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Madam Clinton – Really?

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I always like reading Nolte’s commentary, always nails it with a touch of humor. He certainly nailed this one.

During his Sunday night interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon finally said out loud what many of us already knew: that Hillary Clinton is “not very bright.”

by JOHN NOLTE  11 Sep 2017

This was actually my favorite part of the interview because nothing is healthier for our culture than the truth, most especially a truth no one dares to speak out loud.

For 25 years, Madam Clinton has been in the public eye, and for 25 years we have been told time and again and again and again two whoppers: 1) Hillary is brilliant. 2) When you get to know her, Hillary is a warm, funny, vibrant real person.

We expect Democrats and leftwing activists to tell us this. What else are they going to say? My problem is that it has been the national media, those who pose as objective truth-tellers, who have been spreading and cementing this fable. It is those who wear the uniform of journalists who keep telling us that this bumbling, fumbling, tone deaf, two-time failure is, when you really get to know her, a dazzling personality wrapped around a super-smart brain.

Granted, I do not know Hillary Clinton. I’ve never met her, nor have I even seen her in person. Nevertheless…

COME. ON.

We are talking about 25 years in the public eye here, twenty-five freakin’ years of gaffes, whiffed opportunities, serial-humiliations, absurdly transparent lies, needless scandals, and epic fails.

The Hillary Clinton who clown-shoe’d her way on to the national stage 25 years ago with, “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” (even though time has proved that is exactly who she is), is the exact same stunted-woman who, 25 years later, thought it was smart politics to attack half the country as a “basket of deplorables.”

Hillary Clinton’s public career has been one defined only by stepping on rakes.

From Whitewater to Benghazi.

From cattle futures to uranium.

From Travelgate to Emailgate.

From the “missing” Rose Law Firm billing records to 33,000 deleted emails.

From the speaking fees to the secret server.

From rape-denier to looting the White House.

From the Clinton Foundation to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

From “sniper fire” to “vast rightwing conspiracy” to “stayed at home and baked cookies” to “with a cloth” to Gandhi “ran a gas station” to “I ain’t no ways tired” to “dead broke” to, well, this.

This is not partisanship on my part. I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s brilliance. There is no question Chuck Schumer has plenty going on. Barack Obama is not the genius everyone says he is, but Barry’s still plenty smart. Even Nancy Pelosi has shown some true savvy.

Hillary Clinton is just dumb. Plain dumb. Not once during the quarter century that I have suffered under the oppression of her voice, her condescension, her awkward fumbles at being real, have I witnessed her porch lights come on. Not once have I said, There it is!

And all it would take is once.

I know what the rebuttal is: that dumb people don’t almost become president of these here United States. Let me respond to that in three ways…

1) No intellectually honest person will tell you Hillary Clinton would be where she is had she not married Bill. That is not a slam on women, plenty of whom have emerged from their husband’s shadow to distinguish themselves: Katharine Graham, Arianna Huffington, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abigail Adams, etc. Given a change of fate, we can see each one of these women succeeding in some way all on their own.

Hillary? No.

Senator Hillary Clinton? No way. New York has way too much political talent to waste on a stiff, awkward, brittle politician with zero people skills.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? All she did was log miles. Five years later no one, and I mean no one, not even her biggest supporters, can name a single accomplishment.

Democrat Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton?  Don’t make me laugh.

2) If you trust me on nothing else, trust me on this. Having now served time in the worlds of entertainment and media, the dirty little secret of both is that naked ambition, driving persistence; unbridled, unscrupulous, shameless scraping and grasping allows many, many, many, too many marginal people to fail upwards.

Hillary Clinton might be a few clowns short of a circus, but she is pantsuited ambition personified. There is nothing she will not do to get what she wants, no person she will not destroy, no humiliation she will not suffer, no indignity she will not dignify. And going back to ancient Rome, the quality of naked ambition has always made up for so many others, including smarts.

3) The media. Hillary is a left wing Democrat loathed by the media’s numero uno enemies: Republicans and everyday Americans. So of course the Sisterhood of the Andrea Mitchells and all those media metrosexuals who bow to feminist politics have propped her up over the years.

To be clear, I am in no way saying that Hillary is a stupe. There is no question that in the same way Rain Man can count toothpicks, Hillary can booklearn. But native intelligence? Common sense? Being able to grasp a room, a situation, a people, a country? Yeah, no. She’s an idiot.

