7 Things You Need to Know about Hillary Clinton
Might as well know who you’re voting for.
Rejoice, citizens, the champion of the Left has arrived at last! May she save us from Republican tyranny and its robber baron fanatics. Yes, the sensible Democrats are saved — for another four years at least… and yet, despite the praise, no one seems to be able to properly answer the most important question: who is Hillary Clinton, really? We’ve heard many empty claims over the past few days, details of everything from her status as defender of women’s empowerment, to common man’s candidate, along with many wonderful acts of heroism in between.
Such a mess, to be sure. To clear the confusion, we here at Muddle have devised a populist appeal of our own and made a short list of the necessary Hillary facts, compiled for your personal enjoyment. Indeed, if there are 3 words by which you should remember the former First Lady, then they may well be corruption, cynicism, and incompetence. (The full and undoubtedly boring article may be found here.) Good luck!
1 — She Lies… all the Time.
Like many of her fellow politicians, Mrs. Clinton has taken a liking to the great art of deception. Unlike most of her fellow politicians, however, Mrs. Clinton has been found to lie about matters of all size and importance. It is little wonder people say (and she sometimes does too) that no one really knows her, for here is a person who is just as liable to deceive on her own name’s origins, or claim she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire, as she is to falsify her voting (and stance) record on the Iraq War. That these are just three examples — out of many, many more — should make the average sane person question her dependability. The real importance nonetheless lies (excuse the pun) in the following question: why would anyone ever resort to such mendaciousness? The answer is all too easy I’m afraid. Truth is, each and every one of these lies has helped her image in the short term. Strike one for cynicism!
2 — She Changes Political Stance… all the Time
I suppose this one comes hand in hand with the previous point, but I find its sheer vulgarity deserving of special mention. Hillary changes her political stance whenever that suits her (and us, I guess). Now, her supporters will undoubtedly try to portray these undulations as examples of her capacity to ‘grow’, ‘improve’, or like the flower ‘bloom’ (ok, maybe not that last one); yet, I will ask you to keep an open mind and answer me this: does that not show an absolute lack of ideals? Consider the following: when, at the close of her husband’s presidency, Mrs. Clinton proudly writes that “welfare rolls had dropped 60 percent” because — in large part thanks to her — anything closely resembling the desolation that is American social security was rolled back, does that not seem like the polar opposite of her current ‘people first’ policy line?
Well it is, and also far from the only issue she’s wobbled on. She has, amongst other things, supported gay-bashing legislation, then rescinded her position; proudly defended the Iraq invasion on the senate floor, then claimed she didn’t; stopped, for years, all US intervention in the ethnic-cleansed Bosnian War (and did the same some time after in similarly genocidal Kosovo) to pursue her doomed healthcare project, then rescinded when said project collapsed, etc, etc… You get the point. Strike two for cynicism!
3 — She Played the Race Card on Obama
Not only has the former First Lady regularly shown extreme support for the drug war and mass incarceration, but she actually was the first to make Obama’s race an issue during the 2008 campaign. Yes! Hillary, a person who has on many occasions been applauded for giving well-timed, and essentially empty, speeches during the tenser moments of this country’s unfortunate ethnic relations, has actually run a campaign whose strategy it was to belittle an opponent by pointing out his race. Now, I’m not going to pretend I know whether or not the former First Lady is racist, though in my humble opinion she most likely isn’t. What she is, however, is willing to do anything to placate her overwhelming ambition (or what others would probably describe as her ‘greatness’), including the borrowing of insinuations usually reserved for politicians we’d have no problem describing as, hmm, bastards. This point also marks the moment you should realize Hillary’s true political colors aren’t exactly on the liberal spectrum. Neither are they really conservative, mind you — she’s just precisely the kind of transparent expected of your average opportunist.
4 — She’s Incompetent (Internationally)
Should we choose not to pay attention to her ample influence on Bill’s Bosnian and Kosovar cock-ups, or even her stand in favor of the Iraq invasion, then we’re left with her tenure as Secretary of State — where even a cursory evaluation is enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth. What, if anything, can be labeled a success? You will surely notice that what her supporters call accomplishments are in fact nothing more than wishful thinking. Her supposed reorientation of American foreign policy towards ‘smart-power’ (a historical perspective would undoubtedly make this term even funnier than it already is) has, supposing an actual change, done nothing more than severely weaken US interests, and done so everywhere. As for the other cases, the ‘reset’ with Russia, as well as the Libyan, Egyptian, and Syrian debacles, all account for some serious mismanagement. Granted, much of this may not have been her fault, and the president’s own policy line (or lack thereof) may be to blame. Her record is nonetheless characterized by a staggering lack of achievement.
