"Sexual repression is real, and is the cause of many who are willing to give their lives up, for what? 72 virgins."
Some might argue that we suffer from similar oppressions and even worse perversions.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
amazon.com
Also what does it say of a country whose leading candidate is a victim of abuse.
Hillary Typical of Abused Women – Not Fit to Lead
Joan Swirsky
Author: Joan Swirsky
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: January 29, 2007
Issues of character will take center stage as the presidential candidates line up for the ’08 election. Why? Because in the ruthless world of global politics where radical Islam has declared war against Western nations, America can afford nothing less. In this eye-opening piece beginning a series on the subject, FSM Contributing Editor and psychotherapist Joan Swirsky examines why one of the front-runners is not fit to lead.
Sometimes its hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times
And he'll have good times
Doing things that you don't understand…
“I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette, I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him,” said Hillary Clinton to Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” in 1992.
As her Uriah Heepish most ’umble lip-biting husband sat beside her, faking remorse because he was running for the presidency, the two successfully used the leftwing show to help them defuse a firestorm of criticism about the Arkansas governor’s 12-year affair with Gennifer Flowers.
While Clinton partisans applauded Hillary – deliberately sans the Rodham – for her putative forgivingness, Tammy Wynette, the country music icon who in 1968 wrote and recorded the enduring standard “Stand by Your Man,” was furious at Hillary’s patronizing tone, as were millions of her fans, along with a burgeoning feminist movement just beginning to teach American women that looking the other way on spousal abuse – physical, mental or verbal – would never stop it.
HILLARY ABUSE CONTINUES
Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and re-elected in 1996. Throughout his eight-year reign, his presidency was mired in infidelity scandals a la Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Monica Lewinsky … the list truly goes on and on and on.
But if you love him, you'll forgive him
Even though he's hard to understand
And if you love him
Oh be proud of him
'Cause after all he's just a man
None of her husband’s abuse was Hillary’s fault, to be sure. She did not give birth to Bill Clinton, or raise him, or inculcate him with the contemptuous – and contemptible – attitudes toward women he carried into his adult life. She did not make him oblivious to the pain, embarrassment, rage or depression his behavior caused. She simply tolerated his behavior, even going so far as to call his detractors a “right-wing conspiracy” – as if the charges that eventually disbarred and impeached him were pure figments of imagination.
WHY HILLARY TOLERATES ABUSE
In many profiles of abused women, experts describe a common cycle.
Phase 1: The victim feels embarrassed, hurt, demeaned, angry, and confronts her abuser. He becomes belligerent, in fact outraged at her nerve in challenging him. She invariably ends up placating his “feelings,” hoping that her capitulation will “make things better.” It does not take a rich imagination to picture this scenario played out dozens if not hundreds of times as the first lady of Arkansas confronted her husband about his serial affairs or questioned his “ethics.”
Phase 2: The abuser, pathological as he is, is not placated at all. In fact, he now has contempt not only for the women he so easily cons but also for his wife, whom he sees as yet another easy-to-manipulate patsy. He continues to engage in his favorite psycho-hobby, which is to level even more abuse, i.e., anger, blaming, arguing, threats, and intimidation. The fairly recent Chris Wallace-Bill Clinton interview on the Fox News channel is a good example of this type’s uncontrollable anger at anyone the abuser perceives as “soft” or “ripe” for his tried-and-true techniques. Can you imagine not interviewing but living with this type of intractable, narcissistic rage? Hillary can and did.
Phase 3: In the pathetic reconciliation charade, the abuser apologizes, proffers excuses, denies the abuse, again resorts to blaming the victim, or says it wasn't as bad as the victim claims. Again, Hillary bought it.
Phase 4: The victim inevitably gives in to her torturer and the incident is "forgotten." She denies (to herself and others) that any abuse has taken place. But denial is not a river in Egypt! It is a powerful human defense mechanism that allows the victim – in this case, Hillary – to relegate the incident (or, more accurately, the many incidents) to the very back burner of her consciousness.
Phase 5: The victim completely caves in to her abuser because she deeply believes that without him, she is nothing! She doesn’t have his status, his charisma, or his track record of success. She may display a veneer of confidence, intelligence and capability, but deep down inside she feels that her future is completely dependent on her abuser’s money, prestige, status, connections and power – and his ability to destroy her! She has seen what he has done to others [see body count here] and she knows what he has already done to her! While she is burning with impotent rage, she still figures that sticking with him is better than leaving him, and she trusts that somehow, some way, she will be rewarded down the road.
Few people doubt that in their over-30-year marriage, Bill and Hillary Clinton fit this sad pattern to a tee. That’s too bad – for her. But their marriage is not the subject of this article. Rather, it is whether Hillary – now intentionally Rodham – Clinton is fit to lead the free world as president of the United States, given her proclivity to bow and scrape to the likes of a petty tyrant like Bill Clinton.
