Hillary Clinton unfit to be president

NOW the focus is firmly on the next occupant of the White House. A certain reading of the current US scene suggests that for a significant number of Americans, Democratic and Republican, the choice for 2008 is as simple as ABC (Anyone But Clinton).

According to polls, a majority say they would definitely vote against Hillary Clinton if she was on the Democratic ballot in two years’ time. This reflects my own bias. While I would like to see a woman president, the former first lady is a cold, smug hypocrite, which she amply proved before and during her time in the White House.

When scandal first broke around her husband’s head a long time ago, she chose to ignore the obvious while at the same time declaring she “wasn’t some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette”.

Yet that was precisely the course she adopted — for her own long-term political ends.

In other words, this Yale-educated lawyer and self-proclaimed independent woman, in a self-styled marriage of equals, traded in her principles in a way that might be excused in, say, a Laura Bush.

By not throwing her bags out on the White House lawn at the height of the Lewinsky revelations and remaining with the squalid Bill, she publicly failed the test of the person she claimed to be — let alone that of a potential first citizen.

Oliver McGrane

32 Marley Ave

Rathfarnham

Dublin 16