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We go back 19 years to William Safire’s famous column on Hillary.
Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady — a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation — is a congenital liar. …
Charles Krauthammer brings us to the present day.
She burned the tapes.
Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.
Today you don’t burn tapes. You delete e-mails. Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: “I didn’t see any reason to keep them.” After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone.
How do we know that? She says so. Were, say, Clinton Foundation contributions considered personal? No one asked. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. We have to trust her.
That’s not easy. Not just because of her history — William Safire wrote in 1996 that “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady . . . is a congenital liar” — but because of what she said in her emergency news conference on Tuesday. Among the things she listed as private were “personal communications from my husband and me.” Except that, as the Wall Street Journal reported the very same day, Bill Clinton’s spokesman said the former president has sent exactly two e-mails in his life, one to John Glenn, the other to U.S. troops in the Adriatic. …
Jonah Goldberg says it’s not following Hillary’s script.
Her disastrous press conference on Tuesday was supposed to be about her gender, not her e-mail.
In the wake of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fairly disastrous press conference at the United Nations on Tuesday, there’s only one conclusion shared by all parties: This was not how it was supposed to go.
This was supposed to be the month Clinton led with her chief selling point: her gender. She had put together a whole “I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore” speaking tour in which women’s issues — particularly the women’s issues that poll well among women who care a lot about women’s issues — would be the main subject. …
… It was all carefully scripted, because everything Hillary Clinton does is carefully scripted. Normally, that’s a figurative expression. But with Clinton, when things are carefully scripted, they are literally carefully scripted.
Jennifer Rubin says Hill is even less candid than we thought.
A scathing Time magazine piece on Hillary Clinton has this nugget:
‘For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be “private, personal records.” ’
What?! How in the world did they think not reading the e-mails to check for words that may not have been in the search terms was a legitimate way to go about this? It wasn’t, and it wasn’t designed to be. It was designed to let her say: Trust me. Only private e-mails were destroyed. …
Ed Klein says it’s Valerie who’s going after Hillary.
It’s the vast left-wing conspiracy.
Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me.
But she did so through people outside the administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the White House.
In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom, including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton Foundation. …
… The sabotage is part of an ongoing feud between the two Democrat powerhouses.
Last fall, during the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, Jarrett was heard to complain bitterly that the Clintons were turning congressmen, senators, governors and grass-root party members against Obama by portraying him as an unpopular president who was an albatross around the neck of the party.
Jarrett was said to be livid that most Democrats running for election refused to be seen campaigning with the president. She blamed the Clintons for marginalizing the president and for trying to wrestle control of the Democratic Party away from Obama.
And she vowed payback. …
And we close with another Times column. This time Maureen Dowd.
SINCE open letters to secretive and duplicitous regimes are in fashion, we would like to post an Open Letter to the Leaders of the Clinton Republic of Chappaqua:
It has come to our attention while observing your machinations during your attempted restoration that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our democracy: The importance of preserving historical records and the ill-advised gluttony of an American feminist icon wallowing in regressive Middle Eastern states’ payola.
You should seriously consider these characteristics of our nation as the Campaign-That-Must-Not-Be-Named progresses.
If you, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are willing to cite your mother’s funeral to get sympathy for ill-advisedly deleting 30,000 emails, it just makes us want to sigh: O.K., just take it. If you want it that bad, go ahead and be president and leave us in peace. (Or war, if you have your hawkish way.) You’re still idling on the runway, but we’re already jet-lagged. It’s all so drearily familiar that I know we’re only moments away from James Carville writing a column in David Brock’s Media Matters, headlined, “In Private, Hillary’s Really a Hoot.”
When you grin and call out to your supporters, like at the Emily’s List anniversary gala, “Don’t you someday want to see a woman president of the United States of America?” the answer is: Yes, it would be thrilling.
But therein lies the rub.
What is the trade-off that will be exacted by the ChappaquaRepublic for that yearned-for moment? When the Rogue State of Bill began demonizing Monica Lewinsky as a troubled stalker, you knew you could count on the complicity of feminists and Democratic women in Congress. Bill’s female cabinet members and feminist supporters had no choice but to accept the unappetizing quid pro quo: The Clintons would give women progressive public policies as long as the women didn’t assail Bill for his regressive private behavior with women. …
The cartoonists had a field day with Hillary.