One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred 'experience' on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main 'experience' involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency. Christopher Hitchens
About This Quote

In this quote, H. L. Mencken is writing about Hillary Clinton and the debate over her qualifications for being president. He is suggesting that she needs to be forgiven by the public for her many failures in the White House because of the positive impact she had on health care.

This is a very common argument used in favor of a qualified candidate not getting elected because voters believe they must choose someone who has experience at their job over someone who has never done it before. Mencken is saying that this was not a good thing and that it really did damage to our nation's health care system and thus to millions of citizens.

Some Similar Quotes
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  2. After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. - Terry Eagleton
  3. The first duty of a man is to think for himself - Unknown
  4. You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker - Malcolm X
  5. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners. - Vladimir Lenin
More Quotes By Christopher Hitchens
  1. What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.
  2. About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one...
  3. I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim–so modestly and so humbly–to possess. It is time to withdraw our...
  4. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16
  5. My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line, and kiss my ass.
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