The Clintons in Plato’s Cave

2,211 words

Hillary Clinton reacts to the pyrotechnics display as Bill Clinton joins her on stage after her acceptance speech for the nomination to be President at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28, 2016. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call) (CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

SOCRATES: Such prisoners would think that the truth is nothing but the shadows cast by the artifacts.
GLAUCON: Most certainly.
Plato, The Republic

“Singin’ joy to the world
All the boys and girls now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me.”
Three Dog Night, “Joy to the World”

As of this writing the Democrat presidential nominating convention has just wound its way to an ominous conclusion. The collective mass delirium on display led me think of Jim Jones and the alternative reality in which his flock of the faithful was so insanely immersed such that it culminated in what Jones in his inimitable malevolence would call “revolutionary suicide.” It would be remembered as a collective act of “drinking the Kool-Aid” and as such “drinking the Kool-Aid” became the popular meme for an embrace of self-destructive fanaticism.

The Kool-Aid was flowing in the Chicago convention hall packed with Democrats. Speaking of Democrats, it seems fitting thus to note that prior to his departure with his congregation to Jonestown, Guyana, the Reverend Jones had been singled out and honored by many prominent Democrats – Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, to name a few – as a great humanitarian and champion for the oppressed.(1)

I must add that the grotesque, vulgar and malignant piece of work into which the Democrat party has transmogrified itself – its 2024 nominating convention a “cluster B personality disorder freak show” as James Howard Kunstler put it – is largely the legacy of the children-of-the-1960s, antinomian Clintons. Like a dog lifting its leg on a fire hydrant, Arkansas Elvis and the little missus decamped from Little Rock thirty-two years ago and, having brought their hustle to the DC Big Show, proceeded to indelibly “mark” the party of Andrew Jackson with the odor of their personal pathologies. The reign of the man from Hope and Our Lady of Chappaqua with their dueling banjos of ambition and avarice was an ongoing cavalcade of scandal and corruption. They would go on to normalize the sorts of tawdry, sleazy ways of “doing business” that used to be shunned by respectable, responsible people.

One might say that the political legacy of the Clintons can be succinctly captured with a series of alliterative triptychs: collusion, corruption, coercion; monkey business, money-laundering, mendacity; pedophilia, perjury, pay-to-play. Where ever they went, whatever they touched, whatever they did, the outcome was almost always something immoral, illegal or low class.

The Clintons, with all of their ill-gotten loot, are to the DNC what mafia dons are to the mafia, and so both Bill and Hillary had themselves featured in this year’s convention with prime time speaking roles to help pull off what might best be described as the most outrageous, audacious feat of political alchemy ever attempted by our political establishment. These are cynical, profoundly dishonest people with utter contempt for the citizens they claim to serve and long devoid of any sense of shame.

What were these “alchemists” up to?

“Alchemists attempted to purify, mature, and perfect certain materials. Common aims were, chrysopoeia the transmutation of “base metals” (e.g., lead) into “noble metals” (particularly gold).”

The national convention was all about turning a certain piece of “lead” into something that glitters.

The sudden turn of events precipitated by Biden’s collapse in his June debate with Donald Trump had caught the party capos off guard. They were suddenly looking at marching onto the campaign trail with their candidate resembling Jon Fetterman. But the Orange Man is no Doctor Oz as was shown by the June debate. Trump was going to stomp all over Biden’s Commander and Chief sombrero.

The late July coup unfolded. Joe Biden got worked over by Nancy Pelosi just like what the CPSU bosses did to Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.

“On 14 October 1964, the Presidium and the Central Committee voted to accept Khrushchev’s ‘voluntary’ request to retire for reasons of ‘advanced age and ill health.’ Brezhnev was elected First Secretary, while Alexei Kosygin succeeded Khrushchev as premier.”

Change the names and the date and sleepy Joe’s defenestration resembles the same insider engineered “offer he couldn’t refuse” experienced by Khrushchev – although Harris as Brezhnev takes quite a stretch of imagination. As the details came out in Vox: “Nancy (sounding like a mob boss out of ‘The Godfather’) made clear (to Joe) that they could do this the easy way or the hard way” – a very “democratic” course of correction, no?

With Biden out and Kamala Harris suddenly manoeuvred into the Presidential candidacy, the party consiglieres were staring at a very “base” piece of “base metal” and wondering what the transmutation possibilities for it into a “noble metal” might be. Not good. “Noble” was the last word anyone playing a word-association game would associate with the name of the current Vice President.

“Kamala Harris?”  … Ahh… “Willie Brown’s concubine.”

Up until the July coup the Harris was a national joke, rightly perceived as an affirmative action stooge foisted on Biden by yet another of our corrupt octogenarian congressmen, Jim Clyburn. Throughout his term Biden has remained in his own la-la land of aged dementia. Harris, however, much younger and presumably compos mentis, amazingly, appeared to be even less coherent and cognitively functional than Dr. Jill’s husband. Detested by everyone who had to work with her, Harris quickly became an embarrassment with the outbursts of hideous, idiotic cackling in serious settings that came to define her bimbo, sorority girl “style” of self-presentation.

How then “to purify, mature, and perfect” this unfortunate piece of lead and turn it into gold, so as to “save our democracy”?

The Democrat convention unfolded as a Plato’s Cave where the DNC operatives would cast flickering shadows of things real on a wall that prisoners (convention participants, viewers and hopefully, voters) in the cave/convention hall would mistakenly take as reality. Reality, in fact, was aggressively banished in the convention hall.

