Topic: WorldNetDaily
Clinton Derangement Syndrome still runs rampant in the ConWeb (as we've detailed), and the latest to exhibit its symptoms is WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who spent his Aug. 10 column bashing her for something she did nearly 40 years ago -- and, of course, getting the details wrong in the process.
Farah claims to have read Hillary Clinton's Wellesley College senior thesis on activist Saul Alinsky: "It's sheer torture, believe me. I did the heavy lifting for you. If there was anything in here worth your time, I would tell you." Well, unless Farah has been to the archive room on the Wellesley campus, the only place one can read the thesis -- a trip he has not mentioned in his columns -- he has not read it.
Another sign Farah has not actually read the thesis: he misportrays it. Farah asserted that Clinton wrote "in a most reverential way" about Alinsky, asserting that she and Alinsky share a similar lust for power:
Power, power, power, power, power. That is the essence of Hillary's thesis. And it is still what she is chasing today.
She's in love with power – and so was her mentor, Alinsky.
In fact, Clinton concluded her thesis by rejecting Alinsky's model. As MSNBC -- who, unlike Farah, did read her thesis -- reported:
In the end, she judged that Alinsky's “power/conflict model is rendered inapplicable by existing social conflicts” — overriding national issues such as racial tension and segregation. Alinsky had no success in forming an effective national movement, she said, referring dismissively to “the anachronistic nature of small autonomous conflict.”
[...]
“I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas,” she explained in “Living History,” her 2003 biography, “particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't.”
Farah also weirdly fixates on on Clinton's thesis statement that "I have no 'loving wife' to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote": "What an odd comment, I thought. How many undergraduate students have a "loving wife" to help them write their thesis?"
Well, it could be argued that a not-insignificant number of college students were married at the time Clinton wrote her thesis in in the late 1960s. Perhaps Clinton was making a snarky feminist joke that Farah was too frothingly angry at her to find the humor in.
Farah also gratuitously slams Clinton's writing style as "uniquely laborious"; perhaps he should offer evidence that his own writing style as a college senior wasn't.
Farah is a CDS carrier, and his strain is particularly virulent, so look for a lot more of this in the future.
