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Jewish World Review /May 13, 1998 / 17 Iyar, 5758

Don Feder

Hillary knows what's best for everyone

ISN'T IT ENOUGH to have a president who can't keep his fly zipped? Must we suffer the further indignity of a first lady who can't keep her mouth shut -- who, absent the semblance of a mandate, is driven to policy-making?

To the question, when did Hillary Rodham Clinton become secretary of state, the answer is: on the same day that she became attorney general, secretary of education, etc. -- January 20, 1993, the day the groom of Frankenstein became our 42nd president.

Pre-Hillary, first ladies understood the part the nation wanted them to play -- a reassuring projection of domestic harmony (in the Clintons' case, a real challenge) combined with charitable involvement.

From Abigail Adams to Barbara Bush, other first ladies knew that no one had elected them to public office and that the expression of their views on controversial subjects should await their memoirs.

Not Hillary, who last week blundered into the mine field of Middle East politics, tripping the light fantastic on a claymore.

In a global-satellite interview, the first lady made a pitch for Palestinian statehood. "It would be in the long-term interests of peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine ... a functioning, modern state that is on the same footing as other states," Hillary chirped.

Indeed, to the same extent that it was in the interests of peace in Europe for a former corporal of the kaiser's army to take the helm of the German government in 1933.

The Yassir Arafat is second only to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as the major murderer of Jews in this century. He is a liar, a thug and a man consumed by his mission to annihilate the Jewish state.

On May 6, another Jew was stabbed to death in Jerusalem -- yet another crime Arafat has failed to condemn. In the same week, he allowed Abu Abbas (the murderer of American Leon Klinghoffer) to set up shop in Gaza. Last month, the Palastinian leader again told an interviewer that the Oslo Accords are merely a tactical maneuver in the "phased plan" for the piecemeal dismemberment of Israel.

Does Hillary Kissinger understand the implications of Palestinian "statehood"? Her "fuctioning, modern state" will be a terrorist enclave dedicated to the destruction of America's best friend in the Middle East, allied with Libya and Iraq, sitting on Israel's borders with tanks, shoulder-launched rockets and biological weapons.

Since her undergraduate, anti-war days, Hillary has been an ideologue with an airy disdain for reality.

In the '60s, she and Bill thought a North Vietnamese victory would be in the long-term interests of peace in Southeast Asia. A quarter of a century, 3 million dead Cambodians and 1 million Vietnamese boat people later, it's difficult to fathom the credulity of that young lady with the Coke-bottle thick glasses in a navy peacoat.

Is she ever haunted by the ghosts of political delusions past? Probably not. Hillary is a Robespierrian citizen of the Republic of Virtue, who drifts through life formulating theories about what's best for: peace, families, children, patients -- fill in the blank. Never mind the growing mound of heads at the base of the guillotine.

Consequences are never seriously considered. Take It Takes A Village, the manifesto of the Clintons' new child-care initiative. Day care, social parenting -- yeah. Declare a crisis, then solve it with a new federal program.

But don't think about the long-term implications of encouraging parents to default on their primary responsibility by assigning the upbringing of their children to strangers. Federal day care might do for middle-class families what welfare did for black families.

Hillary's policy-making debut was her 1993 health-care initiative, an attempt to nationalize an $800-billion industry. Dr. Rodham thought that would be in the long-term interests of the uninsured.

But what happens when government controls the health-care purse strings? Rationing? Patient triage? Again, never look at an issue too closely. Never ask those uncomfortable what-ifs.

Hillary is part of an arrogant, overeducated, experience-deficient, cliche-driven, American elite that considers itself ordained by destiny to order the fate of the little people, be they Southeast Asians, Israelis or American families.

Early in 1992, Hillary would caper before campaign audiences, chortling, "If you vote for him, you get me." Absent a miracle from special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, we'll have her for the next three years. Lucky us.