5 — She’s Incompetent (Domestically)
Did you know: America had to wait until 2010 for health-care reform because of Mrs. Clinton? Oh yeah. In 1992, when consensus had finally been reached in both houses on the need for reform, newly elected Bill Clinton left its pursuit to his wife. What did she do? Well, in order to remedy the country’s 40 million uninsured inhabitants (!), Mrs. Clinton rejected a ‘single-player’ plan put forward by a group of Harvard Medical School doctors — though it was deemed by the Budget Office to be the most cost-effective (as well as all-inclusive) — and instead opted for a ‘managed-competition’ scheme which effectively “embodied the worst of bureaucracy and the worst of ‘free-enterprise’” (in itself not entirely different from what we got from Obamacare, but I digress). Her plan actually guaranteed the five biggest insurance conglomerates’ survival while forcing out small and medium ones, something that, left to itself, the system eventually made happen anyway. Yet the proposed reform was so complex and costly Congress could never pass it. Hillary, it is worth noting, blamed the insurance companies for this failure, never once mentioning the fact that those lobbying against her were never true ‘fat cats’, but smaller businesses. Silly, no?
And that’s exactly the problem. Not only was her plan a paradigm of incompetence (if not cynicism), but she somehow made it seem like the reform collapsed entirely because of insurance firms! Absolutely nothing in this story (one she will likely soon describe as ‘valuable experience’) should make anyone want her as candidate, let alone president.
6 — She’s the Farthest Possible Thing from a Feminist
Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Sally Perdue, etc… What these ladies have in common, besides engaging at one time or another in sexual conduct with one William Jefferson Clinton, was that they all felt the force of his degrading, humiliating libel whenever they spoke out. The reason Monica is famous is simply that she possessed proof of her having tickled the president’s fancy, so to speak: recorded phone conversations, and a blue dress. As it happens, those assets saved her from the president’s “rapid-response team”; his personal defamation machine. This group appears to have been a staple of Clintonian political life, and former aide Dick Morris points out that as early as 1992, some “$100,000 of campaign money, […], was used in hiring private detectives to go into the personal lives of women who were alleged to have had sex with Bill Clinton […] to develop compromising material — blackmailing information, basically — to coerce them into signing affidavits saying they did not [have sex with Bill Clinton]”.
As such, one can understand why the others on our list (above) were not as fortunate as Ms. Lewinsky: Gennifer Flowers was portrayed as a money-grabbing liar (and severely hinted at being a woman of disrepute), Kathleen Willey, two-days before her testimony, was threatened by a private investigator — who later came out and basically confessed the fact — after having her car tires ruined and cat stolen… need I say more? Oh, and did I mention Juanita Broaddrick says she was raped!?
The details for each case can be found without too much difficulty online (something I urge you to do, should further evidence be required for your convincing), and appear to bear the same eerie gutter inclinations. How this affects our view of Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t be too hard to deduce. While she is sometimes referred to as directly involved in her husband’s attack team (see the Gennifer Flower case, for example), our disgust should be satisfied solely with the knowledge that she supported and stood by Mr. Clinton as his deeds went unpunished… and his life never really changed. So why would Hillary ever let herself be a part of her husband’s sordid affairs? At this point you should be able to answer yourself: an overwhelming ambition, and utter contempt for anyone but herself. Those aren’t exactly ideal personality traits for the political life (or are they?).
7 — She’s a Never-Ending Corruption Scandal
Both the Clinton campaigns and the Clinton Foundation have been plagued by a number of mini-scandals which, put together with the portrait of Hillary we’ve already formed, manage to paint an even scarier picture. Not only did the latter directly accept funding from some of the most disreputable regimes and individuals around, but the former appear to have taken the 1996 campaign finance scandal as their blueprint for success. And yes, hints of depravity are further found in the knowledge that both offenses are, in fact, repeats of earlier transgressions.
In 2009, after finally being forced to disclose its list of contributors a year earlier, the Clinton Foundation proceeded to ban foreign donations. This ban, the result of Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State (some must have thought the potential conflicts of interest too obvious), was lifted when she stepped down in 2013, and is now again the question of much worthy criticism. What is truly incomprehensible, and as such shows contempt for common intelligence, is how she would conclude that anyone who thinks these donations are dangerous during her time in office, would suddenly have no problem if they were made before (the same may be asked of their — future — promise). And yet that’s exactly what she’s doing, in that charming, completely unjustifiable way of hers.
The other affair is a bit more complicated, and involves things one usually expects are reserved for surprisingly wealthy, cash-based businesses operating in poorer neighborhoods. In a manner mirroring the (hopefully) famous 1996 China-gate scandal, irregularities were found in the contributions of one former fugitive, Norman Hsu, who reportedly bundled donations of astoundingly high amounts from poorer Chinese-American families. Obviously, not much came out of it, as proving an insider’s absolute guilt is rather hard to do in these cases, and unlike Bill-circa-1996 Hillary never got the scrutiny associated with winning the presidency (though the China-gate scandal started with corruption reports in congress). Should you feel the need to remember anything about the original affair, then know that during the investigation 120 people connected with China-gate either fled the country or pleaded the fifth, and that the presidential campaign received large donations from Buddhist nuns who’d taken a vow of poverty (!). Whatever it’ll be this time, I’m sure we can count on it being fantastic.
— Simon Mercer (@tiddlebits)
