One feature of the totalitarian mindset is a need to brainwash children into believing that The Great Leader was destined for importance from birth.  At its most grotesque, this impulse finds expression in absurdities such as the propaganda North Koreans were subjected to on the birth of the late Kim Jong-Il, who inherited his dictatorship from regime founder Kim Il-Sung:

Legend has it that a double rainbow and a glowing new star appeared in the heavens to herald the birth of Kim Jong Il, in 1942, on North Korea's cherished Baekdu Mountain.

Nothing quite like that has (yet) appeared about Hillary Clinton, but an effort to canonize her in the minds of the next generation is well underway. Kyle Smith of the New York Post reviews the slightly-less-grotesque-than-North-Korea effort of children’s book author Michelle Markel, titled, Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead.

Ms. Markel evidently began work on this propaganda effort before the Hillary campaign banished the name Rodham to the memory hole. Evidently, the association with the Clinton brand is key to her appeal. The Rodham brand may well make a comeback if  Hillary actually takes office as president, but for now, it is a distraction from the branding effort. Markle should really get with the program.

I haven’t read the and don’t plan to unless they send me a review copy (highly unlikely), so I will quote Smith:

 Aimed at ages 4 to 8, [it] is meant to instill in girls a thrilling sense of gender pride, even if the book (like Hillary’s campaign) has a difficult time identifying anything she has actually accomplished, other than giving speeches and being in the proximity of famous men.

Awkward, that. But no real obstacle in terms of the propagandist’s art. After all, what did Kim Jong Il ever accomplish, aside from murdering any possible rivals and ruthlessly suppressing all dissent?

The BS comes early and often:

On page one, we’re informed that “in the 1950s, it was a man’s world” and that girls “weren’t supposed to act smart, tough or ambitious.” Little Hillary, looking spunky in a bright-red dress, is set off against a gray and brown array of celebrated men of the time, including Nat King Cole and Jackie Robinson. “Only boys had no ceilings on their dreams,” go the harrumphing words.

So Nat King Cole, who was once attacked on stage during a concert by a gang of white supremacists, and Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper who on the baseball field had to listen to an opposing manager yell the N-word at him and shout “go back to the cotton fields,” had it easy compared to Hillary, the daughter of a wealthy businessman?

Actually, Hillary’s father was not wealthy, and not really that successful in his drapery business. Some years were good, but others provided little income. I suspect the economic insecurity Hillary experienced growing up has a lot to do with her compulsive need to acquire wealth and the trappings of power.  Her father, a white male, is disqualified from victim status, but Hillary, a female, was truly a victim:

After “upstaging boys in class” — not just succeeding but “upstaging boys,” because it’s important that your little girl learn to see life as an us-against-them situation — the teen Hillary “met with poor black and Latino teenagers in the inner city.” Brave Hillary! Later, in law school, we learn that Hillary “walked up and down dangerous blocks in Texas, registering voters for the presidential election.” “Dangerous” apparently means “populated by Latinos,” because below these words is a picture of Hillary talking to brown-skinned people on a sidewalk.

Smith takes glee in pointing our various contradictions in the story. Markel does appear to trip herself up quite a few times. Luckily for her, 4 to 8 year olds are not the most attentive analysts.

Girls are also told that, in the early Clinton administration, Hillary was “tough as nails” but (next sentence) “after Congress turned down her health plan, she was crushed.” And that (page 17), they should be excited about Hillary’s Arkansas work “at a top-notch law firm,” even though the two people she is pictured with, Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell, respectively committed suicide and were imprisoned amid scandals.

The review featured on the Amazon page for this book comes from The School Library Journal, making it clear that this book is intended for schools. To her credit, reviewer Laura Simeon found the hagiographic approach a bit much:

...this picture book biography depicts Hillary Rodham Clinton's story as one of endless heroic struggles on behalf of the oppressed. Clinton is described as an excellent student who took an early leadership role among her peers, was inspired by hearing a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and later fearlessly advocated on behalf of women, people of color, children, and the poor.... The tone is relentlessly positive, making it difficult to get a well-rounded sense of Clinton as a person, and there is no reference to any of the political controversies surrounding her or Bill Clinton.... VERDICT A beautifully produced, if excessively laudatory, biography of a significant contemporary political figure; recommended for general collections.

I have to wonder about the poor boys who are assigned this book in school, or who have to sit and listen to it read to a class. They are cast as oppressors who have it easy in life. But that seems to be thrust of most government schools in this era, perhaps one reason why boys fare much more poorly in schools than girls.

The other intended audience for this book, children of feminists, is artificially small thanks to the popularity of abortion in that demographic segment. I suppose Hillary’s granddaughter, Charlotte Rodham Clinton Margolies Mezvinsky, will have it read to her endlessly. Poor tyke, but lucky for her, Hillary needed a grandchild to soften her image.

It turns out that there is an entire genre of Hillary books for children:

That totalitarian impulse is pretty widespread. But heck, the 2008 Hillary campaign indulged in it quite explicitly:

Compare to: