2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHillary's ties to the right-wing Christian group the "Fellowship" or "The Family"
Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward
legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious
freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth
control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.
What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe
it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by
ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential
spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne
Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family
association that stuck.
Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the underappreciated
depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define the Family's
theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worship
Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe
that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders
who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent
philosophy, it's all about power -- cultivating it, building it, and networking
it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we
can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/hillarys-nasty-pastorate_b_92361.html
Divernan
(15,480 posts)Hillary's Gift to Women
Posted: 05/12/2008 10:41 am EDT Updated: 05/25/2011 12:30 pm EDT
In Friday's New York Times, Susan Faludi rejoiced over Hillary
Clinton's destruction of the myth of female prissiness and innate moral
superiority, hailing Clinton's "no-holds-barred pugnacity" and her media
reputation as "nasty" and "ruthless." Future female presidential candidates will
owe a lot to the race of 2008, Faludi wrote, "when Hillary Clinton broke through
the glass floor and got down with the boys."
I share Faludi's glee -- up to a point. Surely no one will ever dare argue
that women lack the temperament for political combat. But by running a
racially-tinged campaign, lying about her foreign policy experience, and
repeatedly seeming to favor McCain over her Democratic opponent, Clinton didn't
just break through the "glass floor," she set a new low for floors in general,
and would, if she could have got within arm's reach, have rubbed the broken
glass into Obama's face.
A mere decade ago Francis Fukuyama fretted in Foreign Affairs that
the world was too dangerous for the West to be entrusted to graying female
leaders, whose aversion to violence was, as he established with numerous
examples from chimpanzee society, "rooted in biology." The counter-example of
Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the first of head of state to start a war for the
sole purpose of pumping up her approval ratings, led him to concede that
"biology is not destiny." But it was still a good reason to vote for a
prehistoric-style club-wielding male.
Not to worry though, Francis. Far from being the stereotypical
feminist-pacifist of your imagination, the woman to get closest to the Oval
Office has promised to "obliterate" the toddlers of Tehran -- along, of course,
with the bomb-builders and Hezbollah supporters. Earlier on, Clinton foreswore
even talking to presumptive bad guys, although women are supposed to be the talk
addicts of the species. Watch out -- was her distinctly unladylike message to
Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il, and the rest of them -- or I'll rip you a new one.
bbgrunt
(5,281 posts)SusanaMontana41
(3,233 posts)Cheese Sandwich
(9,086 posts)I honestly don't get what people see in Hillary Clinton.
The biggest thing I've heard is she is supposed to be more electabe. Once that image is gone it's not clear what does she have going for her.
salib
(2,116 posts)"What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe
it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by
ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential
spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne
Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family
association that stuck."
Because of society (marital naming) she changed her name because she got married, then because society opened up a tad and women could try some different paths to navigate through?
Oh, but don't forget, she changed her hair-style. A lot, ya know.
Wow Barbara. Just wow.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)She thinks this sub rosa link to the right-wing will endear her to the GOP womenfolk, who will vote for her because she is pretending to be a female nearly-tea party.
She is most likely fooling herself. Unless she intends to do a full Palin....
And it's very possible that the Family love bombs her. God knows, nobody else does.
cprise
(8,445 posts)LOL!
A Simple Game
(9,214 posts)Exactly, they will never vote for her. For someone supposedly so smart why can't she see that they don't like her and never will no matter what she does?
sibelian
(7,804 posts)She seems to think people are like lumps of Play-Doh...
MisterP
(23,730 posts)because--and this is important to how they think--there's not a Black Chicagoan running, so they'll win IL and the South, sewing it up against any challenger; the idea of a candidate running against the system is simply not ever on their radar, hence their direction of attack on him--"let's spread doubts among Blacks/gays/women"
everything's just an accounting issue to them
peacebird
(14,195 posts)The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer
Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes
on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing
leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family
reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that
exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole
bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:
During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government
and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's
postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with
Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American
leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred
thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous
dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During
the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S.
government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova,
convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to
both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.
