Hillary Clinton’s Empire of
Dirt
The more she castigates
others, the more she convicts herself.
What have I become?
My sweetest friend.
Everyone I know Goes away in
the end.
You could have it all, My
empire of dirt.
I will let you down.
I will make you hurt.
— “Hurt,” Nine-Inch Nails
For nearly 40 years, Bill and
Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have
they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded
surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of
dirt”?
Hillary Clinton just released
a brief video about the need for women to stand up to their sexual assaulters
while demanding relief from society’s unwarranted doubts about their
allegations: “It’s not enough to condemn campus sexual assault. We need to end
campus sexual assault!” Who would not agree with that assertion?
Not long ago, she went after
hedge-fund operators and the Wall Street insiders who connive, avoid taxes, and
profit inordinately: “You see the top 25 hedge-fund managers making more than
all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often, paying a lower tax
rate!” The liberal PolitiFact rated Ms. Clinton’s assertion as true.
Ms. Clinton, during this
campaign season, has also sermonized on student loans and the crushing burden
universities are putting on American youth, to the tune of $1 trillion in
collective debt: “We need to make a quality education affordable and available
to everyone willing to work for it without saddling them with decades of debt!”
“Decades of debt” is no exaggeration.
She also deplored big-money
donations to political campaigns and the corrupting influence they have had on
presidential politics: “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and
get unaccountable money out of it once and for all — even if it takes a
constitutional amendment!”
Note the repetition of “we
need,” which I suppose includes herself.
Transparency for public
officials (“real sunshine”; “I’m trying to be as transparent as possible”) has
been another of her themes — as in the deplorable absence of it both in our
elected politicians themselves and in the manner in which our government
operates.
Almost every issue that Ms.
Clinton has raised and every position of advocacy that she now embraces are direct
refutations of either her present or her past behavior — and sometimes both.
She has also weighed in on foreign policy, defending her record, whose logical
trajectory was the present non-treaty with Iran, which she wholeheartedly
supports.
The problem with all of Ms.
Clinton’s advocacies is not that the liberal positions she supports are
unusual; indeed, her proposed solutions to these problems are standard
progressive orthodoxy.
The rub instead is that almost
every issue that Ms. Clinton has raised and every position of advocacy that she
now embraces are direct refutations of either her present or her past behavior
— and sometimes both. Surely she is aware of that?
Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual
harassments are ancient history better forgotten. But Ms. Clinton must accept
that her advocacy video about sexual assault and harassment unfortunately
dredges them back up. Do her present boilerplate professions of believing the
alleged victim amount to a sort of postmodern “I will let you down” confession?
For two decades of Bill Clinton’s political ascendance, Ms. Clinton’s own
attitude toward women who alleged that they were either harassed or sexually
assaulted by Governor and then President Bill Clinton was that they were either
delusional or gold-digging connivers. Nothing that Ms. Clinton said or did ever
suggested that Juanita Broddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, or Monica
Lewinsky — or scores of others — was anything other than a liar or an
opportunist. All these victims advanced claims as convincing as, or more so
than, the he-said/she-said campus incidents in the news, whose resolutions
apparently demand suspension of the Bill of Rights.
Did Ms. Clinton ever
remonstrate with political hitman James Carville for suggesting that Jones was
little more than a bought, trailer-trash libertine? As a lawyer, did she refuse
to defend a predator charged with the sexual assault of a girl — or muse about
her legal gymnastics that got him off?
As a professional woman and
First Lady, did she insist that White House employees — including the President
— be exemplars of gender-equality etiquette? Did she model her current proposed
code of campus sexual behavior on what once emanated from the West Wing?
Mindboggling was the variety
of charges against Bill Clinton. They represented a primer on the current
debate over what constitutes both felonious and nihilistic male aggression
against women: coerced rough sex; on-the-job roughhouse groping; demands for
humiliating ad hoc sex acts; the use of power and position by the employer to
leverage quickie, on-the-desk gratifications from young and vulnerable female
interns. In other words, Bill Clinton became iconic of just the sort of
multifaceted sexual assaults — and of male denials and conspiratorial female
efforts to demonize the victim — about which Ms. Clinton now shakes her finger.
At various stages of his life,
Bill Clinton has played the archetypal wild campus womanizer, the vain,
sexually manipulative careerist, the lecherous employer, and the immune sex
harasser, all of which current campus assault advocacy targets. Surely she
knows that?
We all understand the
principles of medieval liberal exemption. Progressives often voice abstract
anguish to win psychological absolution and political cover for their own moral
lapses and hypocrisies: The louder the condemnation, often the greater the
guilt and the need for absolution. The implosion of former senator John Edwards
was a case in point.
