A Hillary Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand!

Hillary Clinton thinks SCOTUS upholding a law that her husband signed is “deeply disturbing”: http://t.co/66FMBbaqrB

— AG (@AG_Conservative) June 30, 2014

Heh. Or as Allahpundit writes:

First “don’t ask, don’t tell,” then DOMA, now RFRA: Precisely how many statutes signed by Bill Clinton are the Clintons currently horrified by?

It’ll be fun during President Hillary’s administration to try to identify the various laws that Senator Chelsea will be forced to repudiate circa 2036.

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By the way, since Hillary and, presumably, Bill are so mortified to find that closely held corporations count as “persons” for purposes of RFRA, I’m curious: Did either of them demand any clarification of who’d be covered by the statute before Bill signed it in 1993? You would think the Smartest Woman In The World, who hates corporations every bit as much as Elizabeth Warren when she’s not busy hitting them up for contributions, would have flagged that potential wrinkle before Bill made it the law of the land. Huh.

Beyond feminist identity politics, Hillary’s appeal derives from nostalgia of her husband’s two terms and the good feelings they engender to moderates and the left. (The ’90s: The Last Great Decade? is the title of an upcoming miniseries on the National Geographic cable TV channel. Coincidental timing? I would tend to doubt it.) But economically, those good times relied entirely on Bill’s eventual rejection of the far left corporatism (read: liberal fascism) that Hillary, Al Gore, Obama and Elizabeth Warren all wallow in. Not to mention the arrival of a Republican Congress that allowed Bill to govern as the moderate he ran as in 1992, after his own Obama-esque collectivist floundering in his first two years in office culminating in the Hillarycare flameout.

What’s the sense of supporting Clinton when she’s rejected everything her husband’s administration stood for? Other than pure identity politics. And if identity politics is all that you’re left with, why not go with someone who practices that dark art much more skillfully than Hillary? (And like Obama in 2007 and 2008, has far left historical baggage dragging her down.)

Incidentally, as Hillary was was running into the initial headwinds of Hurricane Obama in 2007, she was one of the first, or at least the most prominent of the leftists who publicly declared that she didn’t want to be called “liberal,” but “progressive.” And all of the above segues well into Charles Murray’s new article at the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Trouble Isn’t Liberals. It’s Progressives”:

As a libertarian, I am reluctant to give up the word “liberal.” It used to refer to laissez-faire economics and limited government. But since libertarians aren’t ever going to be able to retrieve its original meaning, we should start using “liberal” to designate the good guys on the left, reserving “progressive” for those who are enthusiastic about an unrestrained regulatory state, who think it’s just fine to subordinate the interests of individuals to large social projects, who cheer the president’s abuse of executive power and who have no problem rationalizing the stifling of dissent.

Making a clear distinction between liberals and progressives will help break down a Manichaean view of politics that afflicts the nation. Too many of us see those on the other side as not just misguided but evil. The solution is not a generalized “Can’t we all just get along” non-judgmentalism. Some political differences are too great for that.

But liberalism as I want to use the term encompasses a set of views that can be held by people who care as much about America’s exceptional heritage as I do. Conservatives’ philosophical separation from that kind of liberalism is not much wider than the philosophical separation among the various elements of the right. If people from different political planes on the right can talk to each other, as they do all the time, so should they be able to talk to people on the liberal left, if we start making a distinction between liberalism and progressivism. To make that distinction is not semantic, but a way of realistically segmenting the alterations to the political landscape that the past half-century has brought us.

“Not everyone on the left wants to quash dissent or indulge President Obama’s abuses of executive power,” Murray writes. Sorry, as they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” And as we saw with Bill Clinton’s multiple attacks on talk radio in the 1990s, his and his defenders’ war on women during that period, the liberal fascism lurking in Hillary and Al’s mad schemes, and with Obama’s “unexpected” rejection of his unifying rhetoric in 2004 and on the campaign stump, the Jungian Shadow is lurking just under the surface. It doesn’t take much for that inner totalitarian to emerge.

Or as John Hayward writes:

It’s increasingly ridiculous to use the word “liberal” to describe the modern American collectivist. There’s nothing liberal about them at all. They’re shooting for the ultimate subversion of liberty, by re-defining “liberty” as a form of compulsion. In other words, they’re saying you are being oppressed unless a wise and virtuous dictatorial authority can force other people to give you what the authoritarians have decided you “deserve.” You aren’t “free” as long as you must provide for yourself. Liberty becomes a term used to describe its exact opposite: a set of active obligations placed upon other people. It’s right up there with any perversion of language and thought described by George Orwell in “1984.” Actually, it is one of the perversions he laid at Big Brother’s feet: “Freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

(Speaking of 1984’s inspiration, love the almost Telogreika-thick jacket that Hillary is waging her own Great Patriotic War in, and the oversized pose in the above photo.)