The Stupidity of Hillary

Few serious people doubt the dishonesty of Hillary and Bill Clinton. Both lie all the time about almost everything, the petty as well as the important. Few serious people doubt the shameless self-promotion, the naked avarice, the depthless lust for power and privilege of these two crooks. There is, however, one fundamental difference between William Jefferson Clinton and Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton. Bill was smart, and Hillary is stupid. References to this fact have popped up again and again in emails and related correspondence within Hillary's inner circle. She often seems confused, her close aides tell each other. She often forgets things. While she can do well in rehearsed performances by parroting the same line over and over again, the same is not true when Hillary is required to think independently and make decisions that are not dull dogmatic repetitions of political cant.

The contrast with her husband is stark. Bill had an almost photographic memory for names and could call up clever rhetoric off the top of his head. Bill won a Rhodes Scholarship, something pretty hard for a poor boy from a small Arkansas town. He was able to persuade voters in Arkansas that he was a decent governor and Americans that he was a successful president – things not true, but Bill made do with a slipperiness that earned him the nickname of "Slick Willie." Would anyone ever consider Hillary to be "slick" or "clever" or "smooth"? Most people attribute her clumsiness when not rehearsed to poor aptitude for politics – "We were dead broke … we couldn't pay the mortgages on our homes" or "What difference, at this point, does it make?" (regarding the dead she left behind in Benghazi) or the weak thinking that led her to set up a private server in her basement. Surely this is simply poor aptitude, period. When has Hillary ever done anything we might reasonably consider smart? Her college studies were mired in the dreary feminist claptrap of the late 1960s, when being an angry young female leftist automatically earned you "As" and "Bs" in most subjects she took. Hillary flunked a bar exam that nearly everyone in the District of Columbia passed, which strongly suggests that she learned little in law school. Hillary quickly hitched her star to the smart half of the marriage, the guy who would be Arkansas attorney general (a nice entrée for Hillary in the Little Rock law business) and then governor of Arkansas again and again and again. One also must imagine that when Bill began his serial adulteries, sexual assaults, and other vile behaviors, at least in the beginning, he tricked his wife over and over again. She clearly decided that he was the breadwinner of the family – at least via the only route these folks knew to make money, which is influence-peddling and political corruption. When Bill ran in 1992, he generated some actual excitement about what he might do as President Clinton. He was even then, of course, a crook and a creep, but sometimes those types, if smart, can be effective presidents. ("He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB.") When Hillary decided to run for office herself, she picked the very safest place she could run, for the Senate seat being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in strongly Democrat New York. When she for the Democrat nomination in 2008, Hillary had every conceivable advantage but lost to a political unknown. Everything she did as secretary of state was a disaster. Hillary came close to losing the Democrat nomination this year to an old man with no influence or base, who was not even a Democrat. Every new batch of emails we have seen come up in regular eruptions during the closing days of this campaign season suggests that Hillary is simply stupid. This is particularly stark when compared to Donald Trump, who – whatever one may feel about him – is a smart guy. When voters ponder which candidate to support on Tuesday, they ought to consider that Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton has really done nothing her whole life to suggest intelligence while Donald Trump has navigated the treacherous waters of the high-flying business world with great success for many decades. The choice, in a dangerous world, ought to be pretty easy.