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Time to have a Hillary day. We’ll let the mainstream left start us out. Here’s Maureen Dowd.
… Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.
Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.
Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.
The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.
Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight. …
… Hillary’s inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can’t distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.
Money-grubbing is always the ugly place with the Clintons, who have devoured $2.1 billion in contributions since 1992 to their political campaigns, family foundation and philanthropies, according to The Old (Good) NewRepublic. …
… what Republicans say about government is true of the Clintons: They really do believe that your money belongs to them.
Someday, they should give their tin cup to the Smithsonian. It’s one of the wonders of the world.
Kimberley Strassel wants to call a spade a spade. She says the Clinton Foundation is just a political action committee or PAC.
Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.
With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.
Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.
Oh sure, the foundation doles out grants for this and that cause. But they don’t rank next to the annual Bill Clinton show—the Clinton Global Initiative event—to which he summons heads of state and basks for a media week as post-presidential statesman. This is an organization that in 2013 spent $8.5 million in travel expenses alone, ferrying the Clintons to headliner events. Those keep Mrs. Clinton in the news, which helps when you want to be president.
It’s a body that exists to keep the Clinton political team intact in between elections, working for the Clintons’ political benefit. …
Matthew Continetti weighs in.
The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has quietly dropped its ban on foreign contributions and is accepting donations from the governments of “the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.” The Journal’s conclusion: Since 2001 “the foundation has raised at least $48 million from overseas governments.”
Needless to say, the gargantuan troll-like conflict of interest that arises as soon as the foundation of the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States begins accepting money from overseas is apparent to every sentient being on the planet except members of the Clinton family and the growing number of advisers, consultants, strategists, pollsters, groupies, allies, and hangers-on whose livelihood depends on that family’s political success. “These contributions,” the foundation said in a statement to the Journal, “are helping improve the lives of millions of people across the world, for which we are grateful.”
What I love about this statement is its flip shamelessness, the way in which its airy sentimental public relations gobbledygook is both a denial of what is obviously a corrupt practice and an implicit endorsement of it. …
Jennifer Rubin too.
… Clinton behaves as she does because the press enables her by playing down the significance of her ethical obtuseness. Why stop if she can get away with virtually anything? It’s not a double standard so much as no standards being applied to her. She is sui generis and therefore is not only coddled but also praised for philanthropy and ultimately endorsed as the great defender of the weak and poor. All ethical judgment is suspended by those who whip themselves into outrage over the most trivial offense by other pols. In some parallel universe, some liberal pundit would declare that years of ethical slumming and unbridled greed make Clinton unfit for high office. Period.
This is a test of sorts for the Democratic Party: Is it so afraid of the Clintons and so lacking in any reasonable alternative to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy that it and all potential rivals will remain mum about this? Oh, let’s not kid ourselves. The people who raised a stink about Mitt Romney’s blind trust that had Cayman Islands mutual funds will continue to treat her as political royalty.
And Rubin says it is Hillary that should be disqualified, not Scott Walker.
… I have not heard Hillary Clinton denounce the leaks from the administration badmouthing the prime minister of Israel. She has not criticized the president for misleading Americans that they could keep their health-care insurance and their doctors. She did not decry the president’s assertion that gunning down Jews in a kosher market in France was “random.” She never condemned the remarks of former Middle East negotiator Martin Indyk blaming Israel for the breakdown in peace talks or of her successor in suggesting that America couldn’t protect Israel or stave off boycotts of Israel if it didn’t make peace with the Palestinians. And let’s not get started on all the idiotic utterances Vice President Joe Biden has made. While President George W. Bush was in office, Clinton never denounced a host of comments questioning his motives, honesty, etc. Frankly, she has not been asked about such things because, well, why would she have to answer for everyone in her party who ever said something off-putting? If they can drag her into an interview, the media should ask her all these questions and more. If she refuses to answer, out of the race, they must declare! Yeah. Right.
Forget comments about others’ comments. Clinton won’t tell us — for she is in perpetual hiding — what she thinks about the compelling issues of the day. She can’t give her opinion on the Keystone XL pipeline. Anyone ask her if she thinks we are winning the war against the Islamic State, if we have improved our standing with Arab allies, if we have violated our promise to Ukraine to provide security in exchange for having given up its nukes, if Iran can be allowed to just “unplug” its centrifuges as the U.S. negotiators are apparently suggesting, or her opinion on any of hundreds of other knotty foreign or domestic issues? Isn’t it pure cowardice for her to remain silent about an imminent deal that would leave Iran with thousands of centrifuges? Really, now is the time for candor and leadership. Knowing how untenable a nuclear-armed Iran would be, her silence is irresponsible. I wonder why the media aren’t pestering her for her position and decrying her silence as disqualifying for the job as commander in chief. …
Eliana Johnson has more on the Brock hissy fit.
There isn’t even a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign yet, and already the sort of vicious infighting that brought down her 2008 campaign is underway. It sprang to the surface on Monday when David Brock, the founder of the liberal group Media Matters as well as the pro-Clinton PACAmericanBridge angrily resigned his board membership at another pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action. Like the political-action committees that have been established in recent months by the potential Republican candidates, from Jeb Bush to Chris Christie to Scott Walker, a trio of pro-Clinton groups, Media Matters, American Bridge, and Priorities USA, are together serving as a nascent campaign apparatus, doing fundraising and opposition research and hiring in top Democratic staffers. …
And we close with the liberal media. Ron Fournier gets his licks.
This is sleazy and stupid. Just as Hillary Clinton is getting ready to run for president again, her family’s charitable foundation secretly lifted a ban on accepting money from foreign governments.
The Wall Street Journal discovered the ethical breach during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. “Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany, and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL Pipline,” reported James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus.
This is sleazy because of the clear conflicts of interest. What do these foreign countries expect in exchange for their donations? What pressure would Clinton face as president to return financial favors? …