Without Bill, without the media, I think we all know where Hillary Clinton would be right at this very moment… Forever-tenured Professor Rodham sitting in a cluttered, smelly,  Womyn’s Study office deep within the bowels of some Ivy League university; a bitter feminist still clinging to her one claim to fame, her time with the Watergate committee (before she was fired). In other words, she would be no one and nowhere , and even among like-minded colleagues, she’d be something of a joke…

Just like she is today.

 

Originally posted 2017-09-12 10:01:17.

Current Events

The Three “M’s”

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I know the author of this article. We never served together in the same unit, but during our careers we were within shouting distance of one another numerous times. Gary is the kind of Marine with whom I could saddle up to the bar at happy hour on Friday night at the O’ Club and shoot the bull. By that I mean we thought alike, had the same philosophies about Marine issues such as training, conduct, discipline, leadership, and the individual Marine himself. I fully concur with Gary in everything he says in this article. In fact, I would be shocked if any of my readers are not in agreement as well.

In the book I talk about some commands in which I served and one in which I commanded that were prime examples about which Gary is talking. An undisciplined command is like the old saying, an accident waiting for a time and place to happen. My fear is that with the current direction our military is headed accidents will be the daily headline news.

14 Feb 2022
Military.com | By Gary Anderson

 

 

The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel. He served as a special adviser to the deputy secretary of defense and as a civilian adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CBS’ 60 Minutes recently broadcast a feature on accidental training deaths in the military. The segment focused on technologies that could reduce fatal vehicle accidents. Training and discipline were barely mentioned.

I think they missed the point.

Most military accidents, in my experience, occur in units with lax discipline and inept leadership. I came to this conclusion early in my Marine Corps career.

As a young first lieutenant platoon commander, I joined a company stationed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The company was commanded by a former enlisted man who had risen through the ranks by doing well in combat in Vietnam. He believed in hard and realistic training but had a “boys will be boys” attitude regarding off-duty conduct.

The company lacked discipline and had a “cowboy” mentality in the field that troubled me. During a tank-infantry exercise, a Marine who was riding on the back of the lead tank fell off and was killed by a tank that was following behind. He should not have been on the vehicle to begin with.

The next day, the battalion commander called me into his office. His message was curt. “I just fired your company commander. You are the new commander. Square that mob away, or I’ll fire you too.”

I got the picture. I survived that command and went on to a few more over the course of three decades, but the lesson stayed with me. No Marine or sailor under my command ever died or was seriously injured in a training accident or while off duty. Nobody died in combat either, but I write that off to pure dumb luck. I am sure many people who served under me considered me to be a martinet, but all left under their own power, and not feet first.

I encouraged hard training, hand-to-hand combat and live-fire exercises, but all were conducted by the book. Over the years, I studied unit accident rates, and what I found confirmed my earliest observation: An undisciplined unit is an unsafe unit.

As I studied organizations that had poor safety records — and this included aviation units — there were four interrelated signs of underlying safety issues, but all are connected to leadership.

First is a unit’s incident rate. Serious incidents range from automobile accidents to off-duty bar fights.

Second is how commanders deal with such incidents, which one can find by looking at the Unit Punishment Book. If minor infractions are ignored or trivialized, an atmosphere of laxness sets in that tends to permeate the command.

A third indicator is maintenance. A commander can learn a lot about a unit by just walking around. A sloppy work area in a motor pool is a good indication that the little things in maintenance are not being attended to.

Finally, there is the attitude of the commander. “Cowboy” commanders who think that injuries or accidents in training are part of toughening the troops eventually are disasters waiting for an opportunity to happen.

The normal military response to a horrific accident is for higher headquarters to call for a “stand down” to examine safety procedures. This has always seemed to me to be a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. If senior commanders would begin looking at the real causes of problems by spending time talking to the troops and poking around in their workspaces before accidents happen, we might prevent some of these events such as the five recent mishaps aboard the USS Carl Vinson.

One of the primary problems leading to a lack of leadership is command climate surveys. Too many commanders are more concerned with being popular than running tight ships, as the surveys can be critical to their career advancement. Gen. George S. Patton and Adm. William “Bull” Halsey likely would never have survived today’s command climate evaluations.

This brings me back to the Vinson. If the fleet commander would visit the ship and look at the indicators noted in this article, I think that he would find that several, if not all, are present in the Carrier Air Group — if not among the ship’s total complement.

Fortunately, no one has been killed … yet. This does not mean that the commanders are inherently bad, but they probably want more to be liked than respected or feared.

In war, a commander’s job should be to accomplish the mission with the least possible casualties. In peace, it should be to accomplish the mission without killing anybody.

The Three M’s; Mission, Men, Myself