{"id":6229,"date":"2016-09-12T12:01:34","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T12:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/09\/12\/hillary-the-vacuous\/"},"modified":"2016-09-12T12:01:34","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T12:01:34","slug":"hillary-the-vacuous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/09\/12\/hillary-the-vacuous\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillary the Vacuous"},"content":{"rendered":"

 In an outstanding NRO piece<\/a>, William Voegeli has collected some choice specimens of Hillarious blather.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, really did say in an economic-policy speech this year, \u201cI believe in an America always moving toward the future.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This inanity is not a new problem. Consider the two most important speeches the president and the first lady gave in 1993. In his inaugural address, Bill Clinton said, \u201cEach generation of Americans must define what it means to be an American.\u201d Further, \u201cthe urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Less than three months later, in a speech ostensibly about health-care policy, Hillary Clinton told a bemused University of Texas audience that \u201cwe lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another.\u201d Her solution exceeded the responsibilities of a president\u2019s spouse, but then it also exceeded the capacities of any public official, private citizen, or national institution: \u201cLet us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The earnest, incoherent moralism that characterized Clintonism at the outset remains its salient feature. In her recent acceptance speech, Hillary Clinton offered \u201cthe words of our Methodist faith\u201d that she had learned as a girl: \u201cDo all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s quite impossible to disagree with this credo, which is both its appeal and its fatal flaw. The hard questions, the moral and practical ones that matter, are about how to do good, not whether. The pious tautology that it\u2019s good to do good but bad to do bad tells us nothing about choosing between goods when there are trade-offs or conflicts, weighing costs against benefits, comparing short-term attainments with long-term risks, or reckoning second-order effects. It\u2019s useless, in other words, for grappling with every problem that makes our moral and political lives so hard.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Contrast this empty verbiage with the detailed policy proposals in Trump's Phoenix immigration speech.<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem with Hillary, as with Obama, is that they are what I call  stealth ideologues<\/em>.  They push a hard-Left agenda but they are too dishonest to own up to it. So they spout empty phrases the better to bamboozle the booboisie.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Hillary's Presidential Bid as an Exercise in and Referendum on Cynicism<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Hillary and the Saga of the Self-Serving Server<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Hillary the Corrupt<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Obama the Liar Update<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>30 Years of Phony Accents by Hillary Clinton (1983 – 2015) <\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 In an outstanding NRO piece, William Voegeli has collected some choice specimens of Hillarious blather. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, really did say in an economic-policy speech this year, \u201cI believe in an America always moving toward the future.\u201d This inanity is not a new problem. Consider the two most important speeches the president … Continue reading “Hillary the Vacuous”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}