The Atlantic found Kevin D. Williamson too hot to handle, but has no problem with longtime "congenital liar" Hillary Clinton. Charles C. W. Cooke eviscerates her recent article: Hillary Clinton Blames Loneliness on Republicans
Hillary Clinton is worried about loneliness in the United States. Or, rather: Hillary Clinton is pretending to be worried about loneliness in the United States. “To defend America against those who would exploit our social disconnection,” she writes in today’s Atlantic, “we need to rebuild our communities.” “Over the past two decades,” Clinton observes, “Americans have spent significantly more time alone, engaging less with family, friends, and people outside the home.” That problem, she concludes, is not only bad for our health and well-being but for the future of the country. Why? Because social isolation “saps the lifeblood of democracy,” it has made us “susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue,” and it “diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarization and animosity.”
I do not disagree with all of this. Writers from Robert Putnam to Tim Carney have chronicled the many ways in which Americans have become, in Clinton’s words, “more isolated, lonely, and unmoored from traditional sources of meaning and support.” The rise of the Internet has undoubtedly reduced the frequency of our in-person social interactions. And there, indeed, is a connection between the atrophying of certain communities and the rise of figures such as Donald Trump. But I must confess to finding it utterly astonishing that, in the course of 3,500 words on this topic, the only frame within which Clinton seems able to set the problem of American loneliness is the supposed perfidy of the Republican Party and its friends. Per Clinton, this is yet another story about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” — a phrase that she uses unironically — and the dastardly group of “right-wing leaders” who sustain it. As ever, Clinton’s tale is hilariously one-dimensional. Its villains are the “ultra-right-wing billionaires, propagandists, and provocateurs who see authoritarianism as a source of power and profit”; “right-wing politicians like Newt Gingrich and media personalities like Rush Limbaugh”; and Steve Bannon, whose “key insight,” Hillary proposes, was to turn “socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech.” Its heroes are “the significant investments being made under President Joe Biden,” which will “lift both incomes and aspirations,” “the historic legislation enacted by Biden and the Democrats in Congress,” and . . . well, Hillary Clinton, for having written a book titled It Takes a Village. “It’s clear,” she writes in saccharine self-congratulation, “that the problems I diagnosed in the 1990s ran deeper than I realized, and were more dire than I could have imagined.” Oh, Cassandra, what have we done?
Fun facts: Not that she's obsessed or anything, but "right-wing" occurs nine times in Hillary's article, including one appearance of "ultra-right-wing" as cited by CCWC. And there's "hard-right" and "alt-right" and "far-right" (one each). And MAGA (once)! And QAnon (thrice)! And "January 6" (also thrice)!
As CCWC notes (that is allegedly a "gifted" link above, by the way), after all this finger-pointing at The Other Side, Hillary winds up by demanding that we "break out of our toxic 'us versus them' dichotomies".
That's hilarious, Hillary.
(By the way, William Safire's NYT column calling her a "congenital liar" was from 1996, 27 years ago.)
Also of note:
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"About himself" is a safe bet. Allysia Finley wonders: What Was Donald Trump Thinking?
Did Donald Trump believe the 2020 election was stolen? Who knows? Discerning his thoughts would be as challenging as breaking into an iPhone without the passcode.
Yet Mr. Trump’s attorney claims the government can’t prove, at least not beyond a reasonable doubt, that the former president knew his election-fraud claims were false, even if he had been advised by the vice president, Justice Department, director of national intelligence and White House attorneys that they were. There might be some truth to that.
You might have seen people pointing with horror to a recent CNN poll that found "69% of Republicans and Republican-leaners say Biden’s win [in 2020] was not legitimate". Ms. Finley notes that even after the Mueller report's release "84% of Democrats still believed the collusion hoax,"
Remember when people talked about the "reality-based community"? I haven't heard that term in a while. Maybe it's time to bring it back.
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Heads will roll. James Freeman engages in a lovely fantasy, speculating on likely outcomes If the Justice Department Is Going to Prosecute Political ‘Frauds’...
The Justice Department’s effort to define former President Donald Trump’s false claims about election results as criminal fraud relies on a brand-new legal standard that could easily be applied to Joe Biden—and also to another of his presidential predecessors.
Freeman quotes a WSJ column from Kimberly Strassel extensively, and goes on to reminisce about the great fraudulent claims used to pass Obamacare. Remember "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan"?
Several days later in that fall of 2013, Chuck Todd of NBC News reported:
President Obama said Thursday that he is “sorry” that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, despite his promise that no one would have to give up a health plan they liked.
Today Mr. Obama’s defenders might say that he should remain in the clear despite the Biden Justice Department’s new standard because Mr. Obama was merely abusing millions of individual insurance customers, not undermining government function. But the Obama falsehoods had other consequences beyond removing choices and raising costs for particular patients.
For example, there's that whole unsustainable Federal debt.
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