Oh No Not Another One:
The Clinton Problem.
After hours of rabid searching across the vast expanses of thought and space and things, we here at Muddle believe we’ve finally stumbled upon the perfect opening blog. What better to inaugurate our bare enterprise than a call — no, a plea! — emanating from the bottom of our collective hearts? Rhetorically speaking, nothing.
With this in mind, allow me to present to you Hillary Clinton, a person blessed with a rare (and much prized) ability. Not unlike a few of her fellow politicians (looking at you, Silvio!), Hillary has time and again been able to weather the violent shitstorms thrown her way, always somehow coming out spotless in the process. Make no mistake however, dear reader, this article in no way aims at recounting the various depraved, disgusting and corrupt actions of her beloved husband William. Rather, I will try to remind you of her own timeless brand of charm, in the hope that this country may never again suffer a Clinton in the White House.
1: A Note on Current Developments
Before we reminisce (and talk of the past there will be!), it should be noted that despite her new scandal, the former First Lady remains very much in front of current Democratic presidential polls. As always, the image she’s crafted of herself — that of a strong, talented, moral woman — appears to have hardly been affected by this latest show of incompetence. I say incompetence here, of course, purely because I cannot possibly know whether her ‘mistake’ was intentional or not (and thus deserving of these quotation marks). It is true that in a character such as her’s, cynicism and immorality should never be discarded. Nonetheless, in this as in the myriad of other cases, I shall be leaving such large claims to your judgment; the point of this exercise being purely to make sure the events aren’t forgotten, and her personality be known.
So what, exactly, happened with her emails? Plainly put, it appears Mrs. Clinton broke the law (i.e. the Federal Records Act) by having the entirety of her official, Secretary of State communications through personal email accounts. How is that bad? Well, under the spirit of, you know, government accountability (!), official communications are supposed to be owned by the state and made available to all — classified, sensitive stuff notwithstanding. In fact, this also happens to impede on that little thing called the Freedom of Information Act. If this doesn’t irritate you, then perhaps the knowledge that her emails weren’t even hosted on a cloud (like they are for us normal people) but on her own private server, conveniently located inside her home, should. It therefore follows that the fifty-five thousand emails she so graciously revealed after this story broke were of her own choosing; we have simply no way to know about any omission(s).
Now now, I am not accusing the former First Lady of anything as ghastly as, say, treason, far from it; I am simply mentioning the fact that even if she’d committed such a crime, we wouldn’t be able find out… from this side of things, anyway. More importantly, however, this latest episode fits in rather well with her previous meanderings, yet again revealing her utter contempt for rules (minor morality, law, whatever you want to call it) and tendency to answer only to her ambition — i.e. herself, I suppose.
2: The Lies
The first, (relatively) lighter and more obvious manifestations of these personality quirks are her lies. There are of course a great many of those attributable to Mrs. Clinton, as indeed is the case for a large number of politicians. What differentiates her from the political masses, however, is that her dishonesty is characterized — and overtly so — by an incredible pettiness and lack of scruple. She doesn’t just stick to traditional, baseless campaign promises, or denials of a moneyed third-party’s influence; no, Hillary is so concerned with her image that she will deceive on matters of all sizes and importance. I’ve chosen two examples, purely to give you an idea (those of you interested in reading some more should start with the funny Edmund Hillary one), the point here being that if she’s compelled to mendaciousness on these, trusting her on more serious activities may be rather risky.
First of all, it was claimed throughout her 2008 presidential run that the former First Lady came under sniper fire during her 1996 visit to Tuzla, Bosnia. Her experience with Bosnia in particular was underlined by her campaign staff as the kind of foreign policy “qualifications” that differentiated her from other candidates. As you’ve probably guessed, these claims are rather far from true. There exists actual footage showing her and her goodwill delegation (yep, she travelled with Sinbad and Sheryl Crow) greeted by a little welcome party after their landing, with no discernable hints of sniper fire. Besides revealing her as the original Brian Williams, this story may be transformed from farcical to disgusting when considering the Clinton administration’s attitude to the Bosnian war. Not only did they delay all action until 1994 (in a conflict which for the past two years had been marred by ethnic cleansings), but they waited purely because of Hillary’s sorry attempt at health-care reform — on which more will come later.