Now, no one does flickering-shadows as reality better than Bill and Hillary. As Bill famously unveiled the semantics of Clinton epistemology before a grand jury years ago during his “Lewinski” deposition: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

Hollywood’s long time warm embrace of the Clintons, viewing them as partners in their quest of “progressive” politics, when you think about it, makes perfect sense. The fame and seductive allure of this magic kingdom, the epicenter of the entertainment, pretend world, comes from its vast power to transform solid substance into fleeting appearance, to substitute imagery for reality. It’s been a perfect transactional partnership. The Clintons got the love, adoration and financial support of the beautiful people. The Clooneys and Streisands, who are accomplished pretenders by profession, got to pretend that they are serious people, deserving to be admired for the moral and political wisdom they freely share with the little people.

Hillary opened her Tuesday evening DNC speech with this whopper: President Biden had “brought dignity, decency and competency back to White House…” (No blow jobs from White House interns; no renting out the Lincoln bedroom to Chinese money-men or bombing Sudanese aspirin factories to divert attention from the scandal du jour … presumably). All of that, apparently, while Joe was firing on only one or two of his original six lightly powered cylinders for the last four years, not to mention falling down a lot, communing with dead foreign leaders, and on occasion resorting to “glossolalia” better known as “speaking in tongues,” uttering words or speech-like sound fellow believers imagine are from a language unknown to the speaker or the listeners.

Now, “competency, dignity and competency,” you might think, would be more than enough to give Joe Robinette another shot at four more years to keep “our democracy” humming away and maybe put Donald Trump in an orange jump suit. But no, there has been this deficit of what all Americans are really longing for – “joy.”

With Biden safely out of the way and sufficiently eulogized by Hillary, on Wednesday evening, Bill got down to the serious business of introducing the formerly cackling moron VP as the newly alchemized “President of Joy.”

“Deep into day three of the Democratic National Convention former President Bill Clinton dubbed Kamala Harris the ‘president of joy,’ focusing on the happiness and hopefulness that her campaign with Tim Walz has brought about for Democrats from the jump.”

So, abracadabra-like, Harris suddenly becomes the “President of Joy,” though no one had been calling her the “Vice President of Joy.” “Hopefulness” was a nod to Obama and a signal that Democrat campaign rhetoric would remain consistently vacuous.

The convention’s purpose was to transmute the real Kamala Harris, an empty-headed diversity shill, unable to string coherent sentences together into … well…Here is alchemist Bill casting flickering shadows: “Kamala Harris is the only candidate in this race who has the vision, the experience, the temperament, the will, and yes — the sheer joy — to get something done.”

“To get something done”? Really? Was Biden’s senility contagious or had collective amnesia fallen over Bill and the convention goers? Has VP Harris done anything in the last four years that’s not marked by embarrassment or incompetence? Can the Democrats get away with pretending that they have not been the party in power since 2021 and that Trump is the fons et origo of everything that is currently going wrong? Clinton also failed to mention that Kamala Harris was “the only candidate in this race” that not a single American in “our democracy” had cast a vote for.

Hillary’s Tuesday evening speech turned into a torture-filled eighteen-minute slog, most of it about her big bundle of wonderful, feminist self – “You know, the story of my life and the history of our country is that progress is possible.” Does anyone, anywhere possess a more twisted, bloated ego than the one that animates this pudgy, little, soulless harridan? Yes, we do “know” the story of her “life.” It would best be published under the title, Crime and (no) Punishment. Perhaps the biggest take away from her speech was that it confirmed why, in spite of being with gifted with every material advantage over the despised, demonized Trump in 2016, the carpet bagging New York senator could not seal the deal. As Obama sarcastically quipped in his primary battle with her in 2008: “You’re likeable enough Hillary.” He got it right: she’s preternaturally unlikable, an obnoxious, self-worshiping shrew whose life’s story, without the attachment to her ignoble consort, would have amounted to nothing of interest to anyone.

Bill on Wednesday evening at seventy-eight was looking long in the tooth. He sounded horse and looked frail. Still, he went on for almost a half an hour. Unlike Hillary, who comes off like a cruel, power-hungry Nurse Rachet in her speeches, Bill still has that relaxed, slickster confident charm with a cock-sureness that whoever is listening to him will buy whatever elixir he’s peddling.

“I want you to be happy,” Clinton intoned. “One of the reasons that president-to-be Harris is doing so well is we’re all so happy.” Life for the prisoners in the cave goes better when you can keep them happy with the shadows.

The speech was 30 minutes of Clintonesque fibbing, cozening and waging his long, bony finger, but perhaps the most remarkable line was near the end: “if you vote for this (Harris-Walz) team, if you can get them elected and let them bring in this breath of fresh air, you will be proud of it for the rest of your life.” It doesn’t take great hermeneutical prowess to grasp that Clinton, unintentionally or not, was fessing up to the backroom Biden coup and the grim reality that Biden’s four-year reign has been experienced by most Americans as a disaster. Who has been in charge the last four years? Who has fouled the air that needs to be refreshed? Ask the villagers in East Palestine, Ohio what they think about Biden-appointed transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and the quality of the air they are breathing. Bill Clinton’s entire speech can perhaps be succinctly summarized as an act of adding insult to injury.

Does Joe Biden have enough working brain cells left to understand that his convention tributes were the perfunctory grease on the skids that slide him out of the race, and that Bill was admitting that Biden as POTUS was a big mistake? Is he wondering in his short time remaining if he has any options to take revenge on the camarilla that ousted him? Maybe “happy” is not right word for the Democrats going into the future. Maybe the feeling of the “politics of joy” will evaporate like a dusting of snow on a spring lawn when the Harris-Walz team takes over and America feels even more than it does now like the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev or Romania when the Ceaușescus were running the show.

Notes

(1) See Daniel J. Flynn, Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco: Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.