Remember The Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? If you’re a millennial, probably not. Some may think it’s Helena Bonham Carter, the actress who played The Red Queen in Tim Burton’s 2010 film version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. But, as one anonymous online reviewer of that glitzy production observed, “Poor Lewis Carroll would be rolling in his grave.”
So too would the original illustrator of Carroll’s classic narrative, John Tenniel. As only we cultured codgers remember, Tenniel was a political cartoonist for Punch magazine. In 19th century England, Punch was the quintessential purveyor of political satire. But then, as HBO codger Bill Maher has noted, we don’t teach our kids about irony and satire in our schools anymore. So how could millennials possibly “get” what Tenniel was doing in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”?
In the original Carroll-Tenniel version, the Red Queen was also known as The Queen of Hearts, and a more heartless cartoon character even Charlie Hebdo couldn’t create, which brings us to the heart of this op-ed: Hillary Clinton’s comments on Oct. 22, 2015, and on June 13. You see, Ms. Clinton is very much like Carroll’s The Queen of Hearts. In other words, she is the darling of progressives, and– like all their other political idols– she always says the opposite of what she means. That, in a nutshell, is the definition of irony.
Those who witnessed the House Benghazi hearing broadcast on C-SPAN will understand what irony means, especially if they paid close attention during Congressman Jim Jordan’s exchange with Clinton about her email to her daughter on the night of Sept. 11, 2012. In case you missed it, a brief excerpt may help:
“So here’s what troubles me. Your experts knew the truth. Your spokesperson knew the truth. Greg Hicks knew the truth. But what troubles me more is I think you knew the truth. I want to show you a few things here. You’re looking at an e-mail you sent to your family. Here’s what you said at 11:00 that night, approximately one hour after you told the American people it was a video, you say to your family, ‘Two officers were killed today in Benghazi by an Al Qaida-like group.’ You tell … you tell the American people one thing, you tell your family an entirely different story.”
Ms.Clinton’s response to this is pure Red Queen gobbledygook:
“Well, Congressman, there was a lot of conflicting information that we were trying to make sense of. The situation was very fluid. It was fast-moving. There was also a claim of responsibility by Ansar al-Sharia. And when I talked to the Egyptian prime minister, I said that this was a claim of responsibility by Ansar al-Sharia, by a group that was affiliated — or at least wanted to be affiliated — with al-Qaida.”
Ms. Clinton wasn’t the only caricature in this Benghazi cartoon. Just a few days after the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice spun her tall tale about a YouTube video on three different network news reports. Then, as late as Sept. 25, the commander-in-chief himself declared before the United Nations General Assembly, “There is no video that justifies an attack on an embassy,…The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
The president’s way of putting it is characteristically “nuanced.” Maybe what he was really trying to say is our future must belong to Islam. Well, anyway, that sure seems like the legacy he was and still is planning for us. It’s not politically correct to connect the dots to POTUS like this, but the preliminary findings of a November 2015 House Homeland Security Committee Review include some pretty troubling statements about the president’s plan to bring in thousands of poorly screened Syrian refugees.
FBI Director James Comey said, for instance, “There is risk associated with bringing anybody in from the outside, but especially from a conflict zone like [Syria]…My concern there is that there are certain gaps I don’t want to talk about publicly in the data available to us.”
DHS Secretary Jeb Johnson also warned, “It is true that we are not going to know a whole lot about the Syrians that come forth in this process.”
As for Red Queen Hillary, she keeps all her plans on a super-duper private server. All we got in her recent primary victory speech on June 7 was more jabberwockian gobbledygook. The only revealing thing she had to say then was, of course, autobiographical—when she recalled her mother’s words of wisdom: “She told me to never back down from a bully, which it turns out was pretty good advice.”
The Red Queen’s gullible Brooklyn audience roared their approval. Obviously, however, they got only one part of Hillary’s unintentional double entendre—her snide allusion to the bullying of Donald Trump. The part they didn’t get was her much more truthful, if unconscious, allusion to that much bigger bully in her life—Bill Clinton.
But we can forgive and forget poor Hillary’s Freudian slips. It’s her continuing habit of deliberate prevarication and obfuscation that we saw and heard most recently in her long-winded and self-righteous reaction to an Islamic terrorist’s slaughter of 49 of Clinton’s fellow American citizens in Orlando on June 12. It is that which convicts her of outright perjury and treason. Clearly, if enough American voters are dumb enough to vote for Hillary in November, it’s Obama’s legacy we all will get.
Why? Because Hillary seeks only to disarm Americans at home and abroad. Like the Red Queen, her solution is summed up in one classic literary line, “Off with their heads!”
By the way, “Off with their heads” is not just the name of a punk rock band. It’s the capital punishment the Queen of Hearts repeatedly meted out to her humble and stupid subjects in Chapter 8 of the original “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
Read it, my dears, and weep.
Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.
