The Wall

It's down to the last few days before Iowans vote in their odd caucuses. In the latest Iowa poll, Obama leads Clinton by seven points, 32-25. Clinton needs to pulls out the stops, put the campaigning into overdrive and move Iowans in her direction with the power of her message. Now is the time for her to take that extra step, to open herself up to every Iowan, to engage with them. This is a time for authenticity. Yes, Clinton is well aware of authenticity; she was there in the '60s when it was a buzzword.

So what does Hillary Clinton do? She stops taking questions from Iowan audiences.

Remarkable.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote,

...a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Jefferson's respect for reason reflects the Enlightenment's values of individualism and liberty.

Hillary Clinton's refusal to take questions implies the opposite. She is saying, because I have no respect for your opinions and don't believe you should be dealt with by reason, but only by force, I will not explain myself to you. Clinton's disrespect for reason reflects her values of statism and collectivism.

Her use of planted questions and her avoidance of the media are also expressions of her contempt for reason. As a philosopher-queen who thinks it is her duty to run everyone's life for his own good, she has no patience for answering questions. Such questions are only used by her enemies, the dark forces of the right, to cloud men's minds and stop her from controlling America for its own good.

Hillary Clinton, more than any other American politician in my lifetime, despises the media. She is even worse than Nixon's Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who famously called the media "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a line written by William Safire). But Agnew had some cause to distrust the media, as the liberal bias, though as bad then as it is now, was entirely unchecked then. The liberal media had such power then that they could inflate a third-rate political dirty trick such as Watergate into a Constitutional crisis.

Clinton, however, despises a media that is for the most part on her side. What she resents is when the MSM is forced by the internet, talk radio and whatever tattered shreds of integrity they have left to actually do their job and dare to ask hard questions of Clinton.

This is why I call her an American Stalinist.

Readers who are "of an age" will remember those Doonesbury cartoons during the Nixon years in which Trudeau drew the White House behind a vast stone wall. When Nixon resigned, the wall came down. Whether or not that image was deserved, a Clinton White House would certainly have wall upon wall between we the people and the philosopher-queen who controls every aspect our life.