But in Ms. Clinton’s case she
has taken such pre-Reformation penance to a new low. Had she, after four or
five of these habitual and sordid episodes, finally, in true feminist fashion,
disconnected from Bill Clinton, she would have done far more truth-to-power
advocacy for abused women than any cheap after-the-fact video that is now
peddled to save her campaign.
Why is Ms. Clinton railing
about big money? If she is really willing to change the Constitution to end the
Big Money/Big Politics nexus, she might do two things. One, she could scold
Barack Obama for being the first presidential candidate in the history of
campaign-financing laws to have refused public funds, with the limiting and
transparent protocols that they require, in order to be freed to raise the
largest privately funded war chest in presidential campaign history — as well
as to set records as the greatest recipient of Wall Street cash. Nothing has
been more deleterious to the progressive idea of barring the piling up of
unlimited money for presidential races.
Two, she might repudiate the
enormous amounts of cash from the global financial elite that have poured into
the Clinton Foundation (whose motto is now suddenly “A Commitment to Honesty,
Transparency, and Accountability”) on the expectation of a quid quo pro from
the U.S. government.
Transparency? Ms. Clinton’s
private server and e-mail accounts will be textbook examples of what high
public officials must never do again. The agenda of her personal server and
accounts was to hide her official communications from audit and indeed from
historical appraisal itself.
Everything she has told us
about the scandal has so far proved either half true or outright false — and on
the premise that she had the clout to avoid the repercussions that lesser
offenders with fewer connections routinely face. The Clinton e-mails will rank
with the Nixon tapes as the most desperate examples of political dishonesty and
historical distortion of the last half-century.
As for now, Ms. Clinton’s
legal future for the next 16 months rests entirely on the degree of pique that
Ms. Valerie Jarrett, White House consigliere, feels in any given news cycle. If
Ms. Clinton is worried about the clout and lucre enjoyed by hedge-fund
operators — the sorts that Donald Trump routinely castigates as tax evaders and
paper shifters, in contrast to supposed men of action like himself who at least
build tall eponymous towers with their fortunes — she need not lecture the
right wing about them. Ms. Clinton lives and breathes hedge-fund money.
Here would be a better
five-point Clinton lesson: 1) Always pay the IRS the full amount of all taxes
owed on profits from market speculation. 2) Don’t allow a daughter to work for
such suspect hedge funds or, barring that, at least suggest to her that those
under 35 don’t routinely end up worth $15 million without some sort of
inequity. 3) Don’t lecture America on Wall Street profiteering until you have
advised your own daughter and son-in-law about the sources of their fortune. 4)
Don’t solicit hedge-fund profits for the Clinton Foundation. 5) Don’t speculate
in futures markets on the premise of using insider contacts to leverage a
$1,000 investment into $100,000, at the expense of someone else less connected,
and at odds variously calibrated at somewhere in the vicinity of 250 million to
one.
The vast spike in college
costs — which have risen far faster than the annual rate of inflation — is due
to the growth of administrative bloat (much of it in diversity bureaucracies),
the expansion of universities into lifestyle landscapes, from upscale rec
centers to advocacy programs and outreach (including the sort of guest
lecturing in which Ms. Clinton is paid $300,000 for a 30-minute talk), and
universities’ lack of fiscal restraint due to federally guaranteed student
loans.
If Ms. Clinton were sincere
about the plight of campus victims, she might jawbone that part-time lecturers
be treated at least with the same dignity as Wal-Mart check-out clerks and be
given pay parity with them, or that bundled student-loan interest-rate packages
should be no higher than those on used-car loans.
Her $10,000-a-minute fee for a
hack ramble is emblematic of college financial mismanagement, the effects of
which fall ultimately upon indebted students.
As for Iran and Ms. Clinton’s
record as secretary of state, history is already the judge. The disastrous U.S.
foreign policy toward Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Middle East in
general was established on her watch. Her team favored the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt, set the stage for the U.S. abdication from a once-quiet pre-ISIS
Iraq, was in charge of the “lead from behind”/ “We came, we saw, he died”
fiasco in Libya, established the security protocols in Benghazi and then
blame-gamed a video-maker for the violence, dubbed Assad a “reformer” before he
was to be red-lined out of power, estranged Israel from the U.S., invited the
Russians into the Middle East, and gave pseudo-deadlines to Iran before
dropping all the conditions that were once said to be non-negotiable requisites
for non-proliferation talks.
Many in the Democratic party
worry that Ms. Clinton’s lackluster performance so far might suggest that,
actually, she has always been a mediocre politico.
Or they privately fret that
she is not vigorous on the stump and makes someone roughly her age and in her
profession — say, Senator Elizabeth Warren (born a mere year and a half later)
— seem two decades younger by comparison. Perhaps so. But the real problem with
the Clinton candidacy is psychological.
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