WHEN ONE POLITICIAN says something nasty about another politician, a classic way to push the stiletto a bit deeper goes like this:
Reporter: Senator A, why did you say in a closed meeting that Senator B has the intelligence of a box of dry Ramen noodles?
Senator A: I'm shocked at your question, sir. I respect Senator B's intelligence as much as I ever have.
Think about it.
The clueless reporter will file a story saying Senator A denies having insulted Senator B. Meanwhile, Senator B, who knows the game, will grow even angrier. And our nation's swamp-dwellers -- most of whom talk this way themselves, particularly in front of grand juries -- will have a big laugh at how Senator A woohooed the bozarts.
So why does Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton use the same rhetorical slip-and-slide to answer a serious question about patriotism?
I love our country every bit as much as a private citizen as I did as a candidate, secretary of State, senator from New York, and First Lady.
This comes from Ms. Clinton's written response earlier this week to criticism of her belittling of Trump supporters, particularly white married women, on a book tour to India.
Is she clever enough to have done this deliberately, to preserve her deniability to a charge from fellow progressives that she is soft on America?
I doubt it. My guess is that she has spent so many years crafting answers to other serious questions this same way that she cannot do otherwise. Her default setting is obfuscation.
I haven't read a Houston Chronicle editorial in some good little while, but you can dig up old Independence Day editorials to see the same rhetorical dodging and darting.
The editorial writers' implied argument is that they don't need to say they love America; the furiosity of their disdain for the real America proves their love of the utopian America of their progressive imagination.
As for you and me, old-fashioned patriots who love America, imperfect though it may be, and love to say so, the Houston Chronicle editorial board respects us as much as it ever has.
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