--------------
Hillary is a member of The Family for the network of influence they have, they are a rightwing organization. Which is the tool of the other? She does consider Henry Kissinger a friend.
What's the saying... Know them by the company they keep?
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)Here is what I've gathered and here is what is printed in the book.
The author states Clinton is, indeed, religious. Big surprise, right?
The first time Sharlet uses The Reverend Rob Schenck, the founder of a ministry called Faith and Action in the Nations Capitala knockoff of the Family, the theological equivalent of fake Gucci - as a source:
The author then explicitly states (and there really is no room for interpretation here):
And there you have it, folks. The most damning passage linking Hillary to 'The Family.' The rest of the book's commentary on Clinton is, in my opinion, a judgmental assault on Hillary for being religious, ambitious and being willing to mix the two. If you want to knock her for that, be my guest, but that is a technique many politicians (yes, even liberal ones) have used to great success.
Don't believe me? You can find a PDF of it online (literally the fourth hit on google for the title and ".pdf" is the entire book). I posted to an extent about this idea here.
Basically it's a right wing smear against Clinton. Not to smear her because they would actually disagree with her being part of The Family, mind you, but to smear her in the eyes of the left and to make us shun her. In reality they would like for her to be part of The Family, but they know she's not, which is why on one hand they spread this meme while on the other they hate and despise her.
If you continue that chapter he does go on to say she's a "Cold Warrior," someone who evokes Cold War mythology, but even then that's not a big deal, she aged in that time, it makes sense. And later on he says she was distancing herself from her feminism yet we know that is objectively false with her latest speaking tours, where she has called for people to call her a feminist.
When I said "explicitly" I meant it. There's really no room for interpretation. Sharlet never said what people claim he said at all.
But who else is mentioned in the book as a 'friend' of The Family? Al Gore (page 259)
It's been pointed out her repeatedly her any 'association' she had with them ended in 2001, jefrn, you're just late to the party.
Did you know Doug Coe, the leader of the Family, is mentioned exactly ONE time in Living History? ONE time. On page 168 in a passage in which Hillary is discussing her faith. What MotherJones and the rest of these 'progressive' muckrakers aren't saying (and I guess they're hoping you won't check yourself) is the same passage Coe is mentioned in covers several other religious contacts including Holly Leachman and Linda Lader who invited both Hillary and Tipper Gore to a bipartisan women's only prayer group.
All in all, the religious faith passage covers only six paragraphs in Living History and this period was when Clinton was close to, and then did, lose her father.
Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Glenn and others were 'associated' with The Family yet there has been ZERO wailing and gnashing of teeth over that.
So this is where I'm going to do a little creative speculation. I hear the word bounced around a lot on DU: Misogyny. Here we have a book that progressives have misquoted and misinterpreted in an effort to prove Hillary is some kind of nefarious cult member. Yet the book plainly states she was not and that others like Ted Kennedy and Al Gore shared the same
association.
The book finds fault with Hillary for being religious, ambitious and being willing to mix the two yet doesn't raise an eyebrow at her male counterparts for doing the same. Why is that?? Think about it.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)If the AUTHOR of the book differs with the standard 'progressive' meme, that must make you smarter than the author of the very book you cite to make your non-point.
Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitudesaying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone elsereally undercuts his effectiveness.
- Rep. Barney Frank
"and his supporters, too."
-wyldwolf
Scuba
(53,475 posts)wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)If the AUTHOR of the book differs with the standard 'progressive' meme, that must make you smarter than the author of the very book you cite to make your non-point.
Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitudesaying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone elsereally undercuts his effectiveness.
- Rep. Barney Frank
"and his supporters, too."
-wyldwolf
" 'Progressive') Democrats understand religion and politics at around the same level as Republicans get climate science."
