TheAdvocate's Full Review: Barbara Olson - Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story o...
I’ve enjoyed Barbara Olson’s political commentary on beltway shows like Hardball and Hannity & Colmes, (Olson is a DC lawyer & insider), but I must admit that I was slow to pick up her book, Hell to Pay because, quite frankly, Hillary Clinton as subject matter has never really interested me. I’m glad I finally found the time to read it, though, because this book has opened my eyes to the fact that my dislike for Hillary isn’t based on her brash personality or lust for power, but on her simple lack of political pragmatism.
Hillary’s foremost mentor was Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals, and Olson prefaces each chapter with an appropriate excerpt. Probably the most insightful Alinsky quote is found at the beginning of the very first chapter: “Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”
Still, this isn’t a book about Hillary’s corruption so much as her vindictiveness. The title, Hell to Pay, refers to the fact that her political enemies pay high prices. Sadly, these political “enemies” can include cooks, valets and lowly White House travel office employees. Generally, though, her enemies are far more predictable: any and all Republicans. I needn’t qualify them as conservative, because Olson describes a bias held by Hillary against even liberal Republicans, exposing our first lady’s rather partisan, absolutist worldview.
Hillary began life, ironically, as a staunch Republican whose views changed in response to the Viet Nam war and a Marxist youth pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. In fact, Olson’s book is refreshingly iconoclastic in naming the Methodist church and its goal of “human perfectibility” as the spiritual nascence for Hillary’s cut-throat political approach. “Her Methodism would emerge in her spirited attacks on corporations, on tobacco, on pharmaceutical and insurance companies. It became the root of her worldview, one in which it is never enough to attack an opponent’s actions. One must also expose his motives, and use that perspective to destroy both the action and its proponents. For the natural companion of a doctrine of perfectibility is a conviction in the existence of evil – and immorality – of one’s enemies.”
Given her history of Methodist spiritualism, is it shocking to find Hillary drifting toward mysticism in her later years? If you consider the D.C. setting and the quirks of its resident power-hungry, probably not. Dr. Jean Houston, who hypnotized the first lady to facilitate that infamous conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt, imparted to Hillary that her ultimate role would be to the finish the job of Joan of Arc, as a “stand-in for all of womankind at the moment of equality,” Olson writes. That Hillary believes Houston is a statement not just about Hillary, but of her generation, as well. Financial sites geared to Baby Boomer females are riddled with astrological forecasts, middle-aged feminist enclaves are ripe with zodiac self-help advice and goddess-worship. Hillary may still listen to Methodists in public with Bill, but her private spiritual life reflects a loyal membership in the Baby Boomer/60s radical collective.
I mentioned, above, that this book clarified to me that my differences with Hillary weren’t based on her personality. If you look at politics as a serious game of strategy, I can’t presume to make any strident arguments against a tough, vindictive demeanor, or the sometimes nasty behavior that accompanies it. In addition, many of Hillary’s social goals, as laid out in Olson’s book, meld with mine. I passionately believe, for example, that poverty is a problem that can and should be fixed. I’d like to see healthcare accessible to all Americans. But where I see market solutions, Hillary sees only governmental controls.
Hillary’s brand of progressive socialism has its place in human events, but it’s a small-scale system that fails in the macrocosm. This reality eludes Mrs. Clinton, as she continues to struggle for social justice on an ever broader scale. Her one-size-fits-all, blanket solutions (nationalized health care, communal child-rearing, etc.) call to mind the words of William Blake:
“He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars/
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite flatterer.../
You smile with pomp & rigor: you talk of benevolence & virtue!/
I act with benevolence & virtue & get murderd time after time:/
You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing, that you/
May take the aggregate; & you call the aggregate Moral Law:/
And you call that Swelld & bloated Form; a Minute Particular.”
Considering her alternatives, Hillary describes a diverse, dynamic market economy – a conglomerate broken down into Kauffman’s “patches” (see my epinion on Adam Smith for an explanation) - as knowing the “price of everything, but the value of nothing.” She utterly fails to realize the incredible social power that can be harnessed from capitalistic enterprise. It’s too bad, too, because if Mrs. Clinton had an ounce of pragmatism – if she realized how much more efficiently and quickly she could achieve her more noble goals by encouraging dynamic freedoms rather than governmental controls – she might just earn her much-desired legacy as Joan of Arc II.
Speaking as one of those hated Republicans, I wouldn’t begrudge her that legacy one bit. Instead, as the years progress, I fear we’ll be reading more and more books like Olson’s, detailing the political escapades of a woman who is ruthless, passionate, and ultimately unproductive in her desire to help mankind.
From her husband s first campaign in Arkansas to his impeachment proceedings, Hillary Clinton has always stood by her man. But beneath the seemingly c...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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