Hillary Clinton’s “Dependent Personality Disorder”

If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like “doesn’t drive,” “needs food prepared,” “needs help with the remote control,” “needs people to bring her beverages,” “has trouble remembering things,” and “doesn’t pay her own bills” about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures.

But, as we now know courtesy of the ongoing FOIA e-mail dump, all of these traits accurately describe the current Democratic front-runner and (as she is always eager to remind us) doting grandmother, Hillary Clinton. Amidst the e-mail revelations, an alarming pattern is developing about Clinton’s personal dependency on those inside her inner bubble. She isn’t just delegating important tasks to underlings, as any executive might; these aren’t urgent matters of national security, such as aides’ fetching satellite intelligence or the latest reports relevant to a managing executive. Rather, it appears that Hillary is either helpless or unwilling to perform even the most menial and trivial of daily tasks. [from “Hillary’s E-mails Reveal a Startling Amount of Dependency” by Stephen L. Miller, NationalReview.com 9/4/15]

It’s an amusing and insightful article. But there’s an even bigger point here.

The point is that government, as we know it, is the proverbial “emperor with no clothes.” The release of Hillary Clinton’s personal emails — due to her bad judgment in storing them on high level government property — shows us what we should have been smart enough to know all along.

Politicians are human. In fact, they’re more fallible than most. If the truth be told, we’re putting the least intellectually, ethically and mentally competent people in charge of doing things we have no business putting the government in charge of doing.

Courts, police, military? Of course we need these. And it’s voters’ job to find the best people possible to perform these crucial functions. But what about the 90 percent of other things the government is doing that we’re expecting mentally out-of-touch politicians to do on our behalf?

Think about it. What kind of person seeks to be a career politician? The type of person who wants control over others. They call it “caring,” but a vibrant charity sector exists for that. It’s control and power they’re after. It’s hard to imagine a better example of a career politician than Hillary Clinton. Her whole life has been about the acquisition and maintenance of power. First for her husband, and later for herself. She’s straight out of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire: 21st Century Edition.

Feminists will be quick to say we’re harder on Hillary because she’s a woman. But Hillary Clinton brought this on herself, by having the poor judgment to think she could break the law as Secretary of State, with respect to storing private data, and still saunter to the presidency (which clearly now, whatever happens, she will not easily do).

It’s not about women, and it’s not just about Hillary Clinton. It’s about the caliber of people who seek power to do things we should not be permitting government to do — things such as telling us what to eat (the FDA); what medicines we may take (again, the FDA); which material objects we may or may not buy (OSHA); the content of our fuels (EPA); the content of our children’s text books (DOE); the nature and cost of our health care (HHS); the amount of our income we may keep (IRS); how much we may spend on elections (FEC); the content and rules of our homes and mortgages (Fannie Mae); what we may put into our bodies (DEA); on and on and on.

When you read about all of Hillary Clinton’s obvious and personal impediments, we’re immediately struck by two hard, unyielding facts. One, this woman is more human than we’d like to think any elected officials are. Two, the things we’re expecting and demanding our leaders to do are incomprehensible and impossible.

The conclusion most of us are not yet willing to face? Government should not be doing any of these things. We should be doing them ourselves, working it out in the free marketplace and with the use of our own minds. We should leave it to the ingenuity, creativity, “skin in the game” motivation and — yes — fallibility of the private sector to do what power-lusting, glorified bureaucrats (like any of our established politicians) should never have been entrusted with, in the first place.

What’s wrong with most of us for thinking that Hillary Clinton, or anyone else like her, could be expected to do any or all of these things better for us? In what world would that ever be the case? And will the release of these private emails help make it clearer? Nothing else has; maybe this will.

It’s tempting to claim that Hillary Clinton suffers from “Dependent Personality Disorder,” described by psychiatrists as a pervasive dependence on other people. The evidence does suggest that. But you really didn’t need to read her emails to know this. The fact that she seeks to embroil herself in all of human activity, taking it over as much as she possibly can, in order to advance her own quest for personal power as well as the interests of her constituent groups who want some form of government subsidy, or selective attention, should tell us right then and there that something is wrong with her psyche, if not her character.

But what makes us think she’s so different from the rest of the career politicians we keep electing to run our lives for us, with programs, subsidies and benefits to be paid for by others — either our present-day fellow citizens, or future generations of people who will be saddled with the $18 trillion (and growing) national debt?

Before we ever hope to resolve the problems with the government, we first have to resolve the problems within ourselves. That problem involves refusing to take responsibility for our own lives and destinies, combined with mistakenly thinking that some hoped for “leader” can do this for us. It’s delusional fantasy, and it’s getting worse.

Thinking that these corrupt and inept people can somehow do everything for us represents the most dangerous form of self-delusion the world has yet seen. And America, more than any society to date in all of human history, has the most to lose. If we go down, the rest of the world will go down with us, because America was the most vibrant, accomplished, just, independent and individualistic society ever known to humankind.

Let Hillary Clinton’s emails show us the kind of people to whom we’re handing over our lives, our liberties and our most basic well-being. Maybe we’ll finally start to reconsider what we’re doing.