- GUTHRIE GRAVES-FITZSIMMONS
Scuba
(53,475 posts)wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)If the AUTHOR of the book differs with the standard 'progressive' meme, that must make you smarter than the author of the very book you cite to make your non-point.
Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitudesaying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone elsereally undercuts his effectiveness.
- Rep. Barney Frank
"and his supporters, too."
-wyldwolf
" 'Progressive') Democrats understand religion and politics at around the same level as Republicans get climate science."
- GUTHRIE GRAVES-FITZSIMMONS
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Maybe "debunk" doesn't mean what you think it does.
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)"but when on occasion they coincide, Hillary and the Family can work together."
I suppose you have examples of such occurrences?
Debunked.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it. Practically speaking, such work appeased evangelical elites without drawing the notice of liberals who thought Hillary stood for separation, but such tunnels genuinely undermine the foundations.
For instance, a law she backed to ensure religious freedom in the workplace that so distorts the meaning of the words that it makes even Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter uneasy about its encroachments on First Amendment freedoms. Its a sort of Bartleby option for those who prefer not to: pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions, nurses who refuse to treat gay or lesbian patients, police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics. And then there was the passage, during Bills presidency, of the International Religious Freedom Act, a move supported by Hillary. Like the workplace bill, it seemed sensible. Whos opposed to religious freedom? But in reality it shifted the monitoring of religion in other countries from the State Department to an independent, evangelical- dominated agency that drew much of its leadership from the Christian Legal Society, creating a platform for U.S. evangelicals to use religious freedom ratings as leverage for a sort of shadow foreign policy. Hillarys stance toward Iran, more hawkish than that of many Republicans, is just one example of a position long held by elite fundamentalists mainstreamed through the work of an ostensibly liberal ally.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)You've debunked nothing.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Debunk -- you keep using that word...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Response to Demeter (Reply #23)
wyldwolf This message was self-deleted by its author.
Response to Demeter (Reply #23)
wyldwolf This message was self-deleted by its author.
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)One of many by the way. I doubt he'd get much help at the state level.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)Divernan
(15,480 posts)Barney Frank joined one of the nation's largest bank's board of directors June 17, 2015.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/06/17/barney-frank-yes-that-barney-frank-joins-a-bank-board/Signature is a $29 billion bank that primarily works with privately-owned businesses. The 14-year old bank has been growing rapidly and performing well at a time when other banks have struggled. Last quarter it posted its 22nd consecutive quarter of record earnings.
The following month (July 22, 2015) he published an article denying Hillary's ties to Wall Street, touting her as a progressive, and attacking Sanders for daring to challenge HRC in the primary. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/why-progressives-shouldnt-support-bernie-120484#.VbhB0NLD-RR
As a new member of the Board of Signature Bank New York, Frank received a signing bonus, so to speak, of 1,913 shares of common stock, currently worth $262,406. But the best is yet to come! As per documents filed as required by law with the SEC, and incorporated by reference to SBNY's 2015 shareholders' meeting report, in 2014 every member of the bank's board received $319,900 in stock options and additional annual compensation for attending board meetings and sub-committee meetings ranging from $46,750 to $63,416.67.
https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/82669G/20150224/NPS_236192/#/1/
$350,000+ per anum sure beats a one-time payment of 30 pieces of silver. If you're going to sell out progressives, Go Big! Pretty sweet deal, Barney! But a lot of Frank's future financial security hinges on HRC winning the primary & the general, & him nailing that cabinet position, so we can expect him to keep attacking Bernie Sanders.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)In her memoir Living History, Hillary describes her first encounter with the Family. It was at a lunch organized on her behalf in February 1993 at the Cedars, an estate on the Potomac that serves as the headquarters for the National Prayer Breakfast and the prayer groups it has spawned around the world. Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.2 Or with the kind of politically useful friends one might not make otherwise. For the eight years she lived in the White House, Clinton met regularly with a gathering of political ladies who lunch: wives of powerful men from both parties, women who put aside political differences to seekfor themselves, for their husbands careersan even greater power. Among Clintons prayer partners were Susan Baker, the wife of Bush consigliere James and a board member of James Dobsons Focus on the Family; Joanne Kemp, the wife of conservative icon Jack, responsible for introducing the political theology of fundamentalist guru Francis Schaeffer to Washing- ton; Eileen Bakke, an activist for charter schools based on character and the wife of Dennis Bakke, then the CEO of AES, one of the worlds largest power companies; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat. The women sent her daily scripture verses to study, and Baker, the wife of one of the Republican Partys most cutthroat strategists, provided Hillary with spiritual counsel during political storms.
