gracchusdixit

After more than two years, after squandering millions of taxpayer dollars, after running down every blind alley, after turning over every conceivable rock, the Special Committee of the House of Representatives formed to investigate the deaths of four American diplomats in Benghazi finally issued its report.  It discovered next to nothing that hadn’t already been found by seven prior investigations and, to quote from the report itself, “no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton.”  In short, this massive expenditure of time and money accomplished nothing—except to embarrass the committee’s Republican chairman and its Republican members.

Which shouldn’t surprise us.  From the beginning, it was altogether obvious that this so-called “investigation” was designed solely to undermine Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming the next President of the United States.  More than one Republican member of Congress admitted as much; indeed, one even boasted of it.

It didn’t work.

None of the conspiracy theories so zealously advanced by members of the committee—that Hillary Clinton knew an attack was coming and ignored it; that she (or President Obama) ordered military forces to “stand down;” that she (and President Obama) were engaged in a clandestine effort to smuggle arms into Libya illegally; that in the midst of the crisis she callously went home and went to sleep—none of these bizarre fantasies proved to be even remotely factual.

This, of course, was not the first time an anti-Clinton witch hunt led to nothing.  For thirty years, the subculture of Clinton Haters, fueled by big money from the radical right, have been hoping to bring them down by cooking up one phony “scandal” after another.  From the purported misdoings of “White Water” and the “Rose Law Firm,” to the trivial peccadilloes of “Travelgate,” to the ludicrous flap called “Hairgate,” to the infinitely more serious and tragic death of their friend and confidant Vince Foster, the Clintons have been accused of everything from accepting bribes to committing murder.  None of these accusations has ever produced even a speck of credible evidence.  No less a one-time Clinton Hater than Kenneth Starr—the “independent counsel” whose investigation, like that of the Benghazi committee, squandered millions of taxpayer dollars striving to turn up something, anything, that might send Bill Clinton to prison—had to fold his tent and give up.  Now, years later, Ken Starr has little but praise for William Jefferson Clinton.

Not that any of this is going for a moment to deter the dyed-in-the-wool Hillary Haters who inhabit the socio-pathetic world of right-wing talk radio, conspiracy-theory web sites, and Fox News Channel.  Against all evidence, or the lack of it, they will continue to rant, rave, and fantasize.  They hate Hillary Clinton with such fury and venom that nothing can change their minds.

Which raises the obvious question: Why do they hate her so much?  Why are they so furiously insistent that she is—or must be—guilty of some vague and never-proven criminality?  Why do they advance the narrative that she is uniquely “dishonest” and “untrustworthy?”

Some cite her indebtedness to Wall Street.  Okay.  Let us grant that she has had an overly cozy relationship with the financial industry.  A similar charge could be made against virtually every other prominent politician in the United States and against both political parties.  Where do the Hillary Haters think Jeb Bush got the money to run his ill-fated campaign for the Republican nomination?  Why are the donations that go to Hillary Clinton more nefarious than the millions of dollars Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s union-bashing governor, accepts to do the bidding of the Koch brothers?

Others say that she and her husband have used their years in public office to enrich themselves by, among other things, receiving lavish fees for speaking engagements.  A fair point, as long we acknowledge that other inhabitants of the White House have done the same and often more shamelessly.  George W. Bush, for one, hired himself out as a low-rent motivational speaker mere days after leaving office.  The only difference between “Dubya” and the Clintons is that they seem to be able to command bigger fees.  More specifically, why is Hillary pilloried for the speaking fees she received from Goldman Sachs when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is the number one beneficiary of Goldman Sachs political contributions?

Still others indict her for being a “liar,” although it is never quite clear what “lies” she is supposed to have told.  Whatever those “lies” may be or may not be, are they truly worse than the lies told by Ronald Reagan when he used money made from illegal arms sales to Iran to fund an equally illegal war in Nicaragua?  Are they truly worse than the lies told by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice when they fabricated a threat from “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist to justify the invasion of Iraq, a war crime that cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, not to mention spawning ISIS?

The truth of the matter is that truth has nothing whatever to do with the venomous rage of those who hate Hillary Clinton.  We must therefore look elsewhere for an explanation.

One place to start is with the Hillary Haters themselves.  Of course, neither they nor their motivations can be lumped into a single, all-embracing category.  There are blue-collar voters who dislike her, because she seems to be part of a remote and condescending elite.  There are progressive Democrats who are suspect her authenticity, because they believe she came late and reluctantly to their cause.  There are young women who view her with skepticism or indifference, because (rightly or wrongly) they think her brand of feminism, forged in the 1960s, has little relevance to their lives.  And of course, there are Republicans of all stripes who despise her, because they despise all Democrats, be they male, female, or something in between.

All that said, the red-hot, combustible center of the Hillary Hating universe is situated in one very distinct demographic group—white, older, poorly educated men.  Their reasons for hating Hillary Clinton are crystal-clear.

They hate her, not for what she has done or failed to do, but for what she symbolizes and the threat she poses: a smart, successful, accomplished woman who refuses to play the part assigned to her by centuries of stultifying tradition, who is neither docile nor domestic, who will not quietly submit or subordinate herself, who will not “keep her place” and above all else, will not bow to the proposition that she, as a woman, must defer to men who are her intellectual inferiors. The Hillary Haters hate her, because she threatens their own fragile and precarious self-esteem.  If she wins in November, psychiatrists throughout the land will rejoice, because the Hillary Haters will be in need of a great deal of therapy.