I hope I’m in the right forum but I’m looking for an answer to something that riddles me.
Why do fundies hate and I mean hate, hate Hillary Clinton. I’ve known for years that they hate Bill, don’t quite understand it as well, but I’m really interested in why they hate Hillary.
Lately I’ve taken to Glen Beck. Don’t always agree with him but I like him. He had Jerry Falwell on yesterday, and Jerry was pretty clear. I paraphrase , “Anyone but Hillary for 2008”. I was not surprised. I was disappointed in Beck’s response and his comfy attitude towards Falwell, but later in the same program Beck advised us that he was not a party hack and that Hillary was a lot more desirable and hawkish on American security than lets say Dean and a lot of liberal democrats and that Americans shouldn’t decide on party lines. Beck just amazes me sometimes. But Beck is a Mormon, not a fundie.
I would have thought that a wife who forgives her husband’s indiscretions would be a wonderful example for fundie women. I understand that Bill is a Baptist as well, so there is some inference there for Hillary .
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s strictly because she’s a woman with a shot at the presidency. Fundamentalists think women have their place in society… right behind their husbands.
Here is her biography. I believe she was disliked by many conservatives as she was seen as a woman who wasn’t content with being a typical First Lady of Arkansas or the United States.
Throw in Bill Clinton having the audacity to let her lead a health care reform initiative (and a lot of people are now wishing she had been allowed to finish the job, I’m sure), and you’ve got a big steamin’ souffle of right-wing hatorade.
The fundamentalists and religious right seems to come at the question of leadership from the angle: that it is the personal character of the President that counts. The big part of measuring that is Christianity.
Actual policies are something the little people should not worry themselves about. Rather, can the President be trusted as a Christian to do the right thing.
In fact that appears to be a longstanding R / D divide. See Mr Moto’s recent departure from this board, where he made the very point that he was not going to convince the majority of is anti-Clinton views, because he considered leadership to be a different thing.
By contrast President Clinton was embraced by the D’s and most of the US for a while, whatever his adherence to trad’ christian morality. That’s anathema.
I can’t answer for the fundies - but she’s like a female Cheney, in my opinion. “Condescending”, “abrasive” and “angry” are the first adjectives I think of to describe either one of them. Add all the other problems the fundies have, and there you go.
To these people Hillary Clinton represents all that is going wrong with America. Abortion. Homosexuality. Evolution. Atheism. Blasphemy. Adultery. Prostitution. Pornography. Internationalism. Materialism. Socialized medicine. Child sex abuse. Crime. Destruction of the family. Removal of Christianity from the public sphere.
The fact that she carefully doesn’t publicly advocate the above positions just proves how duplicitous she is. That she doesn’t act like a wild-eyed socialist is proof that she’s a wild-eyed socialist.
Here is the text of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican Convention speech which demonstrates the hatred people had for Hillary Clinton even before the Lewinsky episode or the health care plan.
She is power-hungry and duplicitous. In other words, she is like virtually all male politicians (she is also like virtually all female politicians, only a bit more obvious). Her fervent supporters view her as a saint, and this dichotomy attracts attention.
She’s seen as an enabler of her much-hated (in some circles) husband. She’s far and away the front-runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination in '08.
I’m no fan of Hilary (she’d be a disaster for the Dems’ prospects if she got the nomination), but she’s nowhere near as abrasive or angry as Cheney (and I’d argue not nearly as condescending either, though that’s a bit more of a judgment call). The problem is that she’s a woman, and while these characteristics are acceptable in moderation in men, the same amount in women is often seen as worthy of contempt.