Is Hillary Growing Senile?

Hillary Clinton is not yet seventy.  She is younger than Ronald Reagan was when he became president.  For that matter, she is younger than me.  So why am I suggesting that she is growing senile?  Can this really be the case?

Actually, my tongue is in my cheek.  Hillary’s problems have less to do with her age than the sort of person she is.  My allusion is therefore to her performance when answering questions for the FBI and other interrogators.  Time and again, she insisted that she could not remember vital information.

Thus, she claimed, under oath, not to recall the details of how she set up her personal server.  She could not, for instance, remember talking to the man who put it together.  Neither could she recollect having been instructed on her responsibilities to guard State Department secrets.

There were an astounding number of such mental lapses.  If her faculties are not, in fact, impaired, this is evidence of conscious deception.  She was essentially pleading the Fifth Amendment without using those words.  Rather than admit to trying to conceal incriminating materials, she denied without denying.

Yet where is the national outrage?  We are told that Donald Trump has sucked all the air out of the electoral campaign with his monkeyshines.  Sex, it is said, is sexier than a few words uttered in Congress or to the FBI or in a signed affidavit.

Maybe so.  But doesn’t malfeasance in office count for anything?  Were Hillary to have been truthful, she would have explained that her personal server was an attempt to camouflage her connection with the Clinton Foundation.  She would have admitted that “pay for play” was a reality. 

Sure, this is too much to expect.  It would have meant self-incrimination.  But why can’t voters put two and two together.  The Watergate scandal consumed the public’s attention for almost a year.  This current outrage is more disgraceful, yet it remains beneath the radar.

Let’s move on to discussing her competence.  This is supposed to be Hillary’s strong suit.  But if she is not mentally impaired, how do we explain her terrible decisions?  Consider what took place when the American embassy was under siege in Benghazi.  Hillary was in charge in the White House, but she was less concerned with saving the ambassador than with rescuing her reputation.

So far as we can tell, most of the meeting she chaired was dedicated to developing a cover story.  Instead of figuring out how to get help to the people in jeopardy, she concocted a phony narrative about a video being responsible for a spontaneous display.

Or how about when she was shown footage of FBI Director James Comey describing her use of the private server as extremely careless.  She told millions of television viewers that they had not heard what they had just heard.  Would a person with all of her faculties have assumed no one noticed?

Or would someone who was about to announce her candidacy for president have sought a twelve million dollar fee for showing up at an event sponsored by the ruler of Morocco?  Wouldn’t she have realized that the optics were awful?

Hillary’s judgment is justifiably suspect.  At least three things apparently throw her off balance.  One is the prospect of making money.  As a woman who claimed to have left the White House dead broke, she evidently thinks of herself as nearly destitute despite her hundreds of millions.

 Another destabilizing factor is her desire for power.  Her ambition is so overweening that the closer she comes to succeeding the more likely she is to ignore dangers.  She rushes ahead regardless of the warning signs.

A third factor is anger.  By many accounts, she has an appalling temper.  When things go wrong, she can work herself into a fury so great that no one is able to approach her.  Immune to reason at such times, a desire for revenge overpowers her good sense.

Is this the person to whom we want to entrust our collective fate?  Can we count on her to make sound decisions?

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University