The Paltrow Of Politics (Minus Looks & Ethics)

By Ilana Mercer

Hillary Rodham Clinton has done some "conscious uncoupling" from reality. The term was disgorged by a celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow, to announce a separation from her spouse. In the same breath, the actress bemoaned her gilded, glamorous life, and offended America’s military sacred cow by comparing the cyber-attacks she endures to the experience of war.

As heir to a political dynasty founded by a powerful man, Hillary has received millions of dollars to write books. Over the years, she and husband Bill Clinton have made hundreds of millions from both book deals and speaking engagements. Yet in a recent ABC interview, the former “First Housewife” complained about emerging from the White House not only “dead broke, but in debt”: “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to … piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”

Another reality Hillary has worked to deconstruct is
Benghazi. Hillary dare not admit that, by leveling Libya, Americans invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any U.S. provocation, real or imagined, to expel those who “came, saw, and conquered.” Still less is the former secretary of state willing to cop to having left the post undefended. This scribe has long subscribed to the view that, at bottom, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom had imagined she would run the Benghazi compound like a community center. How better to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary's special project, was a smashing success?

In a fit of “estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids,” Hillary and two sisters in the Obama administration—“humanitarian hawks" Samantha Power, then a member of the president’s National Security Council, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice, then Ambassador to the United Nations—launched a “war of the womb” that left Libya in shambles.

All along, our globetrotting hegemon evinced little respect for regional powers and their right to handle their own affairs, in-house, so to speak. On behalf of the African Union, South African President Jacob Zuma had brokered a deal with Libya. By the Telegraph’s telling, the AU had “outlined a political solution to end the fighting in Libya based on an immediate end to attacks on civilians and a ceasefire which would be monitored by a credible international organization. The ceasefire would lead to a transitional period and culminate in elections.” Col. Muammar Gadhafi agreed. Judging from what befell Libya, Hillary and her harridans would have none of it. They refused to give peace a chance. War it was. The rest is history, as is Libya.

Who can forget Hillary Clinton's blood-curdling cackle, “We came, we saw, he died!”, when tidings arrived of the actions of her thugs of choice in that country? Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, the Libyan rebels to whom the U.S. had taken a shine intercepted Col. Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte, dragged him from his vehicle, and lynched him then and there. Hillary's ululations were a perfect complement to the rebels’ harangues of “Allahu Akbar."

The focus of Hillary’s next blood-inspired hoedown was to be Syria. She had wanted to arm rebel forces there. Obama objected. Or so she tells readers of her latest, I-did-it-my-way memoire. A story broken by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), almost 2 years back, implicated Hillary’s Syrian soul-mates in the massacre of over 90 Alawi and Shia villagers, “predominantly women and children.” “Rebel atrocities,” relayed National Review’s foreign correspondent, were “being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities.” As president, count on Hillary to devise a creative casus belli for the “humanitarian” invasion she hankers for in Syria. For if she has learned anything from Benghazi, it is not that America ought to divest from democratizing the word, but that our country needs more Green-Zone fortresses everywhere.

Whether this strong-as-a-horse politician was concussed or cowering, in the waning days of 2012, we will never know. Mrs. Clinton was scheduled to testify in December “before the House of Representatives and Senate foreign affairs committees on a report on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.” She was a no-show.

But on CNN, love is in the air. Viewers have expressed a belief that Hillary would restore the country to the Clinton years of peace and prosperity. Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998, as well as a Sudanese pharmaceutical company that turned out to be the main manufacturer of medicines and vaccinations in Sudan. And he strafed the Serbs in 1999. Stateside, Bill butchered 76 men, women and children in Texas. Alas, so long as Hillary steers clear of another Waco, and confines her murderous sprees to killing far-away people from high above—few boots on the ground—her countrymen will consider her a peacemaker.

While prosperity during the Clinton years was due less to Clinton-economics than to Reaganomics and a Republican Congress not yet completely comatose—in fairness, Bill does grasp something about prosperity. “This is good work,” he famously said about Mitt Romney’s much-maligned work at Bain Capital. Hillary, conversely, has no economic acumen. “There are rich people everywhere, and yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries,” she grumbled at the Clinton Global Initiative, in 2012. According to economist George Reisman’s cogent analysis—and contra Mrs. Clinton's crushing ignorance—“a highly productive and provident 1 percent provides the standard of living of a largely ignorant and ungrateful ninety-nine percent.” As for Obama’s putsch for a North-Korean style health care: Instead of aborting it, Hillary will guarantee that Obamacare reaches full-term gestation.

Another wily fox called Bill (O’Reilly) has defended Mrs. Clinton’s riches as capitalism’s reward for hard work. Not quite. Hillary has accrued wealth by using the predatory political process to wield power over others. Although she has pudding for brains, Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has made a living in the honest, productive, non-predatory and salutary ways of the free market. Paltrow’s affluence, unlike Hillary’s, is a reward for assets she peddles to people who choose to purchase them.

 Ilana Mercer is author of Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. ©2014 By ILANA MERCER