Stand by Your Man: Take 2

On Sunday, I had the car radio on and heard a report of Hillary Clinton’s upcoming appearance on 60 Minutes, including a direct quote. Are you as amazed and incredulous as I was at her words? I came home and wrote the following.

Imagine this scenario. On your way to bed, you notice that that there is light shining from under the door to your sixteen year-old son’s room. You knock, planning to say an extra good night, but there is no answer. After the second knock, you figure that he fell asleep with the light on and quietly open the door to turn it off. No one is there. A quick check of the bathroom, kitchen and rest of the house shows that your child is missing.

Some detective work has you soon driving over to a house a few blocks away, where you interrupt a party in progress, complete with lots of beer and even some hard liquor. The teens are less than delighted to see you and eventually you and your son get home where you tell him that you will talk about this in the morning.

What are you going to say? How does this sound?

“Son, you are very lucky that I got there before you were drunk. If you ever do something like this again, and manage to get drunk before I catch you, you are really going to be in trouble.”

If that speech sounds reasonable to you, may I suggest you sign up for some parenting classes?

For years we have been told how intelligent Hillary Clinton is. We have also been told that she is a strong, independent minded woman. This did make it awkward when she chose to “stand by her man” as he publicly humiliated her. However, like all wives whose husbands betray their marriage vows, she had a heart-wrenching decision to make, even if hers played out on the national stage.

But, marriage is personal and that aspect of the affair was truly her business.

This time, standing by her man, Barack Obama, contains no personal element, only a political one. After last week’s botched attempt to detonate a bomb in Times Square was linked by the administration to Pakistan, she taped an interview with 60 Minutes. Can she feel anything but a fool saying such asinine words as, “We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”

Exactly how many Americans need to die for an attack by the Pakistani Taliban to be considered successful? Two, twenty, two hundred, two thousand? What would have happened if in 1941 the Japanese had miscalculated the distance to Pearl Harbor and been forced to turn back a few miles offshore? Would Americans have tolerated a message from the Administration warning that if Japan did manage to bomb our fleet they’d be in big trouble?

When Hillary Clinton accepted the post of Secretary of State she, like the vice-president and other high officials, took an oath of office, swearing allegiance not to the president but to the Constitution. The oath includes the following words:

 “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…”

Last time I looked, one of the jobs of the government as stated in the Constitution includes providing for the common defense.

During the campaign in which Mrs. Clinton attempted to get the Democratic Party nomination for president, she made national security an issue. She urged Americans to see her as the leader they would trust in a crisis. Well, she may not be president, but she is in a leadership position. In this case, standing by her man betrays both her oath of office and diminishes the argument that women bring real-life common sense to government. Need I mention that, most importantly, it puts American lives in danger?