RUTHFULLY YOURS

Margaret Brown earned her moniker as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” by surviving the sinking of the Titanic. Hillary Clinton earned hers by surviving multiple scandals, the last of them claiming four lives. During the Clinton Administration, Hillary Clinton was followed around by the phantom corpses of conspiracy theories, but now four real corpses trail in her wake without ever slowing her down.

Hillary’s departure into the lifeboat is another escape from a ship that is too big to sink. Obama hasn’t been very popular in a while and if she’s going to make her run in 2016, she will need some distance from the shambling disaster that the S.S. Hussein is likely to be three years from now. After being cheated out of her captain’s hat in 2008, she’s determined to be the first in line to receive it in 2016.

That was the deal that brought Bill Clinton on board to campaign indefatigably in 2012 while courting future donors for 2016. The leftist uprising over Iraq that drove Joe Lieberman out of the Democratic Party and undid Hillary Clinton’s careful positioning as a centrist candidate will be out of date by then. And once Obama has spent eight years shredding the country over social issues and partisan quarrels, Hillary’s old alliances with the middle of the party will come in handy to make her seem like a centrist.

Hillary Clinton’s histrionic Senate testimony wasn’t the performance of a cabinet member, but of a candidate. Victimization is her flawed strategy that seems more Lifetime than Lincoln, but while it didn’t pay off particularly well during the 2008 primaries, there’s also no doubt that it resonates strongly in certain quarters. The theatrics were however particularly repugnant as a tactic for avoiding questions about the abandonment and murder of four Americans.

As a former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton finally has some credentials to present for the 2016 race, above and beyond those of a carpetbagger sliming her way into a senate seat on her husband’s name and his connections. But those credentials are entirely worthless.

Hillary Clinton has a slew of photographs as mementos from her time in office, including some taken by cell phone cameras in the streets of Benghazi, but no actual accomplishments. Her reset button with Russia failed from the start and as she heads for the exit, relations with the big bear are far worse than they were when she brought the infamous misspelled button as a peace offering.

China has slid over to the hardliners and is actively courting a conflict with Japan. North Korea has taken its cue from Beijing and is openly talking about using nuclear weapons against the United States. Most of America’s Middle Eastern allies that don’t have oil have fallen into the hands of Islamist regimes and it is now in the situation of being entirely dependent on political and tribal Islamists.

The news doesn’t get better anywhere else. The left has a hard grip on South America and the PRI is even back in power in Mexico. Europe “likes” us better now that one of theirs is in power, but that liking doesn’t actually translate into influence. Under Bush, America led Europe. Under Obama, America is led around into backing the UK and France’s wars while being shut out of their economic sessions. About the only accomplishment that Clinton can claim anywhere is in Burma, a place that is mainly of interest to professional human rights activists.

Hillary can’t really be blamed for Obama’s lost war in Afghanistan or the unraveling of the Libyan War into a regional Al Qaeda conflict, but neither can she be exempted from it as an innocent. She may not have set military policy, but nor does it appear that she had much to offer in the way of diplomacy or useful counsel on the international arena.

Like Molly Brown, Hillary Clinton has picked the perfect time to exit the sinking wreck. The Arab Spring is starting to take on tones so ugly that even the most sheltered liberal warding off the real world with unfurled copies of the New York Times and the Washington Post cannot deny that something appears to have gone wrong. As Egypt burns, Hillary passes the baton to John Kerry, who has never met a dictator that he didn’t fall in love with, and leaves him with the responsibility of dealing with the disaster.

On the Asian front, Japan and China have both shifted toward militaristic governments, and half of Asia is caught between them. At some point the series of minor incidents will get so big that even the densest Democrat will be forced to notice and ask why the smartest man ever and his nuanced boy wonder aren’t doing something about it. By then Hillary Clinton will be dictating her memoirs to a ghostwriter and chuckling while John Kerry tries to explain that the violence is surprisingly complicated.

When Afghanistan implodes and the Taliban march into Kabul, dragging the corpses of little girls behind them, she won’t be associated with the failure of the coalition deal with the Taliban. It’ll be John Kerry haltingly explaining how it all went wrong even though it was all done right.

Voters will have trouble remembering what, if anything, Hillary Clinton actually did during her time as Secretary of State. And that is exactly how she wants it. If Hillary has her way, she would rather that voters, especially the low information kind, remember images of her shaking hands. She doesn’t want them to remember her on television explaining why some part of the world had gone to hell.

That is why Hillary Clinton did her best to avoid testifying about Benghazi, not because she was afraid that it would expose her complicity, but that it would associate her with a disaster. And once again she resorted to becoming the victim of a right wing conspiracy of senators who had some basic questions about the murder of four Americans and the lies told by the administration about those murders.

Rather than answer those questions, Hillary did what she had always done, she obstructed, she blamed others and she made it about her, rather than about the dead. That shallow self-centered approach is what she shares in common with Obama. The dead have never slowed Hillary Clinton down. Her gaze has always been on the horizon of her ambitions. That horizon once lay on 2008. Now it shines on 2016.

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