Hillary Clinton Will Destroy The World!

Unless John Podhoretz can stop her. Second-generation conservative hack John Podhoretz is dutifully making the rounds of all the wingnut talk radio shows and the cable news shows flogging his new book, Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . .

Podwhoretz’s ten-point plan for stopping Hillary includes this bullet point:

“How to expose the real, ultraliberal Hillary”

In her six years in the Senate, what has Hillary done that could come close to earning the ultraliberal tag? Name one thing. I’ll wait.

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I’m still waiting.

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OK. Time’s up.

The answer is that Hillary Clinton has not done one thing in her senatorial term that is particularly liberal, let alone ultraliberal. She voted to authorize Bush’s invasion of Iraq, has voted to continue funding the war and has repeatedly said that we should not withdraw our troops.

Hillary Clinton has not authored or co-sponsored even one piece of legislation that could be called liberal and has never so much as stood up on the Senate floor advocating the creation of a new social program of any kind, liberal or otherwise.

The one piece of legislation she co-sponsored would make flag burning a crime. Very liberal, that.

The fact of the matter is that Podhoretz doesn’t care what Hillary’s politics are. She is a demon figure to the reflexive rightists and Republicans because she has the opposite party affiliation and is a celebrity with the popularity and campaign chest (ahem) that could conceivably get her into the White House. Hillary Clinton could be a member of the KKK and the right would still demonize her as long as they think she poses a genuine threat to Republican power. Conversely, she could be a screaming communist and go way beyond the ultraliberal tag and the right wouldn’t care if she was just an obscure, backbench senator with no chance at the presidency.

I met a friend of mine, Andy Karp, for dinner sometime in summer of 2000, before the election. Andy is enamored of conservatives such as David Horowitz, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Medved, and Dennis Prager. We were talking about the election and Andy said that Al Gore was dangerous. I was taken aback, and said that that was a very extraordinary claim. What evidence, I asked, do you have to support it? He couldn't muster any.

There is a mindset to the extreme right that goes beyond merely opposing someone based on differences in policies. In the minds of these people, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton are a threat to all they hold dear. Of course, it is somewhat unfair to extrapolate merely from wingnut radio blowhards and professional extremists like Horowitz, because they cater to the hardened base and it is in their interest to cast everything in apocalyptic terms and create scary monsters under the bed in order to pose as the last bastion of moral warriors standing between good, God fearing folks and the nihilstic, atheistic, anti-American, secular humanists.