Subject: Hillary and sado-masochism

As her husband has dragged his numerous female play objects before her and has humiliated her on the public stage year after year, she still stays within the marriage.

Hillary seems to take every beating, and yet she appears to “keep on ticking.” Does she thrive on this?

How would this affect one’s (female) psyche? Judgment as President? General perspective?

Robert Philips
Corrales, New Mexico

A swarm of biographers in miners’ gear has tried to plumb the inky depths of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s warren-riddled psyche. My metaphor is drawn (as Oscar Wilde’s prim Miss Prism would say) from the Scranton coalfields, to which came the Welsh family that produced Hillary’s harsh, domineering father.

Hillary’s feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm’s length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham’s abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage — the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.

Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

It’s no coincidence that Hillary’s staff has always consisted mostly of adoring women, with nerdy or geeky guys forming an adjunct brain trust. Hillary’s rumored hostility to uniformed military men and some Secret Service agents early in the first Clinton presidency probably belongs to this pattern. And let’s not forget Hillary, the governor’s wife, pulling out a book and rudely reading in the bleachers during University of Arkansas football games back in Little Rock.

Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem’s fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.

How does all this affect the prospect of a Hillary presidency? With her eyes on the White House, Hillary as senator has made concerted and generally successful efforts to improve her knowledge of and relationship to the military — crucial for any commander-in-chief but especially for the first female one. However, I remain concerned about her future conduct of high-level diplomacy. Contemptuous condescension seems to be Hillary’s default mode with any male who criticizes her or stands in her way. It’s a Nixonian reflex steeped in toxic gender bias. How will that play in the Muslim world?

The Clintons live to campaign. It’s what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value. Their actual political accomplishments are fairly slight. The obsessive need to keep campaigning may mean a president Hillary would go right on spewing the bitterly partisan rhetoric that has already paralyzed Washington. Even if Hillary could be elected (which I’m skeptical about), how in tarnation could she ever govern?

The current wave of support for Barack Obama from Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans is partly based on his vision of a new political discourse that breaks with the petty, destructive polarization of the past 20 years. Whether Obama can build up his foreign policy credentials sufficiently to reassure an anxious general electorate remains to be seen.

But Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark (“Cue the tears!”). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary’s real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House? Day one will just be more of the same.

I will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee of my party, because I want Democrats appointed to the Cabinet and the Supreme Court. But I plan to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary because he is a rational, centered personality who speaks the language of idealism and national unity. Obama has served longer as an elected official than Hillary. He has had experience as a grass-roots activist, and he is also a highly educated lawyer who will be a quick learner in office. His international parentage and childhood, as well as his knowledge of both Christianity and Islam, would make him the right leader at the right time. And his wife Michelle is a powerhouse.

The Obamas represent the future, not the past.

Subject: Greetings from Oregon

Hello, Camille,

My disagreement comes in your characterization of George Bush as the lamest of lame ducks. I disagree 100 percent. It seems to me that Bush is the most successful of the lame duck presidents in my lifetime. He virtually gets everything he wants because the Congress is disorganized, fractured and feckless.

Every time a war resolution comes up, Bush stands the Dems down, and he gets pretty much what he wants. The spending bill: Congress is more concerned with its own earmarks than getting a budget. And something close to my business, the alternative minimum tax. That fight right now is between Democrats, and it looks certain that Bush will get what he wants in that issue as well.

I don’t remember the two other lame ducks of my lifetime — Clinton and Reagan — having this much success in the last two years of their second terms. It isn’t that Bush is popular and is using a “bully pulpit.” It is because the Dems in leadership are clueless.

Tom McFadden
McMinnville, Oregon

Alas, I must ruefully concede in the face of your vigorous rebuttal! The incompetence of the congressional Democrats is a major embarrassment to my party.

The Democratic leadership correctly says it doesn’t have the votes to stop the war in Iraq, but it has been depressingly inept in devising strategies to cut off funding. The White House has won every skirmish for public opinion on that issue.

I have a soft spot for House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi because I find it enjoyable and instructive to watch her assert leadership in that tough-as-nails yet velvet-glove style. On the other hand, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is hardly the face of a dynamic, authentically contemporary Democratic party. What a weird, reptilian ghoul that guy is. Even his sexless, affectless voice on the radio gives me the creeps. When will Reid get the boot?

You are quite right that Bush is not a lame duck in the usual sense. But amid the glut of campaign news, Bush has been oddly recessive. When he surfaces, he looks a bit untidy around the edges, and his manner veers from the awkwardly jocular to the portentously overemphatic. After seven years in office, Bush still hasn’t welded his different parts into a steady, consistent presidential persona.

