Benazir and Billary

Amid all the attention paid to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, the most important aspect of each has been studiously ignored with such a comprehensive consistency as to belie coincidence. In other words, there is an aspect of each phenomenon that the American media intentionally ignores. That aspect is the profoundly un-democratic nature of what each woman symbolizes.

First, for Benazir. Madame Bhutto, who met an end very few deserve (of which she was decidedly not one), is remembered in the American media as the personification of democracy in Pakistan. Ironically enough, she is less remembered for being the first woman elected to lead a Muslim nation. Unfortunately for the American interpretation, however, Bhutto was far more complex than this candy-coated caricature.

Bhutto's political party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), lived up to its name only for those Pakistani People with the last name of Bhutto. Her father founded the party. She assumed his mantle when he was hanged by his own military for corruption and political murder. She was subsequently driven from office, though spared the noose, by her own military for...corruption and political murder (of her own brother, no less). Now the mantle passes to her son, a 19 year old Oxford student, surely the most qualified Pakistani imaginable.

The PPP was dominated jealously by a single family, and though it led to the first elected female head of state in the Muslim world, it was hardly a harbinger of progress. American leftists are fond of pointing out that many countries have elected female heads of state. Many of these are countries from which, to put it politely, we would not expect to encounter vanguards of progressivism.

In most of these countries, specifically Pakistan, India, The Philippines, and Argentina, the women elected to serve just so happened to be the daughters or wives of previous executives. In other words, these phenomena were more reflective of North Korea than North Carolina.

Madame Bhutto, while she led Pakistan, did more than any other Pakistani to facilitate the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. One would be hard pressed to identify a government more abusive towards women this side of the birth of Christ. Yet Bhutto cultivated the Taliban as a strategic asset in Pakistan's unending and narcissistic cold war with India.

So, not only was Benazir Bhutto the product of a profoundly undemocratic scenario, but she actually aided "the terrorists" to an extent that Musharraf never has.

Benazir Bhutto was a great woman. In the final analysis, she was on the right side. She was a patriot, and she was braver than I and most other people are. She did not deserve to die, and the men that killed her were nihilistic midgets who not even the ugliest God would spare. But she was not a democrat.

Now, for Hillary. Hillary, like Benazir, is seen as the embodiment of the ceiling-less promise of democracy. But Clinton, like Bhutto, symbolizes an aristocratic contempt for democracy more than anything else.

The Democratic Party is now dominated by the Clintons in a manner differing in extent but not substance from the Bhuttos' dominance of the PPP. The party now pretends to offer a new horizon in the form of a female executive, but there is nothing revolutionary about this, unless we take revolution in its literal, natural sense in which it means something going round and round endlessly.

Are we willing to openly embrace dynastic aristocratic control of the Democratic Party in the interest of the Pyrrhic victory of "a female president"? Hillary Clinton would be the first female president. But far more importantly, she would be the second Clinton president. And the first Clinton president, still in his prime, would be back in the White House.

One can not deny that an historically significant threshold would be crossed if Hillary Clinton were elected president. Girls and women everywhere would experience jubilee in the biblical sense, and I do not intend to discount that.

But, below that imputation would be this insidious asterik: "if you marry a man who is president and stick by him even when he commits adultery with a woman less than half your age in front of the whole world, you too can be president." We need a female president, but not so bad that the very first boasts many of the specifics that would discredit her successors.

This is not an imputation that Hillary, as a female, needs a man around to really run the country. Hillary Clinton is a brilliant, strong, successful woman. Bill probably needs her more than she needs him. But some things are more important than Hillary Clinton. On the top of that list is a republic that was founded upon the repudiation of power by association.