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The cartoonists have a special day of fun with the Clinton campaign.
Ron Fournier, left/liberal, from The National Journal continues the charge against H.Clinton.
I don’t believe her.
I don’t believe Hillary Rodham Clinton when she says—as she did at a brief news conference on Tuesday—that she has no control over the release of her State Department email. “They’re not mine. They belong to the State Department.”
I don’t believe her because a person’s actions are more revealing than words: She kept her government email on a secret server and, only under pressure from Congress, returned less than half of them to the State Department. She deleted the rest. She considered them hers.
I don’t believe her when she says, “I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in those being released than I do.”
I don’t believe her because I’ve covered the Clintons since the 1980s and know how dedicated they are to what former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry called “telling the truth slowly.” The fact is that she would rather delay the document dump until early 2016—and then have the email released on a single day to overwhelm the media and allow her to declare herself exonerated. That was her strategic choice, Clinton advisers confirmed for me, until a federal judge ordered the State Department on Tuesday to release the email in stages. …
Roger Simon wonders if Sid Vicious will upend the Clinton campaign.
Another shoe, a big one this time, dropped in the endless Benghazi-missing-emails-erased-servers-what-difference-does-it-make controversy that the Clintonistas are trying so hard to push under the rug before it upends Dame Hillary’s presidential campaign. And the scoop comes, once again, from the New York Times, of all places, not some rascally website run by rightwing lunatics like this one.
Emails have surfaced from long-time Clinton bag man Sid Blumenthal indicating the whole Libya debacle was instigated by a cast of sleazy lowlife profiteers out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Smarmy Sid was pumping info from this dramatis personae to Hillary (at more than one email address) about goings on in that benighted country and our then secretary of state believed him — at least most of the time — passing his “knowledge” on to her underlings.
And this is a woman who wants to be president?
We know the results of this insider information: Gaddafi gone, four Americans killed in Benghazi, including an ambassador, with Libya a massively failed state overrun by ISIS goons who lop the heads off Christians by the seaside for sport. Good work, Hillary. Good work, Sid. …
Paul Mirengoff has more on the curious Clinton connection to Sid Blumenthal.
… Blumenthal reprised his role as Clinton hatchet man during the 2008 campaign. Team Obama came to despise Blumenthal so much that President Obama barred Hillary Clinton from giving him a spot at the State Department.
Which brings us to 2011 and Libya. According to the New York Times account, a group of U.S. businessmen who hoped to do business in post-Qaddafi Libya retained Blumenthal. From all that appears, the Clintons’ hatchet man had zero experience with Libya or with the businesses the Americans hoped to establish there.
Plainly, Blumenthal was retained because of his connection to Secretary of State Clinton. The Times points out that the projects contemplated by the U.S. businessmen — creating hospitals and building schools — would have required State Department sign off (but they never got that far).
Blumenthal began writing memos to Hillary Clinton about the situation in Libya. The existence of such memos became known due to the efforts of a Romanian hacker. Otherwise, given Hillary’s document non-retention policy, the memos probably would never have come to light.
According to the Times, Blumenthal sent at least 25 Libya memos to Hillary. One of them praised the efforts of Libya’s new prime minister to stabilize his government by choosing officials experienced in dealing with Western governments and businesses. …
Jennifer Rubin posts on the Clintons’ “blizzard of malfeasance.”
Perhaps Hillary Clinton is counting on the number of scandals, untruths and misdeeds to numb the public and media at some point. It’s not a bad strategy given the stuff that seems to wash up on the shore from the Clintons each day.
Recall what we already know: She kept a private server at her home in violation of State Department policy. She wiped the server clean so no third party could examine more than 30,000 e-mails. She signed an agreement with the administration promising to disclose potential conflicts regarding her husband’s speeches; she violated it repeatedly. Her foundation continued to receive foreign donations and in some cases pay for Bill Clinton’s speeches while Hillary Clinton was in office. The foundation has been described by a charity watchdog as a sort of slush fund whereby those wanting to gain access and favors to a president-in-waiting could contribute (with a tax write-off!). Numerous firms (including a Russian purchaser of critical uranium) and countries from whom the Clintons received speaking fees and/or contributions to the foundation wound up with business before the administration. The foundation in turn gave her visibility, paid for exorbitant travel and employed her cronies. That catches us up to this week.