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“the Red Queen was also known as The Queen of Hearts”
Incorrect: The Red Queen in fantasy novel Through the Looking-Glass, is commonly mistaken for the Queen of Hearts in the story’s predecessor, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The two share the characteristics of being strict queens associated with the color red. However, their personalities are very different. Indeed, Carroll, in his lifetime, made the distinction between the two Queens by saying:
“I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion – a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm – she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses!”
Good to know you’re paying attention. So what’s your other point?
I don’t think there really needs to be another point. But, since you are asking, I’ll just borrow one from you: “Poor Lewis Carroll would be rolling in his grave.”.
Beyond fantasy to hard reality—
The golden girl: Er, the Goldman girl—-
From the above article:
“As for Red Queen Hillary, she keeps all her plans on a super-duper private server. All we got in her recent primary victory speech on June 7 was more jabberwockian gobbledygook.”
Well stated, Mr. Robinson.
More Hillary news(hard truths) the community can use….
From the post below:
“Hillary is both driven to acquire money and emits a faint whiff of guilt about having hoarded so much of it.”
“Mrs. Clinton’s stubborn refusal to disclose the text of her three speeches to Goldman Sachs executives in the fall of 2013 fits this self-destructive pattern of greed and guilt. She was fortunate that Bernie Sanders proved too feeble a candidate to seize the advantage. Each time Sanders was asked to show a nexus between the $675,000 she was paid and any political favors to the financial vultures at Goldman, the senator froze, proving strangely incapable of driving a stake into the heart of her campaign.”
“Goldman executives weren’t huddling around Mrs. Clinton to listen to her recite the obscurantist mish-mash ghost-dictated by her top economic advisor Alan Blinder. Blinder, a well-known Wall Street commodity himself, is a former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve and co-founder of Promontory Interfinancial Network, a regulatory arbitrage outfit whose top executives pocket $30 million a year. Blinder has publicly assured his Wall Street pals that Clinton will not under any circumstances break up the big banks and neither will she seek to reanimate Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era regulatory measure whose exsanguination by her husband enabled the financial looting by firms like Goldman and Lehman Brothers that spurred the global economic collapse of 2008.”
“The lavish fee from Goldman for Hillary’s speeches was both a gratuity for past loyalty and a down payment on future services. Goldman’s ties to the Clintons date back at least to 1985, when Goldman executives began pumping money into the newly formed Democratic Leadership Council, a kind of proto-SuperPac for the advancement of neoliberalism.”
Read the rest of this piece if you want to more about the Goldman girl.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/22/good-as-goldman-hillary-and-wall-street/
Thanks, Will. This is very interesting. Don’t expect the DNC to bring it up, however!
DNC ( those emails) and DLC and those backroom deals—
—The golden girl and Senator Tim Kaine
From the above article:
“As for Red Queen Hillary, she keeps all her plans on a super-duper private server. All we got in her recent primary victory speech on June 7 was more jabberwockian gobbledygook.”
Well stated, Mr. Robinson.
More Hillary and Tim news (hard truths) the community can use….
From the post below:
“Hillary-Kaine: Back to the Center”-
“Hillary Clinton’s VP choice, Tim Kaine, is well liked Inside the Beltway, partly because he bends to pressure from Wall Street, DLC-style “centrists” and the austerity-pushing mainstream media”
“By choosing Kaine, Hillary Clinton is signaling that her new-found support for financial regulation and opposition to TPP is a tactical ploy to win the nomination before she “pivots” back to the disastrous policies that she, Kaine and Vilsack have helped inflict on the world for decades. She is playing into Trump’s claims that she is not honest.”
“What’s especially noteworthy is that Hillary Clinton and Kaine are carrying Wall Street’s water while the Republican Party is repudiating some of these policies. The Republican Party platform (cynically) calls for reinstating Glass-Steagall, and Donald Trump has called for the defeat of TPP in an equally cynical fashion.”
“The self-described liberals – the Clintons, Kaine and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman – are against reinstating Glass-Steagall. This shows Hillary Clinton hasn’t learned a thing from the failed pro-Wall Street policies that have wrecked the economy. It’s bad politics and it’s bad policy.”
“Actually, that’s not quite right. These policies have worked brilliantly for the top 1/1000th of one percent. The policies have been disastrous for nearly everyone else in the U.S. – and around the world. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren says, “the financial system is rigged.”
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/24/hillary-kaine-back-center
Debbie and the DNC—
—The golden girl and lesser evilism–
From the above article:
“As for Red Queen Hillary, she keeps all her plans on a super-duper private server. All we got in her recent primary victory speech on June 7 was more jabberwockian gobbledygook.”
Well stated, Mr. Robinson.
More Hillary and Tim news (hard truths) the community can use….
