Annals of Corruption: What's Real, What's Parody?

Real/Parody?

Which is real, which is a parody?

• Eric Holder takes $77 million job with JP Morgan-Chase
• UCLA pays Hillary Clinton $300,000 for talk, $165 per second
• Bill Clinton paid $500,000 for 45-minute talk, $185 per second

Stumped?  The first is a parody, the second two are real, all too real.  But who can reliably distinguish between satire and reality these days?

How about this: crude joke, what James Carville (he was speaking about scandals at the Clinton Piggy Bank, er, Foundation) called “diddly squat,” or non-diddly squat corruption on a sickening scale:

• Bill Clinton travelsto Kazakhstan, meets his friend Frank Giustra who wants to buy uranium mines there.
• Clinton gives a press conference with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev and extols the leader’s human rights record and democratic progress, even though he had just received 91% of the vote in an allegedly rigged election.
• A couple of days later, Kazakhstan gives Giustra the uranium concessions he requested.
• Giustra then donates $31 million to the Clinton Foundation with a promise of $100 million more to follow.

Ricochet has the whole story here.

No, it is impossible to distinguish between parody and fact any longer, because, as Mark Steyn points out, our entire political apparatus is thoroughly corrupt. Eric Holder may not yet have signed up with JPMorgan Chase.  But it’s early days yet, and who would be willing to bet that his seat at the DOJ won’t be cold before he picks up a super lucrative spot at a 1) huge law firm or 2) financial institution?

Steyn is right: the biggest issue facing our political world right now is corruption. Jay Cost, in A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of Political Corruption, provides some historical perspective on the issue.  In “Oligarchs for Hillary!,” Steyn shows just how bad the corruption has become. “The corruption nauseates me,” Steyn writes, “and, if it doesn’t nauseate the candidates, then that explains a lot about why nothing happens on any of those other matters [all the other policy items that are amiss in the Republic].”

We have a “justice” department that prosecutes a senator who made the mistake of crossing the President (Menendez) but declines to do anything about a tax collector who treats American taxpayers differently on the basis of how they vote (Lerner). We have a revenue agency that regards itself as the paramilitary wing of the ruling party. We have replaced equality before the law with a hierarchy of privilege, so that no-name ambassadors can be fired for breaking federal record-keeping requirements by a department whose boss outsources her federal records to her own server and then mass-deletes them with no more thought than when she’s parking her van in the handicapped space. We have a federal police agency in which 26 out of its 28 hair analysts gave false testimony favorable to the prosecution. We have a cabinet officer who managed to get more firepower deployed to toss her designated scapegoat videomaker into the county jail than she assigned to the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi. We have a president who rules by decree on everything from immigration to health care—and a legislature of castrati too craven to object.

Feeling scared yet?  Pause to savor the Clintons’ role in all this more fully, Steyn is right: Hillary is “the most openly corrupt candidate of the modern era.” Even the New York Times is responding to the stench. Writing about Peter Schweitzer’s new book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, the Times reports the allegation that:

“Foreign entities who made payments to the Clinton Foundation and to Mr. Clinton through high speaking fees received favors from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department in return.”

“We will see a pattern of financial transactions involving the Clintons that occurred contemporaneous with favorable U.S. policy decisions benefiting those providing the funds,” Mr. Schweizer writes.

His examples include a free-trade agreement in Colombia that benefited a major foundation donor’s natural resource investments in the South American nation, development projects in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010, and more than $1 million in payments to Mr. Clinton by a Canadian bank and major shareholder in the Keystone XL oil pipeline around the time the project was being debated in the State Department…
“During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, he writes. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”

Is this OK?  Is it “Diddly-squat”?  I admit that it is a sort of joke, but the joke is firmly on us.

As Steyn says, “The corruption of the republic goes all the way down.” Item: the so-called “John Doe” investigations in Wisconsin meant to smear—no, Steyn’s word is better, to “terroize” citizens who support Scott Walker.  David French expose the whole rotten scheme in National Review.

Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking.

The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking.

She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram…

“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs…’

Multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower…

“He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off…

How long will we put up with this?