Maureen Dowd’s new column about Hillary Clinton convinces me that I am not the only one who smells something peculiarly sick and rotten in presidential politics.
On one side, we have Hillary Clinton, who presents a resume for high office with these major bullet points:
- Partnership in a radically dysfunctional marriage with a discredited former president, specializing in cheating and sleazing.
- Female gender.
- A long string of jobs — partner in a provincial law firm, power behind a throne, United States senator, secretary of state — which she survived, innocent of credit for any specific accomplishment.
- Proven ability to cadge money from Near Eastern religious fanatics, one-dimensional feminists, crony capitalists, and other people with hands out for favors.
- Proven ability, acquired from her husband (see 1, above), to operate (with the help of 4, above) a political mafia.
- Proven ability to tell nothing but lies.
- Proven ability to deliver any desired quantity of self-righteous statements about other people’s duties.
On the opposite side, we have John Ellis (“Jeb”) Bush, whose resume emphasizes these points:
- Membership in a family that includes two abjectly unsuccessful presidents.
- Modest success as governor of Florida.
- Proven ability to cadge money from “moderate” (i.e., non) Republicans and crony capitalists devoted to cheap labor, open immigration, and votes for Dems.
- Proven ability to lose votes from anyone to the right of Anderson Cooper.
- Proven ability to look stupid on any public occasion.
- Proven ability to deliver any desired quantity of self-righteous statements about other people’s duties.
It’s remarkable that everyone who has any knowledge of politics has read these resumes, understands them, and talks about them as if they were plastic disks in a checkers game.
Well, almost everyone. Dowd, for all her leftist craziness, is a respectable person.
But let’s see . . . Who has the longer resume? Jeb or Hillary?
It’s Hillary! She wins!
Can it be that in today’s America, or any other country, this is how things happen?
