The Trouble With Hillary |
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| The national media have failed to connect the dots between a long list of Clinton scandals and Hillary's flawed candidacy today. |
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It is fair to say that Hillary Rodham Clinton would never have gotten as far as she has if she wasn’t married to a former President who remains popular with some Democratic voters. Though she didn’t hold elective office before 2001, Mrs. Clinton has been able to tread on her last name and the fact that her husband’s Administration is remembered much more favorably these days, in light of the disastrous Bush years. While Hillary has received some negative publicity of late — for her serial lies and exaggerations, her failure to pay scores of small vendors who have done business with her campaign, the racially charged statements of the candidate and her surrogates — the national media have been remiss in not exploring more fully the other problems behind her candidacy for President.
Mrs. Clinton has avoided being held accountable for what Camille Paglia describes as her “ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary.” The media have failed to connect the dots between her candidacy today and the various Clinton political, financial and legal scandals of the past, including allegations that Hillary has repeatedly attempted to impede investigations by lying under oath. While slinging mud against her opponents on the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton is suspected of having perpetrated the most pervasive obstruction of justice and cover-up of her own misconduct since Richard Nixon, involving illegal fundraising activites associated with her Senatorial and Presidential campaigns. Bill Clinton’s undeniable brilliance as a policy wonk, the fact that he is an uncommonly gifted and powerfully persuasive extemporaneous speaker, combined with his Bubba persona, are all qualities which have made him a formidable politician. He has been able to not only appeal to the widest possible swath of the electorate, but also ride out the political storms which his habitually sleazy personal behavior has created for him. Although both Clintons are artful dodgers, highly skilled at brushing aside awkward questions and spinning the truth, Hillary does not possess her husband’s speechmaking abilities or natural charm. While decades have passed since she was labeled “Sister Frigidaire” in her high school newspaper, Hillary is still viewed as cold and calculating. Polls show she is seen as being even more contrived, hypocritical, duplicitous and opportunistic than most politicians, with no real core values. These are qualities which surely would have doomed her career by now had she not been married to a political icon. Although she tells voters that she is better equipped to run the country, she has displayed managerial incompetence, as her campaign has been plagued by chronic infighting and major staff shake-ups. Despite a vast personal fortune, Hillary has left a trail of unpaid bills and unhappy vendors, and was apparently caught unaware that she had blown through the $120.9 million raised by her husband’s huge fundraising network by the time of the Iowa caucuses in January. Though she loaned her campaign $5 million to keep it afloat, she failed to pay $292,000 owed for health insurance premiums for her staff, and even stiffed her high school, Maine South in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, where she held a campaign rally and left a tab for $3,161. As Politico.com reports, Mrs. Clinton “badly underestimated her main adversary, Barack Obama, miscalculated the importance of organizing caucus states and was caught flat-footed after failing to lock up the nomination on Super Tuesday.” Hillary is nothing if not tenacious. She shares her husband’s lust for power, and sense of entitlement, however distasteful their dynastic fantasies are to a large portion of the public. Mrs. Clinton repeatedly talks about how she’s been “vetted” and that “there are no surprises” left to be mined by her opponents. She claims she is “the most transparent figure in public life.” Yet her husband has blocked the release of millions of pages of documents from their eight years in the White House. And the Clintons have also refused to disclose the names of more than 113,000 donors — said to include the Saudi royal family and the Middle East sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar, along with the governments of Taiwan and Brunei — who have contributed $500 million to the Clinton Library, thus raising the prospect of quid pro quos and conflicts of interest. Money from Burkle is directly benefiting Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is charged with voting on issues crucially important to Burkle’s profits, clients, partners and investors. Former President Harry Truman struggled financially after he left office, but commented “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency.” Bill Clinton has no such compunction. While other ex-Presidents, like Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, traveled the world and gave speeches for free, Clinton has made $51.9 million since leaving office, getting up to $400,000 per speech — even charging nonprofits and charities. Obviously, any entity paying this kind of money expects to receive something from a Hillary Clinton administration. The Clintons have also been misleading about some of their investments, claiming that certain holdings were in Los Angeles when, in fact, they are in the Cayman Islands. How Hillary Clinton, who is an opponent of offshore tax havens, can rationalize her husband’s offshore business dealings, is hard to fathom. Mrs. Clinton brags that she has beat “the Republican attack machine,” but it’s more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Hillary is a wildly polarizing figure who is only viewed favorably by a meager 37% of the electorate. The GOP is desperate for her to become the Democratic nominee, knowing it is the one thing that can unite their base behind John McCain. Although multiple polls show Sen. McCain losing on every issue of importance to three-fourths of the voters, and he has acknowledged that “I disagree with what the majority of the American people want,” he has paradoxically been leading the Democrats, in a year when they should have everything going