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Andrew Malcolm posts on the Clintons’ hard choices.
… Ever the gallant husband, Bill Clinton was defending Hillary’s oopsey-do claims on her book tour that the couple was “dead broke” in 2001, struggling just like ordinary Americans to get mortgages on their two mansions and finance Chelsea’s private school. It wasn’t easy, Hillary said in that flawed interview with ABC News.
Like hell it wasn’t.
They walked out of the White House into multi-million dollar book contracts and fees for a single speech that exceeded several years’ earnings for most Americans. Terry McAuliffe, their political money man who’s now Virginia governor, put up more than a million as bridge loan for one house down-payment.
Hillary and Bill both boast of having millions in debts when entering private life. Which is true. But where did those debts come from? Well, uh, mountainous attorney fees for numerous actual and alleged wrongdoings while occupying the Oval Office and other rooms.
One of the more humorous evergreen characteristics of Democrats in politics is their genetic need to claim humble beginnings and to apologize for being rich beyond the wildest dreams of the little people they claim to so devotedly defend. …
Hillary Clinton’s defense of a child rapist in 1975 gets the Continetti treatment. And you can listen to newly unearthed tapes with Hillary laughing about her defense strategy.
The facts are these. In 1975, before she married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham defended a child rapist in Arkansas court. She was not a public defender. No one ordered her to take the case. An ambitious young lawyer, she was asked by a friend if she would represent the accused, and she agreed. And her defense was successful. Attacking the credibility of the 12-year-old victim on the one hand, and questioning the chain of evidence on another, Clinton got a plea-bargain for her client. He served ten months in prison, and died in 1992. The victim, now 52, has had her life irrevocably altered—for the worse.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, for an Esquire profile of rising political stars, Hillary Clinton and her husband agreed to a series of interviews with the Arkansas journalist Roy Reed. Reed and Hillary Clinton discussed at some length her defense of the child rapist, and in the course of that discussion she bragged and laughed about the case, implied she had known her client was guilty, and said her “faith in polygraphs” was forever destroyed when she saw that her client had taken one and passed. Reed’s article was never published. His tapes of the interviews were later donated to the University of Arkansas. Where they remained, gathering dust. …
Jennifer Rubin says Hillary was part and parcel of the administration’s Iraq policy.
As I have written, the Obama/Hillary Clinton cover story that Iraq wouldn’t let troops stay behind (or even more outlandishly that the George W. Bush administration put Bush’s successor in a position where the United States “had” to get out) is at odds with reality.
A reader points out the Obama/Clinton cover story was recently blown up by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Graham, along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), had gone to Iraq on behalf of the administration trying to secure a stay-behind force. Take three minutes to listen to Graham’s blow-by-blow account. Three things are clear:
The principal Iraq leaders all agreed to a stay-behind force and warned the administration not to bring the issue up with its parliament.
When Graham asked Gen. [Martin] Dempsey in the discussion how many forces we would have, he had no clear answer.
The number of troops was reduced not by Iraq, but by the White House.
Obama then insisted he had to go to parliament and without its approval (which wasn’t forthcoming) it was impossible to leave troops – any number — behind. In all of this, Graham points out that the administration “got the answer they wanted.” Remember this was a campaign promise — to get all the troops out. Obama was to run for reelection as the guy who ended wars and had decimated al-Qaeda. (Recently Obama decided — with his policy in shambles — that parliament didn’t need to vote on an immunity deal for our 300 advisers.) …
Peggy Noonan writes on Hillary and her book.
… Mrs. Clinton seems to have a peculiar and unattractive relationship with money. She wants it and she doesn’t want you to know. She also appears to think she’s entitled to it, as a public servant who operated at high levels. But public servants now are less like servants than bosses.
When an interviewer compared her to Mitt Romney in terms of wealth, she got a stony look. That is a “false equivalency,” she said. You could see she feels she should not be compared to a wealthy Republican because she’s liberal and therefore stands for the little guy. So she can be rich and should not be criticized, while rich people who have the wrong policies—that would be Republicans—are “the rich” and can be scorned and shamed. This is seen by some as hypocrisy but is more like smugness. …
… As for the book, it is actually the first I have encountered that was written so a politician could say, “I wrote about this at length in my book.” It exists to offer a template for various narratives and allow her to suggest she’s already well covered the issue at hand, which the interviewer would know if he were better informed.
It is written in the style of the current Ladies’ Home Journal in that it patronizes even as it panders. It is an extended attempt to speak “their language,” the language of a huge imagined audience of women. There are silver linings of defeat. She brims with ideas, advocates, gets to yes, chooses