The second example has to do with the Iraq war. From 2007 onwards, declarations were made by both Clintons that Hillary had worked with Chuck Hagel (a later opponent of the war) on the 2002 resolution which acquiesced to the invasion. The problem here, obviously, was that Mrs. Clinton, far from working with Chuck, actually supported and gave an impassioned speech in favor of the White House-backed legislation (which ended up being put forward in place of Mr. Hagel’s) that partly enabled the events we now all know. In case you’re curious, the difference between these two bills was in their respective definition of acceptable causes for intervention, the Bush administration’s being, as expected, much broader. Thus her position, one she wholeheartedly defended on the senate floor, she tried a few years later not only to rescind, but to retroactively change, all purely for short-term electoral gain. Is it nasty? Perhaps. Is it stupid? Definitely.
3: Playing the Race Card
Next up in our grimy menagerie, we uncover which Democrat politicized Obama’s race during the 2008 primaries. Yes! Hillary, a person who has on many an occasion 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 first moment we begin to realize Hillary’s true political colors are not 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: Health-Care Debacle
1992. After about a decade, a hard-won consensus is finally reached in both houses on the need for health-care reform. While running for president, Bill Clinton pledges to bring just that, as well as vowing to end the conflicts erupting in former Yugoslavia, and more specifically the nascent Bosnian War — a struggle so inspired by the past it brought genocide and concentration camps back to Central Europe, leading to around 200.000 deaths (before a 1995 intervention). Up until 1994, however, the administration’s full attention is given to health-care reform, a Mrs. Clinton project. Such is its determination that Les Alpin, then secretary of defense, is ordered not to make a planned trip to Sarajevo, “lest attention be distracted from ‘Hillary’s health-care drive’”, as related in No One Left To Lie To. So what did the United States gain for all this devotion? A terrible proposal and another fifteen years without reform.
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.
5: Foreign Fundraising
A first-time visitor into the former First Lady’s dubious fundraising practices might wish to divide the problem into two distinct parts: those of the Clinton Foundation, and those of her own campaigns. We, however, will not do that, for the very good reason that donors for either tend to overlap, and a dignified donor giving solely to the foundation doesn’t really preclude the rise of conflicts of interests.
As you might have guessed, both entities’ relation to money has been plagued by a number of mini-scandals which, put together with the portrait Hillary we’ve already formed, manage to paint an even scarier picture. Not only did the former, the foundation, directly accept funding from some of the most disreputable regimes and individuals around, but the latter appears to have taken the 1996 campaign finance scandal as its blueprint for success. And yes, hints of depravity may be 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 to be 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 (!).
If you are by now still a Clinton admirer, fear not, the stuff that’s coming up next was basically made to change your mind.
6: On Her Supposed Feminism
Where should one start? The idea that Hillary Clinton appeals to feminists and women in general is largely understandable. Not only does she have a history of likeability among leftist special interest groups (she could count, for example, on the support of many African-American associations before the little 2008 Obama/Race thing [see above]), but she also appears to embody the feminist ideal perfectly. Here is a strong, independent woman, who has achieved much in a male-dominated world (and, especially: male-dominated field), while always sticking up for female empowerment. Yet there is a problem, as some might have guessed, and it lies in the third clause; whereas we can have little doubt as to her potential feminist postergirl status, her record on the actual issue of female empowerment and, effectively, feminism, leaves much to be desired. In fact, I hope no one will blame me if I describe it as absolutely fucking horrendous. Explanations below.
There are of course plenty of smaller reasons why even associating Mrs. Clinton with feminism is a terrible idea. These go from such laughable issues as her book, It Takes A Village, advocating “sexual abstinence for the young” (a proposal put to the test before publication by Bill and a young, impressionable intern), to her support of Mr. Clinton’s 1996 gay rights clampdown and short-term popularity boost, the Defense of Marriage Act. Nevertheless, as untasteful as they might be, such events pale in comparison to the true affronts, those we are unlikely to ever hear her explain (or talk about, for that matter).
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 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” purely “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 of 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: Wishful Thinking
There you have it, folks: Hillary Clinton in all her glory, a most depressing possibility for the presidency. There’s no excuse now, your hopes and dreams should be focused somewhere else.
— Simon Mercer
