“In the years to come there will be trolls galore …”
— Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump’s greatest accomplishment so far isn’t winning the presidency of the United States but preventing Hillary Clinton from getting it.
If you’re feeling low on gratitude, check out Mrs. Clinton’s commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, this past week.
Graduation speeches are notoriously trite. Now combine a trite graduation speech with a bad campaign speech, full of whoppers delivered without irony. (Where’s the evidence? Coming shortly.)
Close to one-fifth of the speech attacked President Trump. And a fair amount of that was about the president’s recently proposed budget, which she called “an attack of unimaginable cruelty.”
(We’re talking, like, ISIS-type cruelty?)
According to the former Wellesley valedictorian, Trump’s proposed federal budget “grossly underfunds” efforts to deal with education, mental health, opioid addiction, and climate change.
Her policy prescriptions are wrong. The first three are best left to the states. The last one is best left to no one.
But even if she were correct, what are such observations doing in a graduation speech? Only a politician prattles on about a budget proposal at what is essentially a glorified social occasion, and only a politician imagines there’s anyone in the audience who cares.
More proof that Hillary is running for president again – 2020, perhaps; or 2024; or 2028; or 2032.
But those are mere style points. Graduation speeches are supposed to be about Big Ideas, not petty details. So she used a petty detail to get at a Big Idea.
She started by poking fun at Trump’s insistence in January that his inauguration was watched by more people than President Barack Obama’s in 2009.
That’s easy to have fun with. But why does it matter?
“It matters because if our leaders lie about the problems we face we’ll never solve them,” Clinton said.
You read that right. Hillary Clinton criticized someone else for lying.
Let’s see. The attack in Benghazi was caused by a Christian activist’s Internet video. Hillary didn’t know it was illegal to set up a private server in her home for State Department business. She never received classified material in her private email account. She was never a champion of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. She didn’t have the White House travel office staff members fired back in the 1990s so she could replace them with her own hacks. She read the Wall Street Journal to learn about futures trading so she could make a 10,000 percent profit on one trade.
But why does telling lies matter?
“It matters because it undermines confidence in government as a whole, which in turn breeds more cynicism and anger,” she said.
No one ever undermined confidence in government like Hillary’s husband, Bill Clinton, through eight years of lying and blundering, assisted by his wife, who was his chief enabler.
Moreover, that is Bill Clinton’s greatest gift to the country. The more skeptical Americans are about government — especially big government — the better off we are.
In a way, it’s also Hillary’s gift to us. As the worst Secretary of State ever — and most memorable liar in the office — Hillary also undermined confidence in government.
Still, confidence-in-government is such a hackneyed concept that it didn’t seem big enough for Hillary’s grand speech. So she groped for an even Bigger Idea:
“When people in power invent their own facts, and attack those who question them, it can mark the beginning of the end of a free society. That is not hyperbole, it is what authoritarian regimes throughout history have done. They attempt to control reality. Not just our laws, and our rights, and our budgets, but our thoughts and beliefs.”
This is an example of what psychotherapists call projection. Controlling “our thoughts and beliefs” doesn’t appear to be on President Trump’s agenda, but it was surely on Hillary’s. She was coming for the Little Sisters of the Poor, for instance, ready to ram contraceptives down their throats, freedom of religion be damned. She was coming for freedom of expression, using “hate speech” as a means to do it.
Appearing before a friendly audience on Thursday, Clinton wanted to project an image of being defeated but not vanquished. Instead, she helped remind her listeners about why they should be grateful they don’t have to listen to her that often.
No doubt the overwhelming majority of Wellesley College graduates who heard her speech voted for Hillary Clinton this past November. But surely few hope to be just like her.
