Life on the Road

This is NOT a political blog, but I just can’t get over Hillary Clinton…

First, there are the things that seem fairly straightforward about her that I dislike.

In order to avoid rehashing things that have already been well-stated, let me first direct you to Crystal’s great posts over at Biblical Womanhood about Hillary’s un-Christmas Ad, and a follow-up about family finances versus government interference.

But my biggest problem with Bill’s better half is that I don’t believe anone really knows what she believes, or who she is.  She’s made a career out of remaking her image to take her where she wants to go.

During the Billary presidency, she was seen as harsh, and un-feminine.  Heck, at one point she alienated every homemaker in the country with her derrogatory comment about not wasting her life “staying home and baking cookies.” 

She decided this was bad, so she got a cat to soften up her image.  There are a lot of photos of Hillary with Socks at the White House, and they look quite chummy.

But when they left the White House, did Socks come along to the luxurious new digs in New York?  Why - when nobody was there to photograph it?  Nope, Socks got dumped on Bettie Curie, the longsuffering Clinton aide who had a pivotal (if embarrassing) role in cleaning up some of Mr. Clinton’s “little messes” at the White House, as well.

I enjoyed the take on it in this article from Fox News.

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

“In the annals of human evil, off-loading a pet is nowhere near the top of the list,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. “But neither is it dead last, and it is especially galling when said pet has been deployed for years as an all-purpose character reference.”

Flanagan’s article, titled “No Girlfriend of Mine,” points out that Clinton wrote a crowd-pleasing book “Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets,” in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House “become a home.”

Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their safety. (Buddy, the chocolate labrador in the Reagan White House, bounded into a road soon after leaving the White House and was promptly run over.)

That’s it in a nutshell, for me.  Not that she ditched a cat, which is a cruddy thing but not the end of the world, but that she’s so false and manipulative about everything. 

Needless to say, I’m neither surprised nor disappointed that Hillary did poorly in the Iowa caucuses…  Although having her on the Democratic ticket might have been the best thing that could happen to the scattered Republicans.