For the children, again

Hillary Clinton is out knocking on doors, eager to show customers some of her new moving-to-the-center products. Because her "for the children" powders and lotions have been her trademark items, Hillary has been holding them up and smiling, her eyes bulging, her head shaking "no" as she says "yes". Unfortunately for her, George Neumayr caught her in mid-pitch and turned consumer advocate:

She returned to this Dick Morris-tutored mode of motherliness this week. Appearing with a few Republicans happy to stand within the compass of her star power, she spoke of the "epidemic" of violent media in the lives of children. "It is a little frustrating when we have this data that demonstrates there is a clear public health connection between exposure to violence and increased aggression that we have been as a society unable to come up with any adequate public health response," she said, calling for legislation to study the impact of media on children.

In other words, Hillary is back to the V-chip. Notice that Hillary Clinton is always careful to emphasize the harm violent television poses to children, while appearing more agnostic and less vocal about the harm sexual content does to them. She has never called for an S-chip. This allows her to reach out to Middle America while making sure not to alienate too many constituencies within the Democratic Party. After all, her friends in Hollywood like to pride themselves on being troubled by the prospect that children might imitate the glamorized violence they see (or a scene involving smoking, nicotine, not marijuana). But that children might imitate the glamorized promiscuity they see -- a far more likely prospect than a teen going out to buy an Uzi after seeing Rambo -- is a proposition her friends in Hollywood won't consider and she knows it. If she were really worried about public health problems arising from media rot -- say, rising levels of illegitimacy and venereal disease -- she would broaden the scope of her concern, and stop supporting the First-Amendment extremism of her party that threw the country into a ubiquitously rancid culture.

Her children's activism has always been highly selective. She will protect children against violence on television but not against the violence of abortion. In one hand she offers parents a V-chip, in the other she offers their children condoms. This is the arbitrary nanny state that takes its cues not from any natural moral law but from the will of an elite that seeks to impose its ideology on families. Proponents of the nanny state will invoke parents but really have no use for them. "We'll take it from here," is the attitude. The chilly social-science-style pronouncements of Hillary Clinton in It Takes A Village revealed her contempt for parenting untutored by the State.