From The Goldberg File
Excerpt: "My point is that Hillary is predictable. I could have written that in 2000 when she went on her last “listening tour” in a Scooby van, or at almost any other moment of the last 30 years.
There are no “new” Hillarys. There are, on occasion, new strategies to dupe people into thinking there is a new Hillary. But these Potemkin do-overs are usually as pale, thin, and see-through as the skin of an agoraphobic Goth computer programmer. The simple fact is: This is her. There is no other her. There is no other Bill, either, by the way. They are Clintons and they are eternal, Aesopian, unchanging. The tackiness and the lying, the parsing and corner-cutting, the entitlement and fakery: This is what they do. Scandals swirl around the Clintons like the cloud of dirt surrounding Pigpen not because the Clintons are the victims of their enemies, but because the Clintons are their own worst enemies. They do this to themselves. They create these problems. They are the authors of their own torment because this is who they are.
Don’t Get Fooled Again
This is an important political point because the Clinton strategists and spinners are invested in a theory that electing a woman will be transformative. It will be like that scene in Excalibur where King Arthur, rejuvenated by the Holy Grail, revives the brown and wasted crops and forests simply by riding by. We already had one experiment in this kind of magical thinking. It worked for Barack Obama. I don’t think it will work for Hillary. Obama was new and fresh. Hillary . . . isn’t.
I think this offers insight into why Hillary is betting it all on reviving the Obama coalition. I’ve written many times that I don’t think she can succeed. But maybe I’m wrong (“It’s happened before” -- The Couch). And, more to the point, I’ve come to realize it’s the only strategy open to her. She can’t run to win moderates, independents, and swing voters (save for a subset of women who will vote strictly on identity-politics lines), because these voters can’t be Jedi-mind-tricked into ignoring all of her baggage. Only the hyper-partisan, the extremely uninformed, the incurably gullible, and, of course, the heavily bribed can get really excited about Hillary Clinton.
How to Listen to a Clinton, Cont’d
I’m thinking, the phrase “eats like a bird” is really bogus. I mean, they eat nuts and bugs all day long; that’s a lot of protein, particularly given their size. But that’s not really important right now (Sorry, I’m writing this in my backyard watching my birdfeeder -- which my cats consider to be a poorly-constructed and frustrating cat feeder -- as I write this).
Where was I? Oh, right, I’m thinking “How to Listen to a Clinton” should be an occasional feature of this “news”letter (see the last entry here). Why? Well, first of all it’s kind of in my wheelhouse. Second, I’m always looking for copy on Friday mornings and, well, if there’s a more renewable resource than Clinton lies, I’m hard pressed to think what it might be.
As I said last week, the Clintons’ favorite way to lie is by telling the truth selectively. There are a lot of benefits to this oh-so-lawyerly technique. It sounds more plausible. It frustrates journalists. It comes in handy when your lies are exposed or you’re asked about them under oath. The downside is that when you use the truth to tell lies, you embed implied confessions in the silences. “There’s no smoking gun” isn’t a denial, it’s a passive-aggressive way of saying, “You’ll never catch me!”
The entire article in the National Review is well worth the read. 
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