Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

August 02, 2007

Hillary's Thesis Now Available Online

Hillary Clinton's senior thesis, written at Wellesley Collge while she was still Hillary Rodham in 1969, has been kept under wraps since her early days as First Lady back in the 1990s. There have been lots of rumors about it, seeing as she wrote about "successful" radical organizer Saul Alinsky (and received an A).

Well, forget those rumors. You can read the whole thing online at GoPublius.com. Here's a link to the document (copy and past into your browser): http://www.gopublius.com/HCT/HillaryClintonThesis.html
(hat tip: my husband). Looks authentic to me, right down to the uneven text and hand-inserted punctuation and slashes to provide missed spacing between words...obviously produced on a typewriter of the era. (NOTE: It has yet to be officially authenticated.)

You might say, "Who cares? This is a college thesis written nearly 40 years ago when she was just 22 years old!" Well, had Mrs. Clinton not made a big stink about wanting it kept in the dark, then likely no one would care much at all. I mean, I don't see anyone scrambling after my boring senior thesis on media bias. But who am I in the scheme of things? I'm not running for president.

And there you have it. Mrs. Clinton wants to be president. So it behooves us, the voters, to know more about her and how she views the world. Seeing as she wrote about Saul Alinsky, the man who redefined radical protest, this will prove to be most illuminating.

I'm reading it now, and would like to pass on a few of Mrs. Clinton's own words to whet your appetite:

One of the strongest strains in modern radicalism is the eighteenth century Enlightenment's faith in human reason and the possible perfectibility of man. This faith in the continuing improvement of man was and is dominated by values derived from the French and American Revolutions and profoundly influenced by the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution shifted the emphasis of radicalism to an urban orientation. Alinsky holds to the basic radical tenets of equality and to the urban orientation, but he does not advocate immediage change. He is too much in the world-right-now to allow himelf the luxury of symbolic suicide. He realizes that radical goals have to be achieved by non-radical, even "anti-radical" means. For Alinsky, the non-radical means involve the traditional quest for power to change existing situations. To further understand Alinsky's radicalism one must examine his attitude toward the use of power.

Frankly, I don't think she's changed much, especially when it comes to harnessing power for radical ends. Read it, and see if you don't agree with me.

On a more humorous note, hubby notes in the e-mail in which he sent the thesis link:

Some irony, since Alinsky was so fond of theatrical agitation - such as loading up opera patrons with beans so they could gas out the wealthy during the performace - it should be noted that Hillary got publicly breasted by Code Pink activists in California. What comes around goes around.