Hillarys Godtalk is more sincere than it sounds, grounded in the influence of a Methodist minister named Don Jones whom she met when he was a twenty-eight-year-old youth pastor in Park Ridge, Illinois. Jones continues to counsel Hillary to this day. He calls the theological worldview behind her politics a third way, a reaction against both old-fashioned separatist fundamentalism and the New Deals labor-based liberalism. He describes the theology he taught as in the tradition of Burkean conservatism, after the eighteenth- century reactionary philosophers belief that change should be slow and come without the sort of social leveling that offends class hierarchy. Elites rule because they rule; tradition is its own justification, a tautology of power neither left nor right but circular.
Under Joness mentorship, Clinton learned about theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Liberals may consider Niebuhr their own, but the Niebuhr whom Hillary Rodham studied with Jones and later at Wellesley College was a Cold Warrior, dis- missive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. Hed thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in, Jones says, explaining Niebuhr as he and Hillary came to see him. But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook [his] faith in liberal theology. The late Niebuhr replaced his devotion to messianic unionism with a darker view of humanity and replaced his emphasis on domestic social justice with a global realpolitik, easily hijacked by liberal hawks in rhetorical need of a justification for aggressive American power.
Tillich also enjoys a following among conservative Christian in- tellectuals for arguments on behalf of revising the once-radical Social Gospel to favor individual redemption, the heart of conservative evangelicalism. Hillary once said she regretted that her denomina- tion, the Methodists, had focused too much on Social Gospel concernsthat is, the rights of the poorto the exclusion of personal faith and growth. Abram, once a Methodist himself, had made the very same observation a half century before. The spirit, conservative Christians believe, matters more than the flesh, and the salvation of the former should be a higher priority than that of the latter. In worldly terms, religious freedom trumps political freedom, moral values matter more than food on the table, and if might doesnt make right, it sure makes right, or wrong, easier. Taken together, Niebuhr and Tillich as Hillary encountered them represent the most reactionary elements of her worldview: a militantly aggressive approach to foreign affairs and a domestic policy of narrow horizons. Under the spiritual tutelage of the Family, Hillary moved further rightward, drifting from traditional liberalism toward the kind of privatized social welfare the Family has favored ever since Abram reacted in horror to the New Deal.
The Reverend Rob Schencks favorite example? Clintons collaboration with Brownback on antisex trafficking legislation condemned by the very activists it should have helped. Brownback and Chuck Colson, one of the leading thinkers behind the law, were more interested in extracting pledges of purity than in helping the already fallen. That resulted in the defunding of longtime federal partners that, for instance, provide health care for prostitutes, and increased funding for faith-based groups that simply preach Christ and abstinence to foreign sex slaves. And its not just those who are trapped in involuntary sex work who are ill served by the switch; epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, notoriously resistant to sermonizing, ripple out into the general population. Its bad law for everyone. But Clinton was willing to lend her name, and her fundamentalist friends noticed. I welcome that, says Colson.
Hillary fights side-by-side with Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling beneath it. Practically speaking, such work appeased evangelical elites without drawing the notice of liberals who thought Hillary stood for separation, but such tunnels genuinely undermine the foundations.
For instance, a law she backed to ensure religious freedom in the workplace that so distorts the meaning of the words that it makes even Republicans such as Senator Arlen Specter uneasy about its encroachments on First Amendment freedoms. Its a sort of Bartleby option for those who prefer not to: pharmacists who refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions, nurses who refuse to treat gay or lesbian patients, police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics. And then there was the passage, during Bills presidency, of the International Religious Freedom Act, a move supported by Hillary. Like the workplace bill, it seemed sensible. Whos opposed to religious freedom? But in reality it shifted the monitoring of religion in other countries from the State Department to an independent, evangelical- dominated agency that drew much of its leadership from the Christian Legal Society, creating a platform for U.S. evangelicals to use religious freedom ratings as leverage for a sort of shadow foreign policy. Hillarys stance toward Iran, more hawkish than that of many Republicans, is just one example of a position long held by elite fundamentalists mainstreamed through the work of an ostensibly liberal ally.
Liberals, says Clintons prayer partner Grace Nelson, are welcome in the Family as long as they submit to the person of Jesus. Jesus, not ideology, is what gives us power. But the Jesus preached by the Family is ideology personified. For all of the Familys talk of Jesus as a person, he remains oddly abstract in the teachings they derive from him, a mix of free market economics, aggressive American internationalism, and leadership as a fetishized term for power, a good in itself regardless of its ends. By eschewing the politics of the momentparty loyalties and culture warsFamily cells cultivate an ethos of elite unity that allows long-term political trans- formation, whereby political rivals arent flipped but won over gradually through fellowship with former enemies, as in the case of former Representative Tony Hall.
Hall, one of the few Democrats appointed by Bush in his first term (he was made ambassador to the UN for hunger issues, a position he used to push the Monsanto corporations genetically modified crops onto African nations) was brought into the Family in the 1980s by Jerry Regier, an ultra-right Reagan administration official in the Department of Health and Human Services who went on to work with James Dobson. Upon his conversion, Hall abandoned his liberal social views and became a vocal opponent of abortion and, eventually, same-sex marriage. He also championed a bill establishing a National Day of Prayer with an event at the White House organized by Dobsons wife, Shirley. But he didnt switch parties, and the Family would never ask him to. Hall isnt a Republican; hes a Democrat who called on his fellow party members to follow President Bushs example by injecting more religion into their rhetoric. Hillary did just that in 2007, boasting of the prayer warriors who carried her through Bills infidelities, a bit of spiritual warfare jargon instantly recognizable to evangelicals who worried about her feminism.3
The Family wants to transcend left and right with a faith that consumes politics, replacing fundamental differences with the unity to be found in submission to religious authority. Conservatives sit pretty in prayer and wait for liberals looking for common ground to come to them in search of compromise. Hillary, Rob Schenck noted, became a regular visitor to the Familys C Street House in 2005. She needs that nucleus of energy that the Coe camp produces. That summer, she appeared as part of a threesome that shocked old school fundamentalists: Bill, Hillary, and Billy, live in New York for Grahams last crusade. Before tens of thousands, the patriarch of Christian conservatism said Bill ought to let his wife run the country. Bonhomie and cheap blessing, maybe, but it was the kind of endorsement that Bill never won, despite Grahams custom of speaking sweet nothings to power.
oasis
(49,389 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)It's very sharp....be wary around it!
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)Use it correctly next time.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Says the person who incorrectly used the word 'debunk' upthread.
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)You just added several posts to the thread without explaining how it wasn't debunked.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)Use it correctly next time.
After that nasty comment you have no right to complain about anyone else's behaviour.
wyldwolf
(43,867 posts)And another post that tries to divert attention.
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)Paka
(2,760 posts)is scary.
olddots
(10,237 posts)Tierra_y_Libertad
(50,414 posts)hifiguy
(33,688 posts)Scary, too.
It will doubtlessly be ignored by the Kool-Aid guzzlers.