument for her candidacy.
Forgive me while I railroad you is not a persuasive campaign for me.
But it's all the Clintons have to offer, right now.
Even as I look at my comment, John, I completely relate to what you're saying, there, completely independent of the politics.
I don't want to have such a visceral dislike for Hillary Clinton. I rooted for her and Bill all through the 90's. But she's really, thoroughly pissed me off this campaign and they already helped railroad the last candidate I really liked in a Democratic race, Bill Bradley.
And I'm tired of having the Clintons play every angle to win my sympathy. Every time I think, "She's a mom," "She's got roughly (socially) liberal insticts," "She's dedicated her life to public service" and every other excuse to like her, I just keep coming up with, "She's slimy as all shit, she can't take responsibility for any of her positions, and yet she pretends she has more answers than she does."
I, personally, don't care if she wants to make cookies or not. But it does bother me that icky feeling dealing with a middle age woman like her - we have a woman in the building I had this feeling with yesterday - whose acting nice but really being kind of a controlling bitch. It drives me up a fuckin' wall. And to pretend like it represents a better understanding of the world that just never reveals itself and simultaneously misses the boat in serious ways on issues like the war just gets under my skin.
To act like you know what you're doing, and to act imperiously about it, all while you clearly do not, by all of the results of your behavior and policy choices, and to act like you know it for everyone else, is just hypocrisy at a height that is too much bullshit for me to accept, some days.
I want to like her. And I love my parents. But then she and Bill remind me of every self-centered, entitled impulse in my now wealthy and always-right-never-wrong liberal parents, and it is just too much for me, sometimes.
That may or may not be a good reason to vote for someone or against someone. But it is close enough to know the difference between something more real and something more bullshit. I love my parents. But this tendency drives me the fuck up a wall. And in Bill and Hillary it is translated into some kind of bizarre rationale for leading the most powerful country in the free world. It's just too much for me.
But cookies are ok with me.
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