Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Foreign Endorsements? The LAST Thing We Need

And she bragged about it!

Yes, on Sunday evening, your soon-to-be-indicted former Secretary of State and mine, she of the unsecured server full of state secrets, Hillary Clinton,  actually said the following to the USA

"But one argument that I am uniquely qualified to bring, because of my service as Secretary of State is what this presidency would mean to our country and our standing in the world. I am already receiving messages from leaders, and I am having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump, and I am like, no, this is up to Americans, thank you very much."  Underlines are mine.
  
Two things, or maybe ten, ought to be troubling about the message above.  The first is that no one asked how many "foreign leaders" asked her to endorse her candidacy (Two?  Eleven?), nor where they were from and which ones.  Assad?  Putin? Trudeau?  No one asked, but it was CNN, after all, where journalism is flexibly defined and "investigative journalism" only goes one way.  You know that, because no one asked her once if any of those "foreign leaders" had ever paid her or Bill to give a speech, or donated to the "Clinton Foundation."

The other is that, incredibly, Hillary Clinton was actually proud to have said it.  Yes, kiddies, in her isolated, ivory-tower mentality, she assumed that having certain leaders endorse her would be thought of as a good thing.

Now, let us listen for a second to the contrary argument, the one that is why Donald Trump, whatever you may think of him, is packing crowds of 25,000 or more into auditoriums and stadiums across the country.

Donald Trump: "America is being beaten by China, Japan, Mexico and the rest of the world.  They are laughing at us and taking advantage of us."

Hillary Clinton: "I am having [the leaders of the countries who are taking advantage of us] ask if they can endorse me to stop [the candidate who is exposing the fact that they are indeed taking advantage of us]."

I don't know how high Hillary's ivory tower actually is, or how insulated she has made herself from reality.  The press rope-off she started her campaign with is probably a good indicator of where she is innately.  I don't know if she really can internalize how widespread the "America first" feeling is, the one that led to the Trump candidacy's success to date.  I am pretty sure no one is telling her that from a devil's advocate perspective.

But isn't it telling, folks, that despite the "huge" movement of pro-American, USA-first attitudes driving Republican primary numbers up while Democrat primary numbers have sagged dramatically,  she would actually think that foreign endorsement would be a good thing.

I can hear the thinking in her head and the nodding agreement among the sycophants and toadies in her inner circle.  They think that she has, first, a lot more actual experience than she actually has (a few years as Secretary of State and a term in the Senate; the rest is all whom she was "married" to).  So to make that experience look important, she waves around her impact on foreign rulers -- and we still don't know how many, how few or from which countries.

The problem is that the other couple hundred countries on earth are the ones who want to take down the USA.  They range from North Korea declaring it can bomb one of our cities off the map, to our trade partners manipulating their currency and imposing barriers to our selling or manufacturing there, to Putin doing what Putin does, to the oil sheiks letting us defend them without accommodation on energy.

Americans aren't that stupid.  We know we're being taken advantage of.  It's just that Hillary and her toadies either don't understand it or, like Obama, are happy to have it happen.  They want the USA to be just another country.

We, on the other hand, get it -- whether Trump supporter or not.  Hillary invoking support from abroad as being a "good thing" is precisely in opposition to the vein that Trump's candidacy tapped into -- tired of the great nation the USA was, before Obama, being deemed as incorrect; tired of condemnation of American exceptionalism; tired of being walked all over.

Hillary just aligned herself, knowingly or not, with the America Last crowd.

And she probably wonders why people aren't coming out in droves to vote for her.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu.

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