Okay, I’m on a short break.  Here’s a quick post. 

George Will has fun at Hillary Clinton’s expense, concluding with this non sequitur paragraph:

The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America’s worst president.  Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow.

Buchanan gets his bad reputation not for anything he did for almost his entire term, but for what he refused to do during the final months of his administration.  Most people have no clue what Buchanan did during his term, but they all know that he did not mobilise an army to kill tens and hundreds of thousands of Americans.  For this, he is judged an egregious failure, while the man who did just that continues to be revered as a deified hero.  This follows the typical rule of nationalist historiography here and in almost every country: the politicians and rulers who are responsible for the most deaths are judged the greatest because they oversaw “great crises.”  Even though these crises didn’t necessarily have to result in bloodshed, and even if the pols in question blundered or willingly made the crisis worse, the more blood that is shed the better for their posthumous reputations.  Of course, when the same things are done by rulers of other countries, people are able to spot very easily the sketchy arguments for regarding them as wise and great leaders of men.  French nationalists will revere Napoleon, while we see him as a blood-soaked despot, and the same used to be true of Germans and Bismarck before it became entirely impossible to be a German natonalist, and Chinese nationalists admire either the modern Mao or have reached way back to raise Shih huang-di on a pedestal.  The general rule of such “great leaders” is that you probably didn’t want to live under their government, since the chances were good that you would be conscripted, killed or otherwise harmed by their policies.

As I read Will, he seems to be arguing on behalf of the least experienced contender in the presidential race, who happens to be Hillary Clinton at this point, which means that he has just compared her to Abraham Lincoln.  So is he saying that Hillary Clinton’s election would usher in an era of mass fratricide, or is he saying that she is the next Great Emancipator?  Maybe both?