OUT OF HER LEAGUE
After all, if Hillary couldn’t stand up to her narcissistic husband all these years, it is impossible to believe that she will ever be able to stand up to the same kind of man in the world arena – especially those who give not a fig for her leftwing political correctness and who see her as a puppet for bad guys – a mere plaything in the world of hardball politics.
Even to this day, she defends her husband’s indefensible behavior. In responding to Bill’s intemperate outburst at Chris Wallace for questioning him about why he didn’t “connect the dots” vis-à-vis Al Qaeda’s attacks on the U.S. during his eight years in office, she said, "I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team."
But we know that Bill Clinton saw that report and, even more damaging, we know that Hillary knows that he saw it!
ABUSED WOMEN ALWAYS RATIONALIZE
Here she is, in 2007, described by her fans as “the smartest woman in the world,” still lying through her teeth to stand by her man. Still covering up. Still trying to delude herself – and the entire country – that up is down, black is white, and the moon is made of green cheese.
As a U.S. senator, she knows better than most people, given her access to national security documents, that Bill Clinton treated America the way he treated her – with utter self-interest and with complete indifference.
She knows better than most people that whether it was the bombing of theWorld Trade Center in 1993 and the Khobar Towers in 1996, the TWA Flight 800 disaster in 1996, or the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000, her husband did NOTHING.
She also knows that he sent his National Security Adviser lackey Sandy Berger into the National Archives to steal records that deeply implicated him in these events, the better to present to the 9/11 Commission a sanitized – or worse, altered – version of his shameful record.
She knows that he abused America, but in vintage abused-woman style, she continues to defend him.
MORE TO BE PITIED THAN SCORNED
Unfortunately for me – and millions of other Americans – Hillary is one of two leftwing Democrat senators who represent my state of New York (the other one being the camera-hogging Charles Schumer). I have numerous objections to her political philosophy and her longtime embrace of anti-American leftwing causes and positions, but I also pity her.
Pity, however, doesn’t eclipse the fact that she is the worst possible candidate for the presidency of the United States. This is because she has proven, over the past three decades, that she is totally ineffectual in dealing with strong, abusive and tyrannical men – the likes of Korea’s Kim Jong-il, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syria’s Bashir Assad, et al.
It is in Hillary’s masochistic nature that once an abusive man apologizes or sweet-talks or threatens or charms or wields his real power, she will cave. When such a tyrant promises her even a smidgen, it is safe to say that she will stop representing the women and men and children of America and instead be in his thrall. Historically, she has been there, done that.
PARTISANS WEIGH IN
From the Left to the Right, partisans are spieling forth. One of President Clinton’s closest advisers, Dick Morris, says that Hillary is “vulnerable to a cultish adoration of the guys with all the answers.” He should know, since her saw her “in action” for eight long up-close-and-personal years.
Conservative columnist Ann Coulter calls her “the horny hick's wife” and wonders at Hillary’s “feigning surprise at hearing about Monica.”
And according to Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, “a funny thing happens to Hillary with women – particularly women who are educated, affluent and consider themselves strong role models. Many think this whole turn-the-other-cheek-and-be-humiliated-by-Bill in order to have the opportunity to run for the U.S. Senate was a sell-out.”
Democrats, of course, are now touting Hillary as the equivalent of her old nemesis, the authentically strong British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But most history-savvy people know that this is yet another attempt to portray the chronically abused “frontrunner” for the ’08 election as anything other than the heiress of her husband’s accomplishments and wealth, as are such other vapid leftist luminaries as Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Arianna Huffington.
But “the image thing” that Hillary has worked so hard to burnish may have run its course. According to Josh Gerstein of The New York Sun, Bill lovers are now abandoning Hillary at an alarming rate. He lists, among other defectors, “a political aide who shadowed Mr. Clinton for years and is advising Senator Dodd of Connecticut,” as well as a former secretary of commerce now backing Senator Obama, a former chief of staff to Vice President Gore now backing Senator Biden, a former Treasury Department official, a former White House congressional liaison, a former Treasury aide, a former White House health-policy aide, a former Clinton national security adviser, a former White House adviser on African policy, a former White House counsel, and former Clinton energy secretary and now Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson.
Even Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who engineered the recent midterm victories for Democrats and was formerly a key member of the Clinton White House staff, is refusing to commit to backing Hillary.
WHY THE DEFECTIONS?
Why are the same people who still bow and scrape before the ex-president abandoning the Hillary ship before it has even left the harbor?
For two reasons, I think, the first of them being the ongoing Bill problem.
