— Elliott Schwartz (@elliosch) April 24, 2015
Failed presidential run followed by botched tenure as Secretary of State? Earning lots of wealth outside of the free market? Lots of botox? Speaking in Orwellian doublethink?
As Twitchy asks, rounding up response to the usual JuiceVox socialist sophistry, “Is Hillary Clinton cementing herself into the pantheon of rich liberal windsurfing hobbyists? If so, Vox declares it a good thing.” It looks like you’re going to need a much more limber, not to mention waterproof and gyroscopically balanced exoskeleton if Hillary will be hitting the high seas.
Another area though, where both archleftists are similar, is in their cold and aloof hauteur. In his column today, asking “Will the Clinton-Cash Scandal Doom Hillary’s White House Bid?”, Jonah Goldberg describes Hillary as a “Tudor of the Ozarks:”
Sure, the Clintons like money. That’s obvious. But the money is incidental to what’s really behind all of this: a mixture of entitlement and machine politics.
The Clintons are like the Tudors of the Ozarks. They believe they are royalty, but they also understand that even monarchs need friends. The Clinton Foundation is the perfect vehicle for their ambition. Like the medieval Catholic Church, it blurs the lines between ideals and interests. On the one hand, it does yeoman’s work in the Church of Liberal Dogoodery, but it also provides a conduit for business interests, foreign governments, academics, activists, and journalists to gain access to the imperial court-in-waiting.
Even if Hillary hadn’t conveniently wiped her servers clean, I suspect there wouldn’t be a lot of e-mails about quid-pro-quos. Such transactions aren’t made in the language of the bazaar, but in the lingua franca of loyalty, friendship, and noblesse oblige. Yes, Clinton Inc. needs money, but the money is likely seen more as tribute than bribery, a bit of coin offered up as a sign of loyalty to the coming Ozarkian Restoration — a restoration that may just have to wait for Chelsea.
There is one big difference though between Hillary and the British monarchy. “The House of Windsor is certainly more transparent” than the House of Clinton, Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:
MS: Hugh, there is no ‘Clinton Foundation’… The only purpose of this foundation is to enable this family to lead the lifestyle of a head of state after it has ceased to be head of state. They spent $70 million dollars on travel at the Clinton Foundation. By comparison, the entire Royal Family, to fly between their various realms – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, that’s a lot of air miles – the entire Royal Family in one year spent $7 million dollars. So in other words, the Clintons have ten times the airplane costs of the Royal Family, who are heads of state of dozens of bits of real estate around the world. The Clinton Foundation is a hollow shell foundation playing the usual shell game with U.S. taxation. There’s no need for a Clinton Foundation except for them to rake in money from Kazakhs and Ukrainians and Iranians and Saudis and everybody else…HH: Well, let me ask you. There are two questions. Which is more transparent – the Windsor or the Clinton family? And which is less tacky – the Windsors or the Clintons?
MS: Well, one can make arguments about the last point, but the House of Windsor is certainly, the House of Windsor is certainly more transparent. You can go to I think it’s Royalty.gov.uk, and the Lord Chamberlain who runs the Queen’s Household posts every itemized bit of travel. So if you were to ask the Queen, if you happened to be meeting the Queen and you happened to say why did Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Gloucester, spend $700 dollars getting from Calgary to Bermuda in 2009, she’ll give you a straight answer. Whereas if you ask a similar question to Hillary Rodham Clinton, she’ll say ‘Oh, well, these are just more distractions from the right-wing Koch-funded media, and I’m just here to talk to everyday Americans as long as they’ve undergone a background check and have been pre-screened so that it’s safe for me to pretend to interact with them…’
If Hillary acts like she has much to hide, it may be because she has much to hide. Mitt Romney, a very different Massachusetts Brahmin than Kerry, was succinct yesterday while speaking with Hugh:
“You know, I’ve got to tell you, I was stunned by it. I mean, it looks like bribery. I mean, there is every appearance that Hillary Clinton was bribed to grease the sale of, what, 20% of America’s uranium production to Russia, and then it was covered up by lying about a meeting at her home with the principals, and by erasing emails. And you know, I presume we might know for sure whether there was or was not bribery if she hadn’t wiped out thousands of emails. But this is a very, very serious series of facts, and it looks like bribery.”
Exit quote: “This time it wasn’t about logos or burritos, but rather uranium, foreign affairs and serious corruption. The New York Times published an exposé on ties between the Clintons and a sketchy deal which left Putin in control of a significant portion of America’s uranium; uranium it can now sell to Iran and other bad actors in the world.”
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