The first time I saw Hillary Clinton in the flesh, she was running alone across the street toward me and my fellow Screen Actors Guild performers lined up waiting to march in the New York City Labor Day Parade. That was when she was first running for New York State Senator. She asked us if we knew where she was supposed to go to be part of the parade. I was struck with her small stature and her look of vulnerability. It was exciting then to see our former First Lady, and I had no negative feelings towards her.
My second encounter, although not a personal one, was when shortly after she assumed her Senate post, I wrote a polite letter suggesting that she might want to consider the high cost of dental care and its harmful impact on senior citizens like myself. I asked that she try and do something about making it more affordable so that people our age whose teeth were beginning to deteriorate would be able to retain them, necessary for good health and to avoid looking like toothless old crocks and crones. Certainly, we could ill afford such costly procedures as root canals, caps and dentures under the existing system.
I never received a response. I figured her staff was new and inefficient and let it go at that...but a question mark entered my head as to her ability to be a responsive Senator. And, then the war talk began. I was anguished to learn that Hillary not only did not protest the resolution giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq, but actually advocated it. In shock, I realized that our Senator -- a wife, a mother, an intelligent human being, was a hawk! That was when I began to seriously examine her character and her politics.
As she played politics with Bush's war, it became apparent that she had no core ethics to guide her but based her policy positions exclusively on her estimation of what would bring her the most votes. The last straw was when at the end of 2005 she cosponsored a bill to ban flag burning, seemingly out of nowhere. How pointless, particularly in view of the fact that there had been virtually no public flag burning to speak of for many years. It was so obviously a ploy to obtain neo-con votes and of absolutely no value at all in solving the really critical issues of war and peace facing us. One mustn't forget, either, that she voted for the Patriot Act--twice!
Thus is the sorry history of Hillary Clinton's performance regarding the most vital issue of our times.
Her recent mini-temper tantrum in Africa revealed in one unguarded minute all that I had long suspected about the real woman behind the facade. In her tirade, when she said. "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is not the secretary of state, I am. You ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I'm not going to channel my husband...," she unwittingly betrayed an unmistakably hostile competitiveness with her husband, a narcissistic focus on her own self-importance combined with a staggering insecurity about herself and her image and--perhaps most damaging--a total lack of diplomacy though she is the Chief Diplomat of the U.S. Intriguingly, she also manifested an unconscious death wish toward Bill Clinton. HELLO, you channel only dead people!
I'm sure our Secretary of State will see to it that she never again lets her carefully maintained facade crack. But the truth is out anyway. We know her now...finally.
