Hillary’s Victory Speech

Hillary comfortably won Super Tuesday. She gave an all-inclusive acceptance speech. You really can’t call it anything but that — she’s the presumptive nominee and her speech reflected that.

Well, her acceptance speech was almost all-inclusive. At one point she declared“We have to defend all our rights, workers rights and women’s rights, civil rights and voting rights, LGBT rights and rights for people with disabilities.” A great sound bite, meant to portray Ms. Clinton as a candidate of all the people, but notably lacking in at least one category: religious liberty.

Hillary make token acknowledgements of religion. She mentioned her own “Methodist upbringing” that taught her to work as hard as you can for as many as you can for as long as you can. No mention of God. She threw in a homily that referenced a house of worship when she told how she met with a group of Baptists in Flint, MI, regarding the water fiasco. There was no mention of supplication or invocation of Deity,though you can be pretty sure the Baptists had a prayer. And she closed her speech by pleading that we all work together to ensure that every American has the opportunity to live up to his or her own “God given potential.”

This is but one problem with the Left. They give lip service to religious freedom while simultaneously working to restrict those freedoms. Hillary calls for a swift approval of President Obama’s “strong, progressive” nominee to the Supreme Court. Does anyone doubt that “progressive” means one who will limit religious freedom as well as the Second Amendment? It’s like saying “some of my best friends are” blacks, Hispanics/gay, pick your minority that you want to placate. It didn’t play well 20 years ago, it shouldn’t play well now.

Believers use words like “faith,” “God,” “worship” as tenets to live by. Hillary uses them as a punch line and exclamation point.

Super Tuesday

Today is “Super Tuesday,” a day of multiple state primaries in the 2016 presidential election. There is a sense of inevitability in both parties. Hillary Clinton for the Democrats vs. Donald Trump for the republicans. It’s enough to make one wonder, has the electorate got its collective head in the region of its collective nether regions?

Donald Trump takes delight in offending anyone and everyone. His disapproval rating among Hispanics is over 80%. Yet he doesn’t seem to care and, according to election and caucus results, why should he? His message of vitriol is working. He’s tapped into the anger that has been building in the American people for several years now, the sense of outrage with politics as usual. On the outside he’s an outsider, not part of the problem and therefore part of the solution. His claims that he will restore America to its former glory and protect her borders against immigrants is beginning to sound much like the message spouted by two of the world’s most recent villains, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. This isn’t to say Trump is a fascist or to compare him to Hitler. It’s not Trump the person that is reminiscent of those days. It’s Trump the phenomenon. It’s the way he’s taken hold of the angst that permeates the nation, how he plays on the fears, real or imagined and how he appeals to bygone times. And it’s especially about how he came out of nowhere so quickly as a politician. The New York Times, admittedly not a bastion of conservatism, had an interesting op-ed piece on this topic yesterday.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is firmly mainstream politics. Where Trump frightens the GOP mainstream, the Democratic central party doesn’t want just a democrat in office; it wants Hillary. But Hillary’s problem is that her trustworthiness is low and dropping every week. Benghazi, classified emails, the Clinton Foundation, Wall Street ties even as she touts herself as the champion of the common man or woman — all keep dogging her despite her and the party’s efforts to put them in the past and say they don’t matter. In fact, it’s the very act of claiming they don’t matter that makes them matter. She’s out of touch with reality, just as she was when she claimed she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001. Some democrats are beginning to realize that Hillary might not withstand real scrutiny as a candidate and are calling for the party wake up and dump Hillary before it’s too late.

So what it comes down to is a matter of Low T on both sides. Low temperament for the office of president on the Donald’s part (do you really want him in control of the nuclear codes and his finger on the button?) and low trustworthiness on Hillary’s part. What a choice. Can there be a third option, ABCD? Anyone But Clinton or Donald?