What the hell was she thinking?
That the Hillary! candidacy is doomed is now a foregone conclusion. Madame Defarge has no aptitude for the job, only a taste for it, and a venomous certainty that it is somehow rightfully hers. But when you’ve lost Jon Chait:
The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse. All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.
The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:
There follows a list of the various Clinton disasters we have lovingly been chronicling here for weeks now. Still, it’s instructive that the default mode on the Left is to attribute to “disorganization,” “greed” and “sloppiness” (hello, Sandy Berger!) what is almost certainly outright and overt criminal behavior, undertaken in the belief that no one would ever be held accountable.
When you are a power couple consisting of a former president and a current secretary of State and likely presidential candidate, you have the ability to raise a lot of money for charitable purposes that can do a lot of good. But some of the potential sources of donations will be looking to get something in return for their money… And yet the Clintons paid little to no attention to this problem. Nicholas Confessore described their operation as “a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.” Indeed, as Ryan Lizza reported in 2012, Bill Clinton seemed to see the nexus between his role and his wife’s as a positive rather than a negative:
Regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal feelings about Obama, it didn’t take him long to see the advantages of an Obama Presidency. More than anyone, he pushed Hillary to take the job of Secretary of State. “President Clinton was a big supporter of the idea,” an intimate of the Clintons told me. “He advocated very strongly for it and arguably was the tie-breaking reason she took the job.” For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the Administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors. “Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,” the Clinton associate continued. “It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.”
Well, duh. Throughout the entire Clinton period, the media has done its best to ignore the organized-crime roots of Bill Clinton’s political career, from his early apprenticeship at the feet of the legendary Prohibition-Era gangster, Owney Madden, to the criminal nature of the town of Hot Springs, Ark., where Bubba grew up, to the quid-pro-quo gangland tactics both Clintons have always employed in their dealings with the wider world beyond the Ouchita mountains. Exactly none of what the Clintons now stand revealed as having done, both politically and through their phony “charity,” should come as a surprise to anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention for the past twenty years.
The Obama administration wanted Hillary Clinton to use official government email. She didn’t. The Obama administration also demanded that the Clinton Foundation disclose all its donors while she served as Secretary of State. It didn’t comply with that request, either. The Clintons’ charitable initiatives were a kind of quasi-government run by themselves, which was staffed by their own loyalists and made up the rules as it went along. Their experience running the actual government, with its formal accountability and disclosure, went reasonably well. Their experience running their own privatized mini-state has been a fiasco.
And yet, the fact that it is coming as a shock to some die-hard Democrats is a tribute to the remarkable power of the Clinton-friendly media, which (as Glenn Reynolds has pointed out) sees its job not so much as deciding what to report, but what not to report, especially when it comes to its beloved Democrat party, famously described by your truly as a “criminal organization masquerading as a political party” — which of course it is. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that this comes about in part from the fact that elite liberal journalists and politicians naturally gravitate toward each other — they all attended the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods — and also from the journalists’ nagging sense that they really should have been Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers, rather than the oxpeckers they actually are.
What’s an oxpecker, you ask?
Those are oxpeckers.
Now, even the lickspittle media can’t stand them; they understand what the Clintons are about, how the “Global Initiative” is simply a vehicle for Bill to meet women and frolic aboard the “Lolita Express” and for Hillary to accumulate ever more wealth and political favors. And the moment has finally come when they can’t or won’t protect them anymore, not with Granny Warren waiting in the wings, every bit as vicious as Hillary, ready to snatch the “historic” mantle from her, and minus all the baggage Lady Macbeth has accumulated over the centuries she has been in the public eye. Hence the signals from the DNC house organs, the New York Times and the Washington Post: get out now, while there’s still time to salvage something.
Bill Clinton was paid at least $26 million in speaking fees by companies and organizations that are also major donors to the foundation he created after leaving the White House, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records and foundation data. The amount, about one-quarter of Clinton’s overall speaking income between 2001 and 2013, demonstrates how closely intertwined Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable work has become with their growing personal wealth.
The multiple avenues through which the Clintons and their causes have accepted financial support have provided a variety of ways for wealthy interests in the United States and abroad to build friendly relations with a potential future president. The flow of money also gives political opponents an opportunity to argue that Hillary Clinton would face potential conflicts of interest should she win the White House. Though she did not begin delivering paid speeches or join the foundation until 2013, upon ending her tenure as secretary of state, the proceeds from her husband’s work benefited them both.
Let us call this what it is: bribery. And there’s a lot more where this came. As IBD notes:
Just this week, Judicial Watch said it has received 126 pages of State Department documents that relate to possible conflicts of interest while Hillary was our nation’s top diplomat. In particular, it cites “questions about funds Clinton accepted from entities linked to Saudi Arabia, China and Iran, among others.”
Need we mention the troubling questions Hillary Clinton refuses to answer about her private email server used to handle State Department business — and her willful destruction of evidence requested by Congress? Or her patent falsehoods about what happened at Benghazi, where four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered? Or past ethical lapses left over from Bill Clinton’s presidency — including Chinagate, Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate and the miracle of Hillary’s turning $1,000 into $100,000 in just 10 months of commodities trading?
Instead of going on the stump and blaming the 1% for all the world’s ills, maybe she should stop running and start answering.
Oh, she’ll stop running all right; over on Twitter (@dkahanerules) I’ve been asking folks to get their office-pool bets down on Hillary!’s Last Day as a Candidate. But she won’t start answering until, like any cornered crook, she’s forced to in a court of law. If she leaves now, the MSM will do its Ivy League-Rhodes Scholar best do protect her and her husband, allowing them to keep most of their money in exchange for disappearing from the public eye. (Oddly enough, that is the exact same deal the FDR administration offered Clinton’s mentor, Madden, to get him to “retire” to Hot Springs in 1935.) If not, all bets are off. Because oxpeckers don’t just clean up big animals — they take them down, too:
What a meal the Clintons will make for some ambitious leftist reporter trying to establish his or her “objective” credentials. If you listen closely, you can already hear the munching sounds.
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