Posts
For my part I have doubts about the inevitability of a Hillary Clinton presidency, but I have been wrong before.
If, perchance, you need to prepare yourself for a new Age of Clinton, George Will offers a primer:
The [Democratic] party, adrift in identity politics, clings, as shipwrecked sailors do to floating debris, to this odd feminist heroine. Wafted into the upper reaches of American politics by stolid participation in her eventful marriage to a serial philanderer, her performance in governance has been defined by three failures.
Will is referring to Hillary’s attempt at healthcare reform, her handling of the Russian reset and her management of the Obama administration Libya policy:
He explains it all with a psychological evaluation, one that I have often repeated:
These episodes supposedly recommend a re-immersion in Clintonism, a phenomenon that in 2001 moved The Post to say, more in anger than in sorrow, that “the Clintons’ defining characteristic” is that “they have no capacity for embarrassment.” This judgment was rendered as two episodes were demonstrating that the Clintons in power were defined by their manner of leaving it.
For the Clintons the rules do not apply. They live in their own amoral universe, protected by the media.
Recently, we have learned that Hillary wiped the hard drive of her personal server clean-- thus, destroying the historical record of much of her tenure at the State Department. As Republicans have noted, even Nixon did not destroy the tapes.
The material, we posit, was suffiently embarrassing for her to believe that the hit she would take for erasing the files would be less than the hit she would take once people found out what was in them.
One might ask now whether she was trying to hide professional incompetence or personal dereliction, or both.
4 comments:
The Clintons are an embarrassment. Even more embarrassing is an American public polling consistently that Hillary would win over any Republican challenger. It is daytime television writ large for the content-ravenous newsreaders and the titillated viewing public. Daytime TV usually presents the new, strange or amusing. There is nothing new, strange or amusing about the Clintons. We've seen all this before. Therefore, we must conclude that Americans are now addicted to daytime reruns, content to watch "National Lampoon's DC Vacation" all day... once 2017 rolls around.
Didn't Nixon resign the presidency on the advice of people within his own party about a long deleted section of his secret tapes? Ummmm... didn't Hillary just violate government policy and delete the public record of any of it? And she's considered the Democratic Party's front runner for President of the United States? A woman who is married to someone who is -- in addition to being a former U.S. President -- a perjurer, serial philanderer, disbarred attorney and jetsetting socialite who likes to hang out with convicted pedophiles and play powerbroker in a horribly destitute Haiti.
Wow. We have so much to look forward to. In the meantime, my money is still on Elizabeth Warren.
The unpleasant truth is that Clintonism thrives because we have US population that finds it entertaining and thrives on it. We are an evil country.
re: Recently, we have learned that Hillary wiped the hard drive of her personal server clean-- thus, destroying the historical record of much of her tenure at the State Department. As Republicans have noted, even Nixon did not destroy the tapes.
Its interesting that heoric actions and cowardly ones can look the same depending on what you're looking for. But it helps to have a little shameless self-righteous ego when you call out the dirt diggers who are not interested in truth.
If Hillary said "I destroyed these personal emails intentionally to avoid making people's private communication public. If you have a problem with that, then let's talk about proper boundaries of privacy for people in public service. Besides that topic, I have nothing to say, and my only regret is that I couldn't have deleted more."
That would be a useful line in the sand, whatever else she was covering up.
On the other side with the NSA and Snowden revelations its rather amazing anyone thinks anything is private at all. Its curious why we don't have encryption algorithms on all our personal emails by now, and hard drive expiration dates that erase anything.
You'd think the next Enron would be all over this, with systems set up to delete all damning evidence that might threaten the golden parachutes of their big stockholders when they sell the day before the fall.
So more interesting questions to me than Hillary's lunch dates and gossip about who's the father of her friend's sister's uncle's cousin's unmarried daughter.
I guess we have two legal standards for criminal prosecution in today's America...
The people who deleted emails relevant to a criminal investigation of a failed company (Enron) were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sent to jail. Why? Because it's still called fraud. Jeffrey Skilling went to jail for a long time, as he should have. Arthur Andersen LLP, arguably the finest accounting firm in the world at the time, was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for its destruction of evidence related to Enron, and the whole entity imploded. Offices all over the globe. Gone forever. Thousands of careers ruined and jobs lost. The role of an accountant is serious and represents both a private (client) responsibility and a public (licensure) responsibility. They got what they deserved.
Contrast this private episode 14 years ago with the media circus we are watching today when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton destroys her emails because she she said she wants a "private life." Yet she CHOSE to go into public life, and wants to take the next step up. She was supposedly a "public servant" as Secretary of State, for which she was handsomely paid and was supposed to faithfully serve the public and our laws. She willfully violated all this because she has declared herself above the spirit and letter of the law, responding with legalistically parsed statements that admit nothing and say nothing except "Go #$%@ yourselves" to the Congress and the American public.
This is a huge problem in our modern political culture... at all levels. Politicians and their staffs operate above the law. We all suffer when they receive implicit encouragement to communicate through alternative electronic communication channels to do the real work of the public trust. Consider that Detroit's Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to prison in 2010 for perjury and corruption charges stemming from his texting using a City of Detroit device (and please keep in mind that, at the beginning, "it was just about sex' with his mistress who was also his Chief of Staff). The only reason those texts became public is because the communications were made using City cell phones. If he'd been using a personal device, under Hillary's logic, we'd have no trail showing the depths of corruption as the "Kilpatrick Family Enterprise" (as the FBI called it) bled an already failing city dry for its own personal aggrandizement. Is that just??? Are we saying Kilpatrick was stupid to not realize that he had to use a personal cell phone to avoid getting caught while stealing? Are we saying Kilpatrick was a potential Darwin Award recipient instead of a full-fledged criminal? That's sickening.
If there were credible evidence today that President Obama kept a secret recording system in the Oval Office that transferred files to a personal server at his home in Chicago -- and that he did it so he, Michelle and Valerie Jarrett could have private conversations -- he would certainly claim executive privilege. Do you honestly think any Democrats would call on him to resign? This is the exact opposite of what happened in the events surrounding Nixon. I thought the problem wasn't the scandal itself, it was the cover-up. Does anyone detect any spirit of "sunshine" in Hillary's statements?
The Clintons have no honor, and think Hillary has a right to be President of the United States of America. If no one holds her accountable, she may well be President, while the rest of us have to live under our nation's laws. Kind of like the guy in California who produced "a disgusting internet video" that "caused" the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. But who cares about him? After all, he was a guy who was on parole and thought he could exercise his free speech. Wow, what an idiot American. He thought he could do what the Clintons do! HAHAHAHAHA!!!
Post a Comment