their way. This is in no small measure due to the unrest Hillary Clinton has fomented within her own party, in a scorched-earth plan to destroy her opponents and sacrifice the White House to the gop if she can’t become the nominee. Why else has she repeatedly praised Sen. McCain as being more qualified than Sen. Obama, despite McCain’s advanced age, frequent gaffes, and zealous embrace of Bush’s calamitous policies? In attacking Barack Obama, she belittles a man who has spent more time in elective office than she, has more experience in foreign policy than Bill did when he became President, and has outraised the Clinton machine by tens of millions of dollars — an impressive fete that also reflects the depths of Clinton fatigue. Some suspect Hillary is a Republican Manchurian Candidate ready to spring forth another eight years of rightwing policies on an already beleaguered nation. Others speculate she realizes she will lose the nomination, so wants to help McCain get elected, assuming his age will make him a one-term President and preserve Hillary’s option to run again four years from now. That may be a cynical view, but when it comes to the Clintons — given their track record — it’s hard to overstate their villainy. Liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert says that Bill Clinton “is so thoroughly corrupt it is frightening.” It is, of course, almost impossible to separate Bill from Hillary in this regard, because their careers are so intertwined and because so many of the corruptions in Clinton’s past specifically involved projects on which Hillary was actively involved. Herbert opines that both Clintons are “terminally vulgar and unethical.” Granted, the Republicans were hypocritical, dishonest, underhanded and vituperative in their self-serving attempts to oust Bill Clinton from office. But it took the Clintons’ own betrayal of the public trust to spiral the country, the Democratic party and the Presidency downward into impeachment. Bill Clinton’s long and disturbing history of sexual misconduct* cannot be dismissed as mere philandeering on the part of an unfaithful husband. Most men who cheat on their wives don’t commit sexual assault, as Clinton has been repeatedly accused of doing. So, contrary to Chelsea Clinton’s curt dismissal of the subject as “none of your business,” it is indeed very much the nation’s business, because it reflects on her mother’s fitness to hold high office. At a pivotal point during the New Hampshire primary in 1992, Hillary knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life in order to save their political careers. In a new book called “Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine,” Candice Jackson details how Bill Clinton’s inner circle bribed, intimidated, harassed and threatened women who had accused him of various sexual improprieties. She speculates that Hillary Clinton tolerated her husband’s sexual assaults on other women because she needed to stay married to him for expediency. Jackson says Hillary “was right there in the inner circle taking a lead in giving these women zero credibility, in attacking them in public and through the press and in participating in all of these scare tactics, like hiring private investigators to threaten them and follow them.” She concludes that Mrs. Clinton “is either as misogynistic as her husband or she is simply willing to conspire to mistreat women if that’s what it takes to preserve their political careers.” On the campaign trail in 2008 Hillary and Bill appear to be the loving, respectful couple — singing each other’s praises on stage and engaging in public affection as they troll for votes. When the Clintons were in the White House, the Secret Service leaked to the press about Hillary smashing a lamp during an argument with Bill. Hillary is said to have thrown other objects at her husband. Yet this is the woman who claims to have “crossed the threshold” in being “ready from Day One” to respond to 3 a.m. phone calls about world emergencies. Dirty Campaigners Bill and Hillary have aggressively pressed petty, disingenuous and demeaning attacks on Barack Obama, evenly criticizing an essay he wrote while he was a child in kindergarten saying he hoped to grow up one day to be President. They have run a dirty campaign which may be implicated in serious offenses even more than what is publicly known. Election integrity activists parsing the precinct-level results from New Hampshire’s Democratic Primary — which saved Hillary’s candidacy after a string of losses to Obama — say their analyses have found anomalies suggesting vote totals as compiled by electronic machines (which are known to be subject to hacking), may have been altered to deliver a Hillary Clinton victory, which defied pre-election polls. When election results were hand-counted in New Hampshire precincts, the results favored Obama. The Clintons have given the Republicans ready-made talking points, like Hillary’s assertion about Obama that “only one of us is ready to be Commander-in-Chief,” or Bill’s insistence that his wife and McCain are the only two candidates in the race who are “patriotic.” The attacks by Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates also have the potential to adversely affect down-ticket races, by mitigating O-bama’s ability to mobilize huge new constituencies that could otherwise elect a wave of new Democratic Senators, Congresspersons, Governors and state legislators. Still, she soldiers on, demanding her place in the spotlight, regardless of the cost to her party’s fortunes in the Fall election. While her selection as the Democratic nominee for President at this writing appears highly improbable, and relies on some disaster befalling front-runner Obama, Mrs. Clinton has benefitted by a national media that has its own reasons for pretending to believe the myth behind her candidacy. A prolonged slugfest between her and Obama makes for good ratings — and profits. Plus a lot big corporate media owners want to help the Republican candidate triumph; it serves their interest to elevate Hillary since they are convinced she will lose the general election. “Not that her staff isn’t policing them too,” Ms. Noonan notes. “Mrs. Clinton’s people are heavy-handed in that area, letting producers and correspondents know they’re watching, weighing, may have to take this higher. There’s too much of this in politics, but Hillary’s campaign takes it to a new level.” Americans