March 10, 2015

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

We can’t get our eyes off the trainwreck that is the Hillary campaign. Ron Fournier is at it again.

“Follow the money.” That apocryphal phrase, attributed to Watergate whistle-blower “Deep Throat,” explains why the biggest threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential dreams is not her emails. It’s her family foundation. That’s where the money is: corporate money, foreign money, gobs of money sloshing around a vanity charity that could be renamed “Clinton Conflicts of Interest Foundation.”

What about the emails? Hillary Clinton’s secret communications cache is a bombshell deserving of full disclosure because of her assault on government transparency and electronic security. But its greatest relevancy is what the emails might reveal about any nexus between Clinton’s work at State and donations to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation from U.S. corporations and foreign nations.

Under fire, Bill Clinton said his namesake charity has “done a lot more good than harm”—hardly a ringing endorsement. One of his longest-serving advisers, a person who had worked directly for the foundation, told me the “longtime whispers of pay-to-play are going to become shouts.” This person, a Clinton loyalist and credible source, has no evidence of wrongdoing but said the media’s suspicions are warranted. “The emails are a related but secondary scandal,” the source said. “Follow the foundation money.” …

… What did these companies and countries expect in return for their cash? Did the Clintons promise any favors? Those are fair questions—not partisan questions and not media “gotcha” questions. The Clintons are responsible for the management of their foundation. Hillary Clinton is responsible for stashing her emails in a secret server. She is running for president. The rest of us should follow the money.

 

 

NY Post OpEd follows the logic.

Here’s the bottom line of the latest HillaryWorld scandals: Clinton Inc. embodies what’s wrong with America.

It’s about getting stinking rich from the inside connections forged in a life of public service.

It’s about using your “charity” and your high government office as adjuncts of your political machine.

It’s about refusing to play by the rules even as you want to set the rules for everyone else.

Start with the latest shocker, the email lunacy. You don’t get to keep your government work a secret from the government.

Anyone with a regular job gets it: Your work product belongs to the folks who sign your paycheck. How can that not be even more obvious when the signature is Uncle Sam’s?

That the question never occurred to Hillary is just one more sign of her overinflated sense of entitlement — as is the fact that she set the whole thing up right when she was taking the job.

And that none of her staff at State ever raised a question tells you what a pack of flunkies she gathered ’round herself.

(I mean, she installed the private email server in her home. Who, other than exiled Nigerian princes looking for our help, does that?) …

 

 

Peter Wehner thinks one of the worst effects of Emailgate is the all the Clinton flacks that assault our senses. 

Good grief.

Over the last few days we’ve seen one former Clinton aide and acolyte after another come out of the woodwork to defend yet another Clinton from yet another series of scandals.

It’s like a tired, awful syndicated series that’s been cancelled but just won’t go away.

In one corner, it was Lanny Davis being methodically taken apart by Fox News’s Chris Wallace. In another corner was the Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville, whining about “cockamamie right wing talking points” being responsible for this story. (The New York Times is well known, of course, for writing its stories based on right-wing talking points.) And what would Old Home Week be without the man Jon Stewart once pounded to dust, the always classy Paul Begala, insisting that voters “do not give a sh*t. They do not even give a fart” about the story that Mrs. Clinton set up a private email account while she was Secretary of State. If those three weren’t enough, there was the right-wing-hit-man-turned-left-wing-hit-man, David Brock, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to defend Mrs. Clinton.

Watching these men react like trained seals is pathetic, causing a wave of Clinton Fatigue to once again wash over America. But it’s also poignant, at least to this degree: The Clintons have a long history of pulling people, including some undoubtedly decent people, into their orbit–and once having done so, sending them out to defend the Clintons’ various and sundry corruptions. And that, in turn, has a corrupting effect on the Clintons’ defenders. …

 

 

Ed Morrissey provides an example of Clinton defenders.

If people want a peek at the defense on the e-mail scandal that will come from Team Hillary will mount — sans Hillary Clinton, at least for a while — check out this exchange between Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace and longtime Clintonland figure Lanny Davis. His very presence on FNS shows just how much Hillary wants to stand up for herself, and after watching this exchange, it’s pretty clear why. Davis insists that Hillary didn’t do anything illegal, but also that she did nothing wrong, and Wallace can’t believe it: …

 

 

Roger Simon says America is being tested.

… Okay, what’s clear is the American public is being given a test.  Are they going to elect Hillary Clinton, a serial liar who purposefully hides her communications from the public and the government she is supposed to be leading while making Foundation deals with Qatar and Algeria in the middle of a war against militant Islam?  If they do that, after everything that has been revealed and is going to be revealed, after Benghazi during which this deeply immoral woman was able to tell the father of a man who was just murdered in a now proven jihadi terror attack that “they would get that man who made that video,” we are all screwed. I don’t know what we can do.  Head to Texas and help it secede? …

 

 

And Seth Mandel says the “Hillary as champion of women” narrative is beginning to unravel. 

Hillary Clinton’s decision to base her 2016 presidential campaign on the fact that she’s a she is running into some problems. DNC vice chairwoman Donna Brazile wrote last week that “This time, Hillary will run as a woman.” Brazile said Hillary spent “much of her 2008 campaign seemingly running away from the fact that she is a woman,” and that this time she’s clearly made the decision to run toward her womanity. Whatever that means in practice, the recent Clinton Foundation scandals have converged with her unimpressive record as secretary of state to complicate the narrative.

Last week I wrote about Carly Fiorina’s longshot candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, highlighting her CPAC speech and her effective line of attack against Hillary Clinton. We’re now seeing just how effective it is. Two of Fiorina’s sound bites in particular stand out. Of Clinton, she said: “She tweets about women’s rights in this country, and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights.” And: “Like Mrs. Clinton, I too have traveled the globe. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, I know that flying is an activity, not an accomplishment.”

Those attacks have now found their way into a New York Times story on the hypocrisy of Hillary talking up women’s rights while her foundation was accepting hefty donations from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other countries with poor records on women’s rights. And it threatens to turn the Hillary campaign’s entire raison d’être into a liability.

From the Times’s Amy Chozick: …

 

 

Apologies for this day of more Hillary stuff. We promise to follow some other stories tomorrow. It is interesting though, to see the left/media trying to move her out of the way. They know she’s toxic and they need to sideline her before she’s the nominee and they go down to sure defeat. For example there is no more reliable Dem clown in the media than Eugene Robinson. The title of his column yesterday was “Is Hillary Hiding Something?” A NY Times reporter has even started to hint about Hillary’s drinking. They want her to go away.