From the post(s) below:
“So what’s happened since late May? It’s been ugly. Thanks to some skilled Russian hackers and WikiLeaks’ release of more than 20,000 pages of Democratic National Committee emails, we now have smoking gun proof that the Democratic Party apparatus schemed throughout the primary campaign to favor Hillary Clinton over Sanders. The e-mail exchanges show DNC officials thinking and writing disparagingly about Sanders and his supporters. They show the national organization, run by the hopelessly egocentric and right-wing Democratic Congressperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) working to rig the game in favor of the former Secretary of State. Several of the messages reveal DNC staffers collaborating with journalists at key corporate media outlets to influence press and television coverage of the primary race in Hillary’s direction. A May 5th exchange even involved the DNC’s finance chief asking a staffer to gather information on Sanders’ religious beliefs, suggesting that Bernie’s potential atheism could hurt him with southern voters.”
“Also in the leak: spreadsheets and emails showing that top Democratic Party officials were discussing which big money corporate donors and fundraisers to give top federal commission jobs and positions to in a Clinton45 administration. All of the donors discussed and listed gave to Hillary Clinton; none gave to Sanders. This is a reminder that top DDDs have bottomless disdain for democracy, not just progressive Democrats.”
“None of this is especially surprising but it’s still a bit of a shock to see the cold-blooded email evidence of DNC bias and corruption.”
These two posts give the reader real deep insights into the democratic machine masquerading as the party of the people.
Can you handle the truth?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/26/85116/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/feel-the-hate/
Interesting to consider, and would make too many of us uncomfortable:
https://www.facebook.com/jane.hara.50/posts/464053077109800
Oops…I meant to post this reply, but both are interesting to think about.
http://ambrosiaforheads.com/2016/08/marc-lamont-hill-trump-revolution/
He’s right, but I still can’t stomach the thought of having to see Trump’s face in the news constantly for the next four years. I don’t have enough bile in my stomach to go through that and still digest my food. Also, the thought of giving Trump’s “advisors” the power to select three or more Supreme Court justices is beyond depressing. If we do not break the system immediately after his election we will be condemned to many years of despair. Can’t we just wait until the next Republican nominee before we give in to this urge. At least we will have a Supreme Court that will have our backs.
From the above post:
“Clearly, if enough American voters are dumb enough to vote for Hillary in November, it’s Obama’s legacy we all will get.”
Well stated, Mr. Robinson.
More Hillary news and information the community the can use…
“This essay documents Hillary Clinton’s history and record as an agent of Wall Street, war, racial violence and inequity, economic inequality and conservative ideology. While Clinton’s early Republican Party history is well documented, it is unfair to judge her (or anyone) based on the political views of her youth. Like Clinton, all people are heavily influenced by the beliefs and values of their parents, local communities, religion, cultural and social identities as well as U.S. dominant culture. Based on various factors, many people with conservative backgrounds are able to develop progressive and humanistic world views over time based on personal struggle, a capacity for empathy, and an expanded sense of consciousness through education and life experience. None of this appears to have happened for Hillary Clinton. Instead, she stayed the course as she and her husband pioneered the “New Democrat” (Centrist Democrats) movement and steered the party toward a neoliberal “Third Way” (dogmatic free-market and moderately liberal social policies). Yet, when it comes to the Clintons, many of their social policy positions are also distinctly conservative.”
”
While incomplete, this post seeks to assist liberals and progressives in recognizing that when they support Hillary Clinton, they are in fact supporting violently oppressive and undemocratic interests.”
” All of the information that follows is part of the public record.”
Key question:
Will the citizenry and the voters do their homework before Election Day?
http://prn.fm/timothy-scott-hillary-clintons-record-an-american-horror-story/
We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. —Woody Allen
“Democracy is this cool system where you yell at people online for 6 months and then people in Ohio and Florida pick the president.”
-anonymous
Those who’ve been following the news from both sides recently may have noticed that Trump just turned the “black lives matter” mantra on its ear by pointing out that the lives of those who live in African American communities matter most to him but not to the Democrat politicians who have been exploiting them since the days of Andrew Jackson.. Consider what happened to Michelle Rhee in the last couple of years. Her Students First program supporting programs like Opportunity Scholarships got swallowed up by Obama’s buddy, the Mayor of Sacramento.
The debate of the century?
More Hillary and The Donald news the community can use …(If you an stomach it)
A re-cap (or should that be OH Crap) from last night’s farce…
“Idiot Winds at Hofstra: Notes on the Not-So-Great Debate”
+” If this was a fight, Trump probably would have won on points as the aggressor. But he probably missed twice as many punches as he landed. Hillary was flat-footed most of the night, defending failed policies, offering little more than policy papers. As a debate it probably ends as a draw. Hillary didn’t knock Trump down and Trump didn’t prove that his hands were larger than Hillary’s. What is clear: the country loses when either of these two becomes president.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/27/idiot-winds-at-hofstra/
0nly if it is Hillary
#trumponabump