have also been subjected to seeing Bill Clinton’s red-faced eruptions and fact-challenged rants on their tv screens. The Pinocchio Syndrome For a very long time, both Clintons have had a strained relationship with the truth. It is not hard to find a surfeit of examples of their mandacity, stretching back 35 years or more. On the campaign trail, they both lie as a matter of routine — even when those lies can be easily exposed. They follow an old creed of the practiced prevaricator: lie large and lie boldly, and a lot of people will take you at your word, because they can’t conceive you’d be so daring. William Safire, who worked for Richard Nixon and surely knows something about dishonesty, calls Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar.” Her lies go far beyond the mere embellishments of a creative storyteller like an Abraham Lincoln, who would put forth apocryphal anecdotes to persuade people and illustrate a point. Clinton’s intent is to deceive, distort and conceal. Hillary also evinces the classic traits of someone who is so insecure she feels she has to interject herself into important situations. When Mrs. Clinton encountered Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first man to climb Mt. Everest, she told him her mother named her after him. Only problem: he didn’t make news climbing anything until five years after Clinton was born. She claimed she negotiated for the release of refugees in Macedonia, but they were released the day before she got there. Hillary told voters in New Hampshire: “I’ve spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector.” The truth is, she worked at the Children’s Defense Fund for less than a year, and that’s the only full-time job in the nonprofit sector she has ever had. She finally got caught lying about her trip to Bosnia, after describing melodramatically how she and her daughter braved snipers upon landing, ducking and sprinting to military vehicles. But the little girl (now aged 20) who greeted Hillary on the tarmac with flowers, said she was surprised when she heard this. And Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the First Lady’s visit to Bosnia in March 1996, “the war was over.” When finally confronted with the video evidence that contradicted her outrageous claims, Hillary first said she “misspoke,” then blamed “sleep deprivation.” But she had made these claims as part of her prepared remarks on at least three occasions over a period of months. Then she tried to divert attention from her lies by reigniting the racial fires around Obama’s controversial pastor, Rev. Wright. Mrs. Clinton is simply not credible on most issues. For example, while promising to “take on the oil companies [and] the pharmaceutical companies,” she is in fact shovelling more of their cash into her campaign than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican. Fortune magazine recently ran an adoring cover story calling her “the candidate of business”. As she campaigned in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana— states where worried workers want to know exactly where the candidates stand on trade issues — Hillary claimed “I have been a critic of nafta from the very beginning.” Now we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released recently that the former First Lady was an ardent advocate for nafta, held at least five meetings to strategize about how to win Congressional approval of the deal and that she was in the thick of the manuevering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement. As Ari Berman reported in The Nation magazine, “A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and pr firm that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton’s campaign. Her husband, since leaving the Presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons’ closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose dc brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton’s economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rival, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, gop operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.” Ari Berman argues that while Hillary’s support for the Iraq war is her biggest liability, “her ties to corporate America say as much, if not more, about what she values and cast doubt on her ability and willingness to fight for the progressive policies she claims to champion.” Scandals From the Beginning According to veteran journalist Richard Poe, “During Bill Clinton’s tenure as Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas, the state became a veritable Dixie Casablanca, a hotbed of global intrigue, in which shady operators ranging from Co-lumbian drug lords and bcci money launderers to Chinese intelligence agents took part.” And there, in the thick of it, was Hillary, who stood by her man. By the time she had migrated to Little Rock, Hillary had learned a lot in “The Natural State,” how to supernaturally evade responsibility, deny accountability, and dodge law enforcement. The profits she made on a cattle futures deal raised suspicions. Hillary had put $1,000 of her own money into a block of cattle futures at a time when her husband, then the Arkansas Attorney General, had a 30 point lead for the Governorship. By way of comparison, had Hillary instead invested $1,000 in the first offering of Microsoft stock in 1986, she would have made $35,839 by March 1994. The premier technology investment of our times, therefore, pales in comparison to what she had made on the world’s oldest commodity: livestock. Hillary denied any preferential treatment with the illuminating statement: “I was lucky.” Then she claimed she learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. But it didn’t cover the market back then. Obviously, Hillary had something better than luck. She had well-placed friends who wanted her to have $100,000 and these friends had business with her husband’s state government. The likelihood of such a return on such an investment was calculated at 24 chances in a million. During the 35 years she claims she was working hard for Americans, Hillary was actually working hard for herself: •From 1986 to 1993, Hillary Clinton sat on the board of Wal-Mart, the notoriously anti-labor corporation, founded and operated by far-right conservative Republican Sam Walton. Hillary remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers. •She was a $30,000 a year director