So far — and it is only Tuesday — we have learned that despite her lawyer’s representations to the contrary, Hillary Clinton used yet another private e-mail address. Those e-mails (the ones not destroyed) that were turned over to the State Department are not going to be made public until January 2016. So much for coming clean any time soon. And now to top it off we learn famous Clinton flunky Sid Blumenthal, who was barred from working at the State Department, was busy writing policy memos for the secretary. The New York Times reports: …
From NY Post Page Six we learn that Chelsea is driving away Clinton Foundation staff.
Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she’s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, sources say.
Several top staffers have left the foundation since Chelsea came on board as vice chairman in 2011.
“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”
Onetime CEO Bruce Lindsey was pushed upstairs to the position of chairman of the board two years ago, so that Chelsea could bring in her McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman.
“He [Braverman] was her boy, but he tried to hire his own communications professional and actually tried to run the place. He didn’t understand that that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing,” said my source. “He was pushed out.” …
Looking forward to the 2016 vote, John Podhoretz wonders if the “ick factor” will doom Hillary and the Dems.
… At that point, a few million votes either way might be likely to decide the outcome.
That’s when the get-out-the-vote skills of the campaigns will come into play — as well as certain intangibles that play a key role in helping those last few million voters who may or may not go to the polls or have not yet decided make up their minds.
One of those is something you might call “the ick factor.” What kind of association does the candidate’s name conjure up? Is it positive or negative?
Democrats spent most of 2012 raising the ick factor associated with Mitt Romney’s name — condemning the supposed evils of his investment banking firm, publicizing his privately uttered remark that 47 percent of the electorate had become wards of the state, raising questions about his essential character because he was mean to a kid in high school and once put the family dog in a carrier on the roof of his car.
In this respect, Republicans are ahead of the game. Hillary is beginning her trek to November 2016 with a built-in “ick factor” regarding her essential truthfulness and the sense that she spends her life dancing around and about ethical lines.
Now, there will be a Republican nominee, and what was done to Romney will be done to him to the extent possible.
So what we may have, as Election Day nears, is a choice between relatively unattractive options. What’s far from clear is how Hillary can make herself even remotely attractive from here on in to anyone who isn’t already in her camp.
The tarnishment is permanent. The Clinton brand is damaged. The question is whether it’s going to tarnish the Democratic Party.
Spengler asks if the American people are as corrupt as the Clintons.
I have been reading Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash with brief pauses to wipe the puke off the computer screen. For the past fifteen years, there has been no sewer too stinky for Bill and Hillary to bathe in. Most of Schweizer’s research has already made the mainstream media, but the sheer mass of it still amazes. It’s not one malfeasance or three, but an unbroken pattern of overtly corrupt behavior trading half-million-dollar speaking fees and multi-million-dollar payoffs to the Clintons’ foundation in return for billion-dollar mining concessions and corporate takeovers staged by the most revolting gangsters in the jungle of Third World governance. The English language needs a word like the Yiddish term “chutzpah” to describe them, but without the connotation of modesty and discretion.
What kind of people are we Americans, that we allow these kleptocrat’s hirelings to persist in public life? The answer, I fear, is that we have become corrupt ourselves. I’ve seen enough corruption in the Third World to know that it requires the consent of the governed. …
… As Schweizer reports, America’s favorite power couple made millions from Kazakhstan dictator Nurslatan Nazarbayev. In 2005 Bill came to the homeland of Borat with Canadian penny-stock speculator Frank Giustra. Giustra’s shell company UrAsia Energy, a paper entity with no track record, beat out bigger competition to scupper Kazakhstan”s uranium mining concession. Bill endorsed Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe. a human rights organization founded by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, despite Nazarbeayev’s execrable human rights record. Senator Hillary Clinton lifted her previous objection to Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the organization. …
… Americans are becoming a nation of hustlers. 87% of men of working age used to belong to the labor force. Now it’s down to 70%. …
… Democracy exists to give people the kind of government they deserve. If the American people do not have the moral fibre to extirpate corruption on the Clinton scale, they will deserve what’s coming to them.