There’s a popular website on the Internet called “Awful Plastic Surgery.” It chronicles the most hideous makeover attempts by celebrities: Nose jobs gone bad. Eye lifts gone awry. Liposuction disasters galore. The poster child of Awful Plastic Surgery is a socialite named Jocelyn Wildenstein - a once decent-looking woman whose insecurities fed a three-decade-long addiction that turned her into a world-famous, face-scrambled freak.
Watch Her Perform
Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Jocelyn Wildenstein of politics. It’s almost unbearable to watch her perform in public. Whether pandering to racial racketeer Al Sharpton’s congregation in Harlem with her stilted black-cent or wrapping herself in body armor to bolster her national defense credentials, Hillary’s façade is crumbling. Even Dr. 90210 can’t help this mess.
Bay Buchanan’s new book, "The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton" (published by Regnery, a HUMAN EVENTS sister company), provides a painstaking and painful account of the New York senator’s botched political transformation. At bottom, Hillary is a “dedicated, unapologetic liberal,” Buchanan writes. She’s passably smart, but barely competent. Recounting how her (in)famous Wellesley College commencement speech came to fruition, Buchanan notes that Hillary had to pester classmates for ideas. She didn’t have enough of her own - and instead stayed up all night “to piece a speech together from a communally written text.” It shows.
Buchanan helpfully reprints the entire text, which includes such profundities as: “Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we’re feeling.”
Myth of Hillary’s Competence and Brilliance
No wonder Clinton took such pains in her autobiography to avoid credit for the speech that came out of her lips in 1969. Blecchh. Buchanan pierces the myth of Clinton’s competence and supposed political brilliance by spotlighting the various gurus and charlatans she has relied over the past three decades to fill her head and provide her with ideological gobbledygook - from leftist radicals Saul Alinsky and Michael Lerner to healthcare schemer Ira Magaziner to psychic nut ball Jean Houston.
Contrary to the popular perception of Hillary as a megalomaniac run amok, Buchanan sees the opposite. “She has allowed a chronic lack of confidence and self-esteem to define her,” Buchanan concludes from Hillary’s life-long advice addiction. “One simply cannot study Hillary without understanding how debilitating this trait has been to her development as a human being.”
Indeed, it explains much. It explains Hillary’s inability to listen to her own ridiculous voice mimicking a Southern accent in a Selma pulpit earlier this year - and to tell herself to stop. It explains her notorious grimacing and woodenness two weeks after the September 11 attacks during President Bush’s rousing address to Congress. It explains her desperate straddling on the Iraq War and her attempt to wear the “Princess Peacenik” crown while paying lip service to vigorous prosecution of the War on Terror.
Piercing Clinton’s Veil of Moderation
And it explains her extreme flip-flopping on the marquee issue of immigration—toying one moment with Buchananesque(!) toughness on border security and then retreating to an unrepentant pro-illegal immigration posture. Buchanan dubs her “Queen of the Amnesties.” Once again piercing Hillary’s veil of moderation, Buchanan takes aim at “the mental meanderings of a politically shrewd opportunist who knows the dangers of straying too far from home.”
Buchanan takes us on a grisly tour of the many faces of Hillary - the woman, the wife, the lawyer, the feminist, the politician, the senator, and the aspiring presidential candidate. But perhaps no one has helped unmask Hillary more than her own former friends and allies. In her chapter on Hillary’s political candidacy, Buchanan analyzes her “Obama nightmare.” She quotes onetime Hill pal David Geffen, who infuriated the Clintons by throwing a Hollywood fund-raiser for Barack Obama. Hillary exploded. “Livid” was Geffen’s term. He excoriated the Clintons’ comfort level with lying. “Everyone in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
All the political Botox injections in the world can’t hide Hillary’s character and ideological flaws. But like Jocelyn Wildenstein, Hillary Clinton sees nothing but perfection when she looks in the mirror. Bay Buchanan’s devastasting dossier gives us the true picture of a corrupted politician without a face or a core.