of Lafarge Corporation, the nation’s second largest cement producer, whose kilns were under official condemnation from Michigan to California for burning hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic waste. •Hillary was to become co-counsel for Refco, which became implicated with the notoriously corrupt and scandalous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) which was linked with terrorists, spies, arms and drug dealers. As Newsday revealed, “In 1975, a 27-year-old Hillary Rodham, acting as a court-appointed attorney, attacked the credibility of a 12-year-old girl in mounting an aggressive defense for a client of hers,” 41-year-old Thomas Taylor, who was accused of rape. Hillary attempted “to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim. “...Records show [she] questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out ‘older men.’” But Hillary never cited the source of these allegations. The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems, including a suicide attempt a year after the incident. Hillary got her client off on the rape charge, and he only spent a few months in jail. • For awhile, Hillary Clinton worked as a lawyer with the House Judiciary Committee in Washington on the Watergate investigation in 1974. But now-retired general counsel and chief of statf Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation — one of only three people who earned that dubious disinction in Zeigman’s 17-year career. In an interview with journalist Dan Calabrese, Zeifman explained that the reason he did so is “because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the Committee and the rules of confidentiality.” Zeifman claims that Mrs. Clinton was one of several individuals who engaged in a scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel. In order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief and confiscated public documents to hide her deception. When Zeifman pointed out to Hillary that legal precedent already existed for Nixon to be allowed counsel, based on Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970, “Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public.” Then she wrote a legal brief ignoring the precedent. The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.This attempt was opposed even by House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill. • In 1988, Hillary directed the Rose Law Firm to destroy her files on Castle Grande. This was not illegal, but it was unusual, especially because of the irregular banking practices engaged in by this particular client. A year later, Castle Grande became the focus of a criminal probe. Hillary had stated in two separate federal investigations that she had had absolutely nothing to do with Castle Grande. Though her billing records disappeared, it was later learned that she had billed more time to Castle Grande than had any other partner at the Rose Law Firm for the period of time. William Safire also points out that “records show Hillary Clinton was lying when she denied actively representing a criminal enterprise known as the Madison s&l, and indicate she may have conspired with Web Hubbell’s father-in-law to make a sham land deal that cost taxpayers $3 million... By concealing the Madison billing records two days beyond the statute of limitations, Hillary evaded a civil suit by bamboozled bank regulators...” • Then there was the infamous Whitewater real estate deal, which haunted the Clintons for years and even prompted the appointment of Special Prosecutors. Many elderly buyers invested in Whitewater because, after all, the Governor and his wife owned it. However, they made the mistake of not reading the fine print of the real estate contract. As many of them would later discover, if they defaulted on their monthly installments for more than 30 days, they would lose all of their equity in the land, regardless of how much they had put down or paid in. The results could be devastating. Clyde Soapes put $3,000 down and faithfully made 35 monthly payments of $244.69. When he fell desperately ill, he could no longer make his payments. Although he had paid $12,000 of the $14,000 price of the lot, he quickly lost the land and all his previous investment. More than half of those who bought Whitewater lots would lose their land and all their equity payments. Records showed at least 16 different buyers paying in more than $50,000 and never receiving property deeds. Meanwhile, Whitewater carried on a flourishing traffic in repossessions and resales, selling some lots over and over when elderly buyers faltered on their payments. A local businessman said, “They screwed people left and right, taking advantage of a bunch of poor old folks on a land deal... The future President and First Lady. That ought to be the real Whitewater scandal.” David Hale, the source of criminal allegations against President Clinton in the Whitewater affair, also claimed in November 1993 that Clinton, while Governor of Arkansas, pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the partner of the Clintons in the Whitewater land deal. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation resulted in criminal charges against the two principals in the Whitewater project, but the Clintons themselves were never charged. Three separate inquiries found that there was insufficient evidence to charge the Clintons with criminal conduct in the land deal, although 14 other persons were convicted of more than 40 crimes, including a sitting Governor who was removed from office. The special prosecutor also asserted that delays in the production of evidence and “unmeritorious litigation” by the Clintons’ lawyers impeded the investigation’s progress. Later it was discovered that almost all the Clintons’ $42,000 investment in Whitewater was deducted on their personal tax returns as interest payments over several years, even though they were not entitled to do so. A subsequent analysis by tax experts said Mrs. Clinton should have known better than to take the deductions. Furthermore, when the Justice Dept. perused the Clintons’ Whitewater files, it was discovered they contained letters that cast doubt on Bill Clinton’s account of the deductions and most important, that Mrs. Clinton knew these were improper. Even more suspicious was a cryptic 1993 letter that was found in the office of Vince Foster after his supposed suicide. It indicated that he was troubled