Hillary Clinton: Immoral or Amoral?

 

HILLARY CLINTON: IMMORAL OR AMORAL?

Pundit Dick Morris – who predicted Mitt Romney would beat Barack Hussein Obama – now predicts that Hilary Rodham Clinton would seek the Democrat nomination for president in 2024.

The corrupt Democrat Party leaders may be stupid (or desperate) enough to run her, despite the heavy baggage she carries.

She has been a poseur, playing the role of victimized, yet forgiving, wife during the Lewinsky scandal. She has been a victim, complaining to those who would listen (and those who tuned out) about losing to Obama in a primary and Trump in the general election. She has been a hypocrite, castigating the government for warrantless surveillance but using purloined tapes to her own political advantage. She has a been a criminal, for destroying evidence of crimes. She has been a paranoid, complaining to the world about the alleged “right wing conspiracy.” She has been a conniver, ousting career White House travel office employees in favor of her cronies. She has been a dilettante, presuming to make over America’s health care system.  

 

While this conduct, and much more like it, has been unseemly and at odds with the image that had been projected by modern-era First Ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Barbara Bush, to Melania Trump, none of her conduct, as unseemly as it was, raised serious moral questions.

 

But Hillary Clinton has done many things that have reeked with immorality.

 

She was party to a sham commodities transaction that turned lead into gold, cattle into cash.  She stung lenders in the Whitewater scheme.  She bought votes with criminal pardons issued by her husband.  She lied about Chinese contributions to her political campaigns.  She participated in slandering and intimidating women whom her husband had abused. She desecrated the presidency by selling the Lincoln Bedroom. She stole furniture and furnishings from the White House. And much more—conduct that without doubt rose to the level of moral wrongdoing.

 

Her conduct is infamous and has been detailed on the public record for decades. Until recently, Hillary Clinton has lived with the benefits and detriments that have flowed from her behavior.

 

During her campaigns for the Democrat Party presidential nomination and her presidential race against Donald Trump, the question arose about whether Clinton’s decades-old character traits and conduct demonstrate that she is immoral or whether she is amoral—and whether there is any significant difference between the two concepts.

 

The answer is that there is a difference, a profound one, and it is crucially important for the future of the United States of America if again she runs for president that the voters of this country understand it.

 

I begin with the concept of “morality” itself, one which Americans instinctively understand.  Rooted in fundamental notions of “right” and “wrong,” we know that it is right to pay our bills and protect our loved ones.  Equally, we know that it is wrong to defraud creditors and abuse children.

 

Thus, immorality bespeaks of conduct antithetical to the “right”: lying to investigators, releasing terrorists, violating the law, attacking the defenseless, stealing from the President’s home—all conduct Hillary Clinton participated in—as well as countless other actions that, by anyone’s definition, must be characterized as immoral.  That this former candidate for the presidency of the United States has acted immorally repeatedly is clear beyond any argument.

 

But what about “amorality”—defined as “being neither moral nor immoral; specifically: lying outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply; lacking moral sensibility . .  . .”  (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10^th ed.); emphasis in original.)

 

A person who is amoral does not accept any moral standard by which her conduct is to be judged.  She simply does not care about the concept of morality, about right or wrong, in what she thinks, says, or does. Morality does not apply to such a person.

 

Thus, the questions: Does all of Hillary Clinton’s dubious conduct over the course of decades reflect a simple, garden-variety immorality, eschewing the right and doing the wrong?  Or can it be said that so much immorality, and of such a nature, has a cumulative weight that lowers her conduct to the level of amorality?  Does the leading candidate of the Democrat Party for the 2024 presidential election at root care nothing about morality and consider it as having no application to her?

 

Regrettably, Hillary Clinton’s record leaves no doubt about the answer.  Hillary Clinton is manifestly immoral, but to such a degree that it amounts to her being amoral.

 

Sad to say about a former First Lady, United States Senator, and former (and perhaps) presidential candidate.

 

Sad for America.

 

But if Dick Morris’s prediction is correct, it could get much worse.