Sure, like a monster would, Hillary tries to scare people, lots of people - but that's where the similarity ends. Monsters don't merely conjure and promote fear - they actually try to kill you. They growl, and grab and claw and devour. In movies, monsters pick their victims off one by one, subjecting each to terror and then death. Hillary is nothing at all like that. First off, she doesn't work one at a time; she works state by state. And second, she doesn't want to actually injure people, just frighten them - and not to death. Hillary Clinton is the scary music in the movie that gives you the creeps - not the beast that sinks its teeth into people's necks. So calling her a monster isn't accurate and isn't fair.
Calling her a politician is right on. Her most recent commercial flashes a montage of scary photos certain to stimulate frightening memories. There's Bin Laden, of course - that doesn't even surprise me at this point - but Pearl Harbor? For fear's sake, Hillary, you're invoking the Yellow Peril? I understand going back to the fear well so often, but going back 67 years?
Because she won't let up, I want to pick through the rubble of one of Hillary's earlier conjured tragedies: the 3AM phone call. We can now look at it from the vantage point of having somehow survived these two months without a nuclear terrorist event.
Hillary plays herself in that Bush league ad-fear-tisement, trying to show what it would look like if she actually did have the experience she claims Obama doesn't have. The commercial promised that she'd be awake, dressed, lit, made-up, and on the phone keeping our little blonde children safe, whereas Obama... well, who knows, because he -never having been First Lady- just doesn't have the experience we need. Hillary's more truthful story would have sounded like this:
Since I can't actually tell you about a time, not one, in which I was awakened and managed some child-threatening world crisis, I've stayed up late doing this little dramatization to show you what it might look like. That's your kids there in bed, cute and asleep, yet so vulnerable; you see that, don't you? And that's me on the phone making a critical decision that allows your child to remain snug and safe from an un-named horrible event that won't happen if I'm president, but probably will happen if it's anybody else.
During her time in the White House, was Hillary ever actually involved in managing some international crisis in which she boldly took the phone, presumably from the President's hands, and gave orders that saved us all from anything? Of course not. Of course not.
I've worked for a President and I've got decades of experience managing high-stakes emergency situations that might escalate to violence. Presidents don't actually make moment-to-moment decisions while briefcase-bombs dangle over children's bedrooms. Hillary's campaign could just as accurately have inserted images of her face throughout an episode of 24, since she's promoting the same kind of fear nonsense, promoting the illusion of critical risk that presidents routinely handle while the rest of us sleep. And could someone remind me of an actual transnational terrorist event in which sleeping American kids were harmed in their beds? (Just so you're ready for the Hillary/Rove/Cheney reply to my rhetorical question, it goes like this: "We can't just stand by and wait for it happen!")
There's a funny twist in Hillary's little movie: Just before she answers the fake phone in the fake White House to fake-manage the fake international event, a mother pads into the kids' room to check on them. Weird thing: Mom is fully dressed, white T-shirt under her fully buttoned blouse, even her cuffs are buttoned. If it's 3AM, why is Mom awake and dressed? In case she has to rush the kids away from a terrorist mushroom cloud, obviously. She knows to stay up all night dressed and ready, because as Hillary reminds us, it's a "dangerous world."
If Hillary scares people as a candidate, why should we assume she'll add to our peace of mind as president? And putting aside her silly 3AM horror film, can a president actually influence the safety of our kids? Yes, by reducing the reasons and incentives for adversaries to hate us, by reducing the reasons and incentives for fringe groups to do harmful things. By increasing communication and enhancing relationships around the world. By being an American leader who does not resemble the posturing, blustering Bush.
Which brings us to Hillary's recent description of what she would do if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. Given that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons and is not at all likely to attack Israel, she could have rejected the question. But instead, in true Cheney style, she pledged "massive retaliation," noting that "we would be able to totally obliterate them."
So when the 3AM phone call about Iran's nuclear attack comes in, she'd like frightened people to be reassured by imagining her giving the Joint Chiefs a two-word order before rolling over and going back to sleep: "Obliterate Iran."
In her defense (not that so powerful and awesome and decisive a leader needs any defense from me), Hillary did acknowledge that obliteration of Iran was "a terrible thing to say." But she said it anyway, and in so doing promises to keep the Us and Them fear-fest going.
Fear, not mere distance, separates the people of the world from each other. We are divided by our belief that people pose danger to us just because they live in cultures other than ours. We don't know the Iraqis, we imagine they are so different from us, and it is thus easier to drop 70,000 bombs on their country in twelve days. My observation here is not political, but logical: Leaders of nations retain power by dividing people. Some may see an attack as liberation, others may see it as domination - whatever one's political view, it is clear that violence thrives on our separation, on our fear. Gandhi said, "The machineries of governments stand between and hide the hearts of one people from those of another."
The last way to improve the safety of Americans is through continuing the illusion of always-imminent danger, the inaccurate vision of the world as teeming with home-made nuclear devices about to be placed under our kids' mattresses - unless we kill whomever first. Hillary is not showing readiness to enhance our image in the world, to heal the wounds of recent years, or to reduce fear in our lives. She is intentionally co-opting the same message we've heard for eight years: That They are out to get us and our safety teeters precariously on our ability and willingness to threaten and kill them first.
No, she is not a monster - she's Hillary Clinton, and she approved that message.