by the impropriety of taking what he called an “erroneous tax deduction.” Furthermore, Hillary’s own Rose Law Firm was hip-deep in the whole Whitewater mess, as was shown when the infamous firm billing records mysteriously and belatedly showed up in a spare White House office, reportedly with Hillary’s fingerprints (real, not figurative) all over them. The Tip of the Iceberg Once they got to the White House, new Clinton scandals erupted. In May 1993, Hillary was accused of having a central hand in firing several long-time employees of the White House Travel Office, in order to give the pricey travel business to her Hollywood pals, Linda Bloodworth Thomason and her husband, Harry. There was also the odd and scary (and utterly disproportionate) use of the fbi to investigate the employees on what proved to be utterly spurious charges. In true scandal-mode form, Hillary denied everything. When Whitewater Independent Counsel Robert Ray investigated Travelgate, he concluded that there was substantial evidence that involved Hillary but not enough to warrant an indictment. But he did cite her for making false statements at a 1995 deposition. In July 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was said to have committed suicide, although the case for his murder has been made persuasively by, among others, Christopher Ruddy, in his 1993 book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.” In 1996, Hillary was accused by the Senate Special Whitewater Committee of ordering the removal of potentially damaging files related to Whitewater from Foster’s office on the night of his death. Hillary denied everything, once again proving her adeptness in the scandal briar patch. In June 1996, White House security head Craig Livingstone, a political operative and former bouncer, illegally obtained over 700 fbi files of mostly White House personnel from former Republican administrations. Hillary was accused of requesting the files and, in fact, hiring Mr. Livingstone, but she denied everything to yet another Independent Counsel, and Filegate became one more notch in her scandal belt. The business partner of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown testified to a scheme by First Lady Hillary Clinton and top-level White House operatives to cover up evidence linking Commerce Department trade missions to political contributions. Nolanda Hill, who was was Brown’s business partner and “close personal confidant for over seven years” until he died in a government plane crash after being sent by President Clinton overseas, said that Hillary Clinton and senior White House officials had ordered Brown to ask business executives to give a minimum of $50,000 to the Democrat National Committee and the 1996 Clinton campaign to gain seats on the trade missions. At least 577 campaign contributors got overnights at the White House in the two years before the 1996 election. Ultimately, Hillary’s involvement in her husband’s Presidency brought about the fall of more elected and appointed members of their administration, as well as “friends” who met untimely deaths, were indicted, pleaded the fifth, fled the country, and were imprisoned, than in any White House in American history. The record is disturbing: Clinton machine crimes for which convictions were obtained include: three for drug trafficking; four for racketeering, extortion, bribery; two for tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement; 12 for fraud; five for conspiracy; one for fraudulent loans; one for illegal gifts; five for illegal campaign contributions; and six for money laundering. The Clinton scandals also took a toll on the Democratic party, whose nomination for President Hillary now seeks: By 1998 under the Clinton co-Presidency, the GOP gained 48 seats in the House, eight seats in the Senate, 11 Governorships, and 1,254 seats in state legislatures. During their tenure, 439 out of 1,998 Democrats became Republicans as opposed to three Republicans who became Democrats. There is also the Clinton campaign-finance scandal of the late 1990s, where millions of dollars of illegal Chinese campaign cash found its way into Democratic Party and Clinton legal defense fund coffers. Worse, American missile-guidance technology was given to Beijing. The Unpardonable Pardons Although Bill Clinton had ignored 3,226 clemency petitions that had piled up on his desk over the years, in 1999, he suddenly reached into the stack and plucked out 16 meritless cases. He then commuted the sentences of 16 members of faln, a violent Puerto Rican nationalist group that was responsible for a string of armed robberies, kidnappings, arson, and prison escapes as well as 146 bombings that killed nine people and injured hundreds in its quixotic fight for independence from the United States. The group had been convicted of conspiracies to commit robbery, bomb-making, and sedition, as well as firearms and explosives violations. Clinton’s commutations were opposed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, many former victims of faln terrorist activities, the Fraternal Order of Police, and members of Congress. He also violated the Federal Victims Rights Law. The President’s actions were seen as an outrageous slap in the face of the victims and a bitter betrayal of the cops and federal law enforcement officers who had put their lives on the line to protect the public and who had invested years of their careers to put these people behind bars. The FBI warned — in a memo the Clinton White House tried but failed to suppress — that “the release of these individuals will psychologically and operationally enhance the ongoing violent and criminal activities of terrorist groups, not only in Puerto Rico, but throughout the world.” Why would Bill Clinton have done such a thing? It’s because Hillary Rodham Clinton was in the midst of her statewide “listening tour” in anticipation of her run for the u.s. Senate in New York, a state which included 1.3 million Hispanics. So, as Joseph and Thomas Connor — whose father was murdered by faln — pointed out, President Clinton’s commutations were “made in an attempt to sway New York’s Hispanic voters with an eye to his wife’s Senate campaign.” Thus it represented nothing less than the surrender of American honor and prestige to terrorists for political gain. Its effect —in the midst of the African embassy bombings, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, Khobar Towers