Hillary Clinton: Is it time for her and Jeb Bush to leave
the presidential field to members of other families?
Hillary Run Reinforces 'Quasi-Feudal System' in America (Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland)
"America increasingly
belongs to the millionaires and billionaires. A quasi-feudal system has formed
in which the fate of a man and his future position in life are determined at
birth. A Bush-Clinton relay would confirm that this unhealthy process is occurring
not only in finance but politics as well. … To my surprise, Americans, at least
those supporting the Democrats, don't seem to mind. I have to admit to a
personal bias here, as I do not understand the reasons for Mrs. Clinton's
dominance."
"The presidency is not some crown to be passed between
two families!," former Maryland Governor Martin
O’Malley said recently. He meant, of course, the Bushes and the Clintons
who, as seems a really possibility, have governed and will govern the United
States from the year 1989 until 2025, excluding an eight-year interruption by
Barack Obama.
On Sunday that dark scenario moved a bit closer when Hillary
Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, officially announced her
candidacy in 2016 presidential election. In her steps will soon follow Jeb
Bush, brother and son of two former Republican presidents.
O’Malley, though far from objective as he himself is considering
becoming a candidate, is undoubtedly correct for many reasons. In recent years much
has been said about the growing inequality of the American economy, and how a
child from a poor family has less of a chance at social advancement. America increasingly
belongs to the millionaires and billionaires. A quasi-feudal system has formed
in which the fate of a man and his future position in life are determined at
birth. A Bush-Clinton relay would confirm that this unhealthy process is occurring
not only in finance but politics as well.
To my surprise, Americans, at least those supporting the
Democrats, don't seem to mind. It would be quite a sensation if someone else
won the party nomination (things look completely different on the Republican
side, where Bush will have a much harder path, with his most dangerous rival apparently
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker).
I have to admit to a personal bias here, as I do not
understand the reasons for Mrs. Clinton’s dominance. The fact that she is a
woman seems like a considerable advantage in the face of more than 200 years of
male rule in the White House. However, as asserted by the more malicious, to be
a woman one must be a human being, whereas Mrs. Clinton sometimes resembles a cyborg in her public appearances.
No Hillary, Don't Do It! (de Volkskrant, The Netherlands)
She claims to be a spokesperson for women’s rights, but, as investigated
by the right-wing portal Washington Free
Beacon, during her tenure as a senator the women in her office were
paid 72 percent of men in equivalent positions! That's far worse than the Washington
average (in the U.S. capitol, women earn approximately 90 percent of men in the
same positions).
As secretary of state between 2009 and 2013, Hillary Clinton
flew - diligently calculated by her confidants - 956,733 miles, a distance equal
to two return trips to the moon - but not much came of it. It is of course
difficult to blame her for the fact that Obama himself undertook the key
decisions and that U.S. foreign policy was manually controlled from the White
House, but the fact remains that as the head of diplomacy she failed to achieve
very much.
Her biggest drawback, and again this is my personal opinion -
is not even the fact that she is privileged, but that she considers herself to
be. Certain rules that apply to "ordinary people" do not apply
because her name is Hillary Clinton.
A perfect example is the so called e-mail scandal that broke
a few weeks ago. It turned out that when Hillary was secretary of state she
used her personal e-mail account. All correspondence was saved on a server that
the Clintons had installed in their home in New York. Last year she forwarded
to governmental archives thousands of "business" e-mails, but she
deleted 30,000 "private" ones – and she was the one who decided which
were which.
Republicans raised a fuss, suggesting Hillary was hiding
something. Jeb Bush brags that he had a business e-mail account and that its contents
were revealed on his Web site. Yet that isn't the root of the matter! After
all, Bush had a private account in addition to a business account, and if he
wanted to conceal his business matters he could have kept such correspondence in
his private account – and he probably did as all politicians do.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
The point is that internal State Department procedures
prohibit the use of private e-mail accounts for business matters. In 2011, when
Mrs. Clinton was head of the Department, all employees were given a reminder of
that ban. Apparently because she feels privileged, Hillary Clinton concluded that
the ban didn’t apply to her.
"Everyday Americans need a champion … and I want to be
that champion" Hillary Clinton says in a video in which she announced her
candidacy [above]. However a year ago she confessed that "when Bill and I left the
White House, we were bankrupt." Yet a few months before they had sold a house
they owned for many millions of dollars, and a few months later she began a lecture
tour for which they received tens of millions of dollars. Someone who in such a
situation regards herself as a "bankrupt" is not only poorly
qualified to be a champion of "everyday Americans," but has insufficient
contact with reality.
In view of the above, and taking into account the fact that Mrs.
Clinton recently saw a granddaughter born, it seems it would be better for "everyday
Americans" if, rather that testing herself in the role of president, she
could instead prove herself in the role of grandma.
