WANT TO UNDERSTAND HILLARY CLINTON? READ SAUL ALINSKY, Roger Kimball advises:
The prime Alinskyite supposition is that “all life is partisan. There is no dispassionate objectivity.” One might — in fact, one should — mouth various nostrums about the welfare of children, access to healthcare, etc.; one might rail against inequality, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., but at the end of the day, politics was all about the acquisition of power and life was all about politics.
This seems to me to be an accurate epitome of the Clintons’ modus operandi. It is not original to Alinsky, but he gave it a distinctively American twist. In his chapter on “tactics,” he offers various practical tips that might have come straight out of the Clinton, or the Obama, playbook.
Rule No. 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it … All issues must be polarized if action is to follow.” So if Bill forces himself on a Gennifer or Juanita, you avail yourself of this tactic by having James Carville appear on television scoffing that if you “drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Or consider the protracted abuse figures such as Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney were subjected to.
One of Alinsky’s most potent rules is No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” That included this: “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian can live up to Christianity.” Note the diction: Alinsky, like the Clintons, assumes he is dealing not with political opponents, people of good will who disagree about some aspect of a problem, but an enemy.
You do not seek to convince or persuade enemies. You seek to destroy them.
Especially those you consider permanently “irredeemable.” And note how the “Media Hides Hillary Clinton’s Religious Urge To Exile ‘Irredeemable’ Americans,” Neil Munro adds at Breitbart.com:
“You could put half of [Donald] Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘Basket of Deplorables’ … some of those folks, they are irredeemable,” she said Sept. 9 to a laughing audience of supporters.
“Irredeemable” is a religious term, and it describes people who have died and been condemned by God to hell forever, without any hope of redemption or a return to society, said Paul Kengor, a biographer of Hillary Clinton and a professor at Grove City College, in Pennsylvania.
In secular terms, “irredeemable” is best understood as a “death penalty, not just a political death penalty, but also a social death penalty” that exiles targeted people permanently outside the pale of civilization, Kengor says. His 2007 biography of Clinton is “God and Hillary Clinton: A Spiritual Life.”
In American politics, that’s an unprecedented claim, which leaves Clinton vulnerable.
“She has called herself many times an ‘Old Fashioned Methodist,’ so she ought to know that word usually has a religious content,” Kengor said. “Religious-left Christians can be Hellfire and Brimstone, and be the most [unforgiving] judgmental people on the planet,” he said, adding “that’s what we’re seeing.”
As Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism – whose final drafts were edited in 2007 when it was widely assumed that Hillary would be the Democrats’ nominee the following year – Hillary’s worldview synthesizes a variety of strains of American “Progressivism.” She would do a thorough job of completing Obama’s fundamental transformation of America if elected, particularly given that she’ll have four to eight years to completely reboot the Supreme Court. Just as Obama seemed far more eager to go to war against the milquetoast American Midwest than the radical Islamic Middle East, she’ll be growing that Basket Of Irredeemable Deplorables exponentially under her watch.
