The Patriot Post® · The DC Elite's Exaggerated Praise for Madeline Albright
By Richard McDonough
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other. … What a revolution it would be to have a woman president.” —Madeline Albright, referring to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run
Madeline Albright, who studied at Wellesley and Johns Hopkins, received a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and became the first female secretary of state under Democrat President Bill Clinton, died on March 23, 2022. Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2021. Numerous government officials, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Obama, and Joe Biden, attended her funeral and spoke glowingly of her “accomplishments.”
Bill Clinton called her “a force of nature” who through “goodness, grace, humanity and intellect turned the tide of history.” He also said that many of America’s adversaries marveled at her “vast collection of lapel pins” that she wore to signify her mood and “laughed about her dancing the tango and macarena.”
Hillary Clinton gushed that Albright “spent her entire life counseling, cajoling, inspiring and lifting up so many of us [women] who are here today.” Albright, Hillary recalled, said: “Silence may be golden but it won’t win many arguments. You have to interrupt. [When adversaries] didn’t get the message, she would put on a snail pin to signal her impatience.”
Joe Biden said, “In the 20th and 21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Albright.” He added that her name was synonymous with the idea that America is “a force for good in the world. In the 20th-21st century, freedom had no greater champion than Madeleine Albright.”
Unfortunately, these Democrat Party elites and the media, for some inexplicable reason, managed to forget a few small matters about Albright’s actual career.
Perhaps Albright’s most infamous remark was a response to a question by Leslie Stahl on whether the death of 500,000 children in Iraq was “worth it.” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.” Albright apologized later for her callous words about dead Iraqi children, but she did so in a way that made clear that she was sorry that she had accidentally revealed her real feelings.
Albright was also secretary of state when up to one million people were hacked to death in Rwanda with machetes while the Clinton administration dithered. Although Albright was a strong supporter of using U.S. military force around the world, she admits she feels bad about the genocide on her watch but absolved herself, saying she does not feel the Clinton administration could do much. Although few Americans believe that the United States should have intervened on its own in Rwanda, many people believe a greater effort should have been made to mount a UN operation to stop the genocide.
In addition, during Albright’s tenure as Clinton’s secretary of state, a laptop containing highly sensitive information about missile technology and nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons went missing from a conference room and has never been found. A senior official said that a laptop was used instead of a desktop computer because with a laptop, different people could view the information without having to change chairs. How nice! Further, an official in Albright’s State Department brilliantly propped open a door to the conference room while contractors without security clearance were working outside. It was apparently very important for the comfort of the State Department elites that no one should have to exert themselves by changing chairs and that it be easy for anybody to get in and out of the room. It did not apparently occur to Albright that a laptop would also be easy to steal, and so someone, finding the pickings astonishingly easy, did. In fact, two other such State Department laptops also went missing in May of that year.
Further, in the prior year, a Russian spy was found lurking outside of Albright’s department and an eavesdropping device was later found carefully implanted inside the wall molding in one of the conference rooms. Moreover, in 1998, a man dressed in a tweed coat strolled into an executive secretary’s office, six doors down from Albright’s office, and helped himself to a sheath of classified briefing materials and walked out, never to be seen again. Quite surprisingly, despite her impressive list of degrees from expensive elitist schools, it had not apparently occurred to Albright to institute sufficient security procedures to prevent such disastrous lapses. Since these were her own offices at the State Department, she could have easily instituted any level of security she wanted.
Albright did admit that “the responsibility for security rests with me.” However, this is quite easy for her to say because, being a member of the privileged class who went to expensive elitist schools and also has a big “D” behind her name, she was never held responsible for any of this. Nor will the reader be comforted by reports that Albright was “furious” at the security lapses because that will not do the American people any good if these laptops are being examined in Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang right now.
Naturally, since Albright checks many of the Left’s identity-politics boxes, the media was not inclined to inform the “deplorables” of her disastrous record on security. Thus, Albright, who apparently does not believe it was her responsibility as secretary of state to support men as well as women equally, was for many decades thereafter regularly invited to give commencement speeches at elite universities to brag about her sanitized résumé and, more importantly, remind everybody that she is a woman. Of course, no one brings up the dead Iraqi children, the genocide in Rwanda, the missing laptops containing classified information on missile technology and nuclear and biological weapons, the eavesdropping devices a Russian spy planted in her conference rooms to steal America’s secrets, or the man in the tweed coat who casually walked into her State Department offices and strolled away with more of America’s secrets. The fact that Albright has literally put the security of the United States at risk by multiple instances of careless behaviour is not considered important enough to ruin the festive atmosphere at these graduation parties for a beloved Democrat feminist icon.
What the ritual groveling praise for mediocre and disastrous Democrats by the DC elites and their groupies actually shows is that what is really important to them is not actual accomplishments that benefit the nation but pandering on the basis of skin color, gender, ethnicity, or sexual preference. Like all true narcissists, it is all about them. The DC elite’s preoccupation with such frivolous matters, as opposed to real accomplishments (like protecting America’s nuclear secrets), is the way nations are lost — but why spoil the party? The champagne is flowing, and the caviar canapés are the best money can buy (all at taxpayer expense, of course). The Democrat Party’s propagandists in the media, Hollywood, and academia are as obliging as ever. There is no more need to interrupt the merry-making than there was on December 6, 1941 — and the consequence will, unfortunately, inevitably be the same.