Malignant narcissists like Bill and his ilk are unerring in their assessment of the people who fall prey to their charm, manipulation and exploitation. Their victims are the very definition of those who suffer fools gladly because the rewards, mainly access to power, are worth the pain, disappointment, volatile outbursts and fickleness that come with the package.
Those who fawn over and tolerate narcissists, like Hillary, hang on even after the last dog dies. Why? Because they are afraid of the narcissist’s wrath and fully appreciate his capacity for vindictiveness. And they also know – or at least believe – as the title of the Sandra Bernhard movie said, “Without you, I’m nothing.”
In addition, the quality that defines narcissists best is their insatiable hunger for attention – better known as “the spotlight.” They consider everyone competition. Even their children … even their wives. And that is why it will not be her brittle demeanor or her entrenched liberalism that brings Hillary down. It will be – ruffles and flourishes here – Bill.
In commenting on this very subject, film critic and radio talk-show host Michael Medved discounts Bill accompanying Hill on campaign trips because “the former President would upstage his wife at every rally and joint appearance, making her look bad and getting her furious.” For more than 30 years, he says, “the lady has been upstaged by the Big Lug.”
Medved suggests several strategies for the already beleaguered Hillary, including keeping Bill at home. Not bad advice, considering that Medved also reported that a former editor at Newsweek told him that “he has acquired incontrovertible evidence that Bill has conducted a passionate, and unquestionably consummated, recent affair with a glamorous, wealthy and prominent married woman in New York City… and there have also been bizarre but persistent rumors (accompanied by eyebrow-raising photos) of a 29-year-old blonde bombshell …”
Hillary undoubtedly knows this. Just as she knows that other bad men – like Jong-il, Ahmadinejad and Assad – don’t change their ways. So, what is she suggesting now? That we talk to them. Right. Just as she has talked with Bill for the past three decades.
Another suggestion by Medved was to Kill Bill! “…what if (God forbid!) something happened to Bill during Hillary’s campaign? Try to imagine her as the grieving widow, heartbroken yet dignified, managing to overcome her shattering loss for the sake of the nation she loves and the principles of the man she loved.”
Not so unimaginable at that, given that Hillary rode to senatorial success in New York largely on the sympathy vote of liberal love-the-victim New Yorkers.
THE BLUE DRESS
Perhaps the most scathing commentary about the presidential aspirant comes from Gerald Baker of the UK’s Timesonline, in his article “The vaulting ambition of America’s Lady Macbeth.”
In what Baker calls “Hillary Clinton’s shameless political reconstructive surgery,” he notes that she is “too polarizing a figure [and] the American people don’t want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.”
Baker then cites “the ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition” of becoming president, and confirmed that “there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion … a woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as ‘women who stay home and bake cookies.’”
This is what rage does to abused women. It makes them crazy and vindictive and downright desperate. It makes them do anything to get back at their abusers, in Hillary’s case to be not only president but also the first female president, thereby killing her husband with a “first” he could never achieve.
Baker attributes Hillary’s “transfiguration” to “the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress,” which she parlayed into her Senate race, “launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.”
Baker calls Hillary’s presidential candidacy “the Grand Deceit … an artificial construct” by a woman who embodies “cynicism, manipulation and calculation.”
UNFIT TO LEAD
When Hillary announced her bid for the presidency, she promised to “chat” with people across the country, ostensibly to learn what they think, care and worry about, and desire for themselves and America.
Isn’t that odd? Not only that this poll-driven politician doesn’t already know what people think, but also that in a time of grave dangers to our nation – a war in Iraq in which thousands of brave Americans are putting their lives on the line every day, a looming threat from Iran, thousands of illegal immigrants teeming across our borders, and dozens of domestic issues that demand attention – Hillary wants to chat.
Actually, it isn’t odd at all. Abused women can learn to break free of their oppressors, even have lives of their own. But it is common for them, and for all people, to deep down retain their essential natures. Hillary survived her years of abuse by employing that old liberal standby, “talking.” Not acting. Not leaving. Not confronting, at least effectively.
And so she pulls out the one reliable “weapon” from her limited repertoire – talking, or rather chatting – which allows her to put on her moderate mask, say nothing (of substance) and conceal the percolating anger that boils barely beneath the surface of her carefully constructed persona. She wants to make nice, the way she did with Bill. And she feels that without the approval of the American electorate, as without Bill’s approval, she is nothing.
And this is what she will do as commander in chief. She will take her limited repertoire of emotional responses and her craving for approval to the world stage, where she will chat with Ahmadinejad and chat with the Joint Chiefs. And when they ignore her, or give her their word and then cheat on her behind her back, or embarrass or hurt or demean or enrage or confront her, she will do what she is still doing with Bill – nothing.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Joan Swirsky, a clinical nurse specialist (R.N., M.S., CS, CE) and certified psychotherapist, is a New York based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.
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