Subject: Iran

The NIE report still acknowledges that Iran is producing large amounts of enriched uranium in violation of the U.N.’s non-proliferation treaty. Essentially, the best we can conclude is that Iran merely paused (I won’t use the word “halted” or “ceased”) the most overt component of its nuclear program.

I will pose a simple question to you: Should the U.S., possessing the means of inhibiting the proliferation of weapons that we can assume make the world a less safe place, use military force to prevent so-called rogue nations from developing nuclear warheads?

JM

I oppose the unilateral use of military force based on supposition and worst-case scenarios. An operation of this magnitude would never be a surgical strike on empty facilities. In addition to the violation of sovereignty of the targeted nation, there would be great cost of life.

I have never understood the logic by which certain nations in the world have determined that they have a perfect right to nuclear weapons while other, emergent nations do not. Naturally, it would be a far safer world if no one had them. But it’s the U.S., which first used the atom bomb in warfare, that began this process.

Unfortunately, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has made it more likely, not less, that smaller nations will seek nuclear weapons by any means necessary: Nukes are the only possible equalizer against a superpower like ours with overwhelming military might. This is yet another way the Iraq folly has destabilized the world: Weak or corrupt governments will always have trouble controlling their nukes, which may end up in terrorist hands.

Our foreign policy cannot be eternally predicated on bombing other countries into submission. Iran does not pose any kind of direct threat to the U.S. mainland. If there are nations, such as Israel, that are menaced by Iran, let them deal with it regionally as they think best.

Subject: Iraq pullout would result in massive killing. Don’t fool yourself.

I am a 37-year-old Gulf War vet, two Bronze Star recipient, by the way. Not that it matters.

The chicken-hawk argument is so full of crap. Lincoln never served, and of course, neither did FDR. It was a wide war on communism [in Vietnam and Cambodia]. We lost that theater because the Dems withdrew money and Nixon lacked the testicular fortitude to take it to China and/or Russia.

The thing to know is, despite opinion on the Iraq invasion, a pullout gives it to Iran, and the killing will really start. Camille, pulling out of Iraq would be the worst mistake we have ever made.

I do believe Saddam sent bio/chems to Syria — while the idiot Bush was wasting time at the U.N. (who should be sent packing out of our country) — out the back door in Russian semis. No doubt about it. Bush will be shirking his duty if does not blow up Iranian facilities.

Peace only happens when the good guys win. That will always be true.

Rob
Dallas, Texas

Thank you very much for your military service. However, I must respectfully disagree that the U.S. should have confronted China or Russia directly during the period of the Vietnam War. Our intrusion into agrarian Southeast Asia was a tactical disaster, and it did not and could not stop the region’s internal conflicts. We cannot control the entire world or force it to follow our cultural, legal and political traditions.

As for our withdrawal from Iraq effectively handing the country to Iran, I do suspect that the Shiite region of Iraq will eventually merge with Iran. I have no feeling whatever for the present borderlines of Iraq, which were drawn for their own advantage relatively recently by the British.

So you too feel we should attack Iran. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq, thanks to the geopolitical naiveté of the Bush administration, was an enormous gift to Iran! We did Iran the favor of taking out its No. 1 enemy, Saddam Hussein — who had evidently been bluffing about his WMD in order to keep Iran at bay.

You believe that Saddam’s WMD were trucked out to Syria, presumably under cover of night — a claim that I have often heard on conservative talk radio. But any truck movements over that distance would have been visible to our constant aerial and satellite surveillance of the region. How desperate the U.S. was for evidence — any evidence — of WMD was shown by the startlingly unconvincing aerial photos of motley vehicles that Colin Powell marshaled during his address to the U.N. Security Council in 2003.

Chemical weapons were indeed used by Saddam during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s and during his merciless suppression of the Kurd rebellion in the north. But his huge stockpiles of weapons rapidly (and predictably) degraded in the 1990s, when Iraq was under duress from economic sanctions. Biological and chemical weapons require professional upkeep, which Saddam’s Iraq was in no position to do. The Bush administration’s claim of an imminent threat to the U.S. mainland from Iraqi WMD in this decade was intended to manipulate popular opinion and did succeed, thanks to our pathetically credulous national press.

Finally, I’m uncomfortable with the formulation “good guys”/”bad guys” that one also constantly hears on talk radio. By what reasoning or authority have Americans concluded that we are invariably the “good guys”? And that it is our moral right to define who the “bad guys” are and to exterminate them, or anyone who looks like them or happens to be in the area, at will? To claim purity on the basis of good intentions alone isn’t virtue — it’s complacence.

Stereotyping diverse people into generic groups makes it easier to wage war on them. They cease to exist as individuals, with their own aspirations and capacity for suffering. Hence the full scale of the brutalization and destruction of Iraqi civilians has been underreported by the American press and has never been mentally processed by most U.S. citizens.