et. al. — was to confirm Osama bin Laden’s declaration two years later that the United States was a “weak horse.” For that matter, President Clinton and his national security team repeatedly forfeited opportunities to capture Osama bin Laden. Talking about Hillary in The New Repubic, James Kirchick observes, “that this woman would claim to be tougher than Barack Obama in dealing with America’s Islamist enemies when she and her husband sold out the country and its honor to a bunch of two-bit, Hispanic terrorists requires the willing suspension of disblief.” The pardon scandals that marked Bill and Hillary Clinton’s final days in office are also remembered as transactions involving cronies, criminals and campaign contributors. Two of Hillary’s brothers, Tony and Hugh Rodham, got cash to influence Bill Clinton to grant pardons. Hillary claimed she did not know her brother Hugh had received $400,000 in fees from two people, one of whom received a commutation and one a pardon. She also denied that her brother, Tony, had been paid to convince the President to bestow a pardon on a Tennessee couple who had been convicted of bank fraud. But then it was disclosed that Rodham had received $244,769 as a “consultant” to the couple’s carnival business, and he was recently sued for $153,000 for failing to repay a loan from them. Among the handful of known contributors to the Clinton Library, Denise Rich donated $450,000 while her fugitive ex-husband, Marc Rich, was seeking a pardon on tax-evasion and racketeering charges. Mr. Clinton granted the pardon hours before he left office, triggering a federal criminal investigation and Congressional inquiry. Both Clintons were also involved with looting the White House when they left, claiming belongings for themselves, prompting the left-leaning New York Times to lament that they would “never understand the process by which a departing President and his wife come to put sofas and flatware ahead of the acute sense of propriety that ought to go with high office.” Also missing were 62 keyboards, 26 cell phones and ten antique doorknobs. The Senate As Stepping Stone When Hillary Clinton ran for Senate in 2002, her campaign involved spinning the yarn that she was a long-time New York Yankees fan, assuring upstate conservative voters that she “cared” about their jobs, informing the large liberal base of New York City Jewish voters that she was part Jewish, and convincing the Chasidic New Square community in Rockland County (that had formerly voted overwhelmingly for arch-conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato) to vote 99 to one for her. In a season when Democratic candidates were scrambling to raise enough to finance an ever-expanding array of competitive races, Clinton raised $52 million for a Senate campaign that she could have won in her pajamas, spent $40.8 million (to beat a token opponent who spent less than $6 million), and transferred the rest to her Presidential campaign. Only the self-funded Jon Corzine has ever spent more for a Senate race in our history. You could say she was just playing the game, but Barack Obama and John Edwards, in comparison, campaigned across the country to support worthy Democratic candidates, while doing negligible fundraising for themselves. Obama emerged with less than a million in the bank and the Edwards campaign ended up still in debt from 2004. Their top priorities really did seem to be helping other Democrats win a critical election, instead of subordinating all other goals to their own personal futures. Paul Loeb speculates, “Imagine if Hillary had transferred $20 million into the dozen Congressional campaigns that Democrats lost by margins as close as a few hundred votes. Or into Harold Ford’s Senatorial campaign, to help close a $5 million gap with Republican Bob Corker. A few extra ads or mailings might well have tipped the balance. But Hillary made different decisions. Much as may have been true with her support of a recent Iran vote so reckless that Senator James Webb called it ‘Dick Cheney’s pipe dream,’ her priority was election-year positioning.” If Senator John F. Kennedy’s best-selling book “Profiles in Courage” was updated, nothing Hillary Clinton has done in the Senate would even be a footnote. Nor has she taken on the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare — subsidies, giveaways, handouts and bailouts for big business — that consume the contributions of millions of small taxpayers. Clinton has rarely been the threat to the business community that many on the right typically allege. She’s often partnered with Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist. In 2002 she backed a harsh position on welfare reform reauthorization that put her at odds even with conservative Republicans like Orrin Hatch. She persuaded her husband to veto the bankruptcy bill in 1997, but voted for a similar version in 2001 and missed the vote in 2005. She advocated weakening the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, telling Feingold to “live in the real world.” A Record of Race-Baiting Mrs. Clinton has brought her ruthlessness to the campaign for President. Obviously seeking to diminish her opponent, Barack Obama, on the basis of race, Hillary dismissed the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr. by saying that while mlk talked about equality, it took a President like Lyndon Johnson to do the real work of getting civil rights passed. What could possibly have been her point except to imply that black man King was all talk, no action — just like she’d been portraying Barack Obama — and it took a white person like her to implement change? It also begs the question as to why she campaigned for Barry Goldwater, who opposed lbj and the Civil Rights Act? Indeed, Hillary and her family were Republicans and she supported the 1964 Presidential bid of Mr. Goldwater, the radical conservative Senator from Arizona who extolled “extremism in the defense of liberty” but lost to Johnson in a landslide. Though dismayed by his loss, Hillary continued her conservative ways by becoming the president of the Wellesley chapter of College Republicans at a time when the party had racial overtones. Her future husband, William Jefferson Clinton, has his own record on civil rights besmirched by a racist postcard he sent. In February 1966, when Bill was a student at Georgetown University, he mailed a card to his grandmother (whom he addressed as “Mammaw”) in a nursing home in Hope, Arkansas. It contained a racially insensitive and grossly stereotypical caricature of a young African American boy wearing an idiotic grin as he “shined” a watermelon. To send such a card in the midst of the most active civil rights period in our nation’s history showed appalling judgment on his part. Larry Patterson, an Arkansas state trooper and Clinton bodyguard from 1986 to 1993, told Fox News and NewsMax that he witnessed Bill regularly make derogatory comments about African-Americans in private. “He has used the ‘n’ word before,” Patterson insisted. “Bill would make snide remarks about blacks behind their backs.” Longtime paramour Dolly Kyle Browning corroborated Patterson on Clinton’s use of the racial pejorative. As Governor, he even belonged to an all-white country club. The former state trooper also said Hillary was no stranger to the “n” word either. But she hasn’t stopped there. Former campaign aide Mary Lee Fray said that Hillary exploded in a rage after Bill lost his first bid for elective office, a run for Congress in Arkansas. Hillary blamed a campaign aide’s bungled strategy and screamed “You f---ing Jew bastard!” Another campaign worker, Neill McDonald, confirmed the story, according to the New York Daily News, Reuters, the ap, and the New York Post. One-time Clinton consultant Dick Morris has also talked about Hillary’s use of a Jewish stereotype during an argument she had with him. When this allegation surfaced in 2000, Mrs. Clinton called a news conference on her Chappaqua front lawn and angrily and tearfully said, “I wanted to unequivocally state it never happened, I hate this type of politics of destruction.” Bill Clinton insisted “My wife has stood for social justice and tolerance and against racial and religious hatred and bigotry for as long as I have known her.” Now, the Clintons and their surrogates have overtly and covertly raised the issue of race in an attempt to drive a wedge between constituencies and arouse bigoted white fears about a black man becoming President. They have done so in part to divert Obama from his original theme of unity, transparency and inclusiveness. Sure enough, Clinton surrogate Bob Johnson implied that Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer was actually spent dealing drugs while the Clintons were fighting the good fight. Trying to reinforce the stereotype, Hillary’s New Hampshire director, Bill Shaheen, told The Washington Post that Obama, if made the Democratic nominee, would have to answer questions like, “Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?” One of Clinton’s pollsters, Sergio Bendixen, bragged to the New Yorker magazine about Hillary’s appeal among Hispanics, while claiming that “the Hispanic voter...has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Bendixen seemed to also imply that Hillary is exploiting anti-Black racism in the Hispanic community. Mrs. Clinton defended Bendizen’s comments as being “historically accurate.” Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, another Clinton surrogate, aimed a religious low blow by claiming Obama “spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa” when growing up. He later apologized for this false accusation. Then the former President equated Obama’s win in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson’s, as if being black made his success there inevitable. He also described Obama’s candidacy as a “fairy tale” and said a vote for him would be like a roll of the dice. Hillary supporter Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania Governor and former dnc chair, said that “conservative whites” of his state “are probably not ready to vote for an African American candidate.” Then Hillary Clinton said in a speech that Obama hasn’t done the “spade work” necessary. Matt Drudge claims the Hillary Clinton campaign emailed him photos of Barack Obama in traditional Kenyan garb, which Barack donned briefly during a trip overseas. Clinton denied responsibility but her campaign knew such a photo would be misinterpreted and foster fears that her opponent is a Muslim. Most egregiously, Hillary’s campaign has also been accused of doctoring Sen. Obama’s skin tone in her commercials to make him appear darker and his nose wider. The Daily Kos called this “a concerted effort by Clinton’s ad people to make Obama look more sinister.” When initially reached for comment, the Clinton campaign denied emphatically that the ad was theirs, until Kos pulled a screen grab of the video directly off Hillary’s website. News reports also say that so-called robo-calls in Nevada repeatedly referred to Mr. Obama by his middle name, “Hussein.” And emails suddenly appeared on Jewish lists accusing the African-American Senator of being fond of Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Obama had to disavow Farrakhan and his associates. An Iowa County chair, Judy Rose, resigned after admitting that she had forwarded scurrilous emails about Barack Obama to members of the national media, smearing him as a Muslim by repeating the false claim that he attended a madrassa as a child. Geraldine Ferraro’s comments were cynically timed to influence the Pennsylvania primary. As Jake Tapper of ABC News, observes: “In a city with a history of racial tensions between working-class whites and African-Americans, I can hardly think of a better wedge issue for the Clinton campaign to use than this one — this notion that Obama has benefited from some sort of political affirmative action.” After all this, the Clinton campaign sent a memo to the press celebrating the fact that Obama’s support among white voters was supposedly eroding. Current Financial Scandals Proving nothing has changed, for her current Presidential campaign, Hillary has harvested contributions from China Town, amongst bus boys, waiters and dishwashers who surely don’t have the money to donate to her campaign. Yet as the New York Post and Los Angeles Times have reported, the names of these poverty-income workers appear on Mrs. Clinton’s campaign finance disclosure statements. This smells like what was being done previously, whereby illegal money was coming into the U.S. from China and being laundered through fake donators. Democratic fund raiser Johnny Chung, a key figure in the 1996 campaign finance scandal, admitted helping to funnel $300,000 from a high-ranking Chinese military officer to former President Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. In January 2006, Hillary Clinton’s fundraising operation was fined $35,000 by the Federal Election Commission for failing to accurately report more than $700,000 in contributions to Clinton’s Senate 2000 campaign. There’s the Nebraska data processing company InfoUSA, whose CEO, Vin Gupta, used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal, and campaign trips, gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract, and is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly diverting company money to his own personal uses. Mississippi attorney Dickie Scruggs recently canceled a major Hillary fundraiser (with Bill Clinton headlining) after being indicted for trying to bribe a judge. Major international sweatshop owners, the Saipan-based Tan family, have given Clinton $26,000, complementing their previous massive support for Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. That doesn’t even count dubious supporters from the past, like Peter Paul, the convicted con-artist turned event producer who coordinated a massive Hollywood Clinton fundraiser during the 2000 election. Taken together, it’s a pretty tainted constellation of backers. Because the whole rationale of Hillary Clinton's candidacy is predicated on her symbiotic relationship with, and experience alongside, her husband, the various scandals in which they've been embroiled, plus the unscrupulous way in which they've campaigned, all add up to a candidate who is deeply flawed. Returning tBill and Hillary to the White House for at least four more years, would mean that the country would once again be plunged into the Clintonian psychodrama which characterized their earlier eight years. The simple fact is, the problems facing the nation and the next President are far too serious, far too urgent, to allow any needless distractions to interfere. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who first introduced Bill and Hillary at Yale years ago, but who has been disillusioned with them for some time, now supports Barack Obama. He concludes ruefully, “The sad news is that whether the Clinton scorched-earth strategy ultimately succeeds or fails, it will have caused great harm. In the unlikely event it succeeds, the result will be a shame and not a little ironic. Barack Obama has breathed life into the Democratic Party, and into American politics, for the first time in 40 years. Not since Robert Kennedy ran for President has America been so starkly summoned to its ideals; not since then has America — including, especially, the nation’s youth — been so inspired. The Clintons would prefer to write off “Obamania” as a passing fad, but the reality is that idealism and inspiration are necessary preconditions for positive social change. Nothing happens in Washington unless Americans are energized and mobilized to make it happen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tactics are the old politics the nation is recoiling from — internal division and national fear. This only serves to deepen Americans’ cynicism about politics, and makes social change all the harder to achieve.” Let us know what you think of this story. Click Here To Email Us >> SIDEBAR: *Hillary Clinton once euphemistically dubbed her husband’s chronic predation as “ministering to troubled young girls.” Such statements raise serious questions about her character and fitness to hold public office. Women have been charging Bill Clinton with sexual assault since his days as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford decades ago. Somehow, the man labelled “Slick Willie” has managed to avoid criminal prosecution, but has been forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements to some of the women he has offended. And Hillary has enabled his behavior. Hillary and Bill were well on the way to crucifying Monica Lewinsky as an unstable stalker, liar and fantasist — and would have done so if Bill’s semen had not be found on Monica’s blue dress. Carolyn Moffet claimed Bill made an unwelcomed sexual advance, including indecent exposure, in 1974. Gennifer Flowers, who was a longtime mistress, said he paid for her to have an abortion in January 1978. Juanita Broaddrick claimed he raped her twice in a Little Rock Hotel room in 1978, severely biting her lip to disable her during the assaults. Investigations by NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post poked no major holes in Broaddrick’s story. Liz Ward Gracen alleges that Bill raped her in 1983 while she was Miss America, and that when this became public knowledge in 1997, she was subjected to harrassment and threats. Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, claimed Clinton exposed himself to her. She sued him for sexual harassment, and he entered into an out-of-court settlement by agreeing to pay her $850,000. Jones’ tax returns were then leaked. Sandra James, a former Washington, D.C., political fundraiser says Clinton inappropriately touched her in his hotel room in the nation’s capital in 1991. Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, claimed she had an affair with Clinton in 1983, but that after word of this leaked in 1992, she was visited by two men who threatened to break her legs. Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer, reported that Clinton fondled her in the Oval Office in November, 1993— the day her husband died. Willey, who told her story in a “60 Minutes” interview, became a target of a White House-directed smear campaign after she went public. Copyright 2008 by Midwest Today. All rights reserved. TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY - CLICK HERE TO SEND AN EMAIL TO THE EDITOR |
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Thus Hillary has been able to rewrite her biography and embroider her résumé, while airbrushing her husband’s impeachment and disbarment for perjury. She has repeatedly touted her supposed “35 years of experience” without the voters being told that this includes the time she spent as a “Goldwater girl;” being in college; working as a lawyer who defended a rapist and smeared his 12-year-old victim to win-at-any-cost; getting fired as legal counsel to the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate (because it was alleged she was a liar and unethical); serving on the board of the anti-union Wal-Mart; and shunning her husband’s last name when he got elected Governor of Arkansas.