What’s Scary, Scarier, and Scariest about Hillary

It’s not good to get into personal appearances especially when, like me, you live in a glass house. But I believe what Brit Hume was hinting at in regard to Hillary’s appearance the other night was that she was so made up and rigidly coiffed she could have been prepared for the debate by Don Corleone’s undertaker Amerigo. Scary, like one of those creepy clown dolls which move from the couch to the chair when the lights go off is scary. But scarier is her pledge to create five million new jobs. Because she doesn’t mean what it sounds like she means. Hillary Clinton is not going invent a new industry like computers and produce her five million jobs that way. She’s not going to found a new Internet business like Jeff Bezos or a new retail chain like Sam Walton. She doesn’t have the I.Q., training or motivation for anything like that.

Instead what she’s talking about is: (A) creating new government jobs; or (B) creating new jobs with lobbyists and influence peddlers, the Public-Private-Partnership grifters who fund her political machine. Guys whose sons and daughters run companies who insist they can make jet fuel out of algae or better knock-off Chinese solar panels if only they get stuffed with enough Federal cash. In other words, bad jobs. Jobs which, whether in government or in corrupt private entities, consume wealth rather than create it. Indeed, they will wolf taxpayer money down to no purpose like contestants at a Coney Island hot dog eating contest. And just as bad money drives out good in Gresham’s law, bad jobs drive out many times their number of good jobs in what we can call the Liberal Law Of Creative Job Destruction. It’s not a joke. One of the clearest examples of how certain types of jobs drive out other more valuable jobs is in public schooling. Teaching the young how to read, write and sum isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even model airplane science. Nor does it take a lot of manpower. But the layering on with new government jobs year after year; school psychologists, nurses, “professional” unionized custodians, assistant teachers, grievance counselors, teacher aides, curriculum specialists and junior teachers, playground monitors, security guards, nutritionists and in some cases more administrators than classroom teachers has meant that spiraling school taxes have helped drive something like two million manufacturing jobs out of my state and into oblivion. It’s also why something like forty percent of the houses in my neck of the woods are for sale. A process that only goes on. For example not so long ago I remember an official in a nursing union testifying before Congress that Obamacare would produce 25,000 “new” nursing jobs in California alone. But when asked how many other jobs the oppressive new regulatory regime would at the same time eliminate in California, she refused to answer. Because in the computation of a Left Wing Liberal, the massive job killing consequences of their “new jobs” don’t count. But it actually does -- big-time, so when Hillary says she has plans for five million new jobs, more jobs than there are people in many States, you cannot, cannot and cannot, be certain the nation will survive the experience. Because with a hundred million already out of the work force there may not be a single solitary good job left anywhere to support us or your aged Nanny when she finishes creating her five million moon children. While what you can be sure of is that as bad things happen, nothing will be Hillary Clinton’s fault. It will be the “rich” (the other rich -- not her friends the super-rich and Hollywood rich) or maybe America’s “systemic racism” which will be to blame, the fact that Congress wouldn’t pass a family leave act or raise the minimum wage to a hundred dollars an hour, the refusal of Republicans to “prioritize our inner city schools” or offer trans-gender bathrooms. Not to mention the blame she will heap on The Little Sisters Of The Poor who year after year stubbornly insist upon caring for the abandoned instead of promoting abortion. In fact, Hillary Clinton will blame anybody and anything for the disaster she will produce, except her own corruption, incompetence and deceit. And so winding down, we have scary Hillary the clown and the scarier Hillary the jobs creator but the really, really scary aspect of Hillary Clinton, the scariest thing about her is another thing entirely. It’s the spell she casts. Something I’m immune to, I guess, because I go to church every week and eat enough garlic or more likely because I’m already under the spell of the wild Irish girl I married fifty years ago who likes to remind me that while St. Bridget may have given away her father’s sword to a mendicant beggar a thousand three hundred years ago, she never let go of her own. But in any event, so many people are not so immune and it’s a fact that even face-to-face with the economic end-of-times, that huffing and puffing little Arkansas tugboat will tow into port millions and millions of our fellow citizens who will continue to believe every word out of that lying mouth. Kind of like how You-Know-Who insisted upon believing Mrs. You-Know-Who about that fruit. And no, I’m not talking about Barack Obama. Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here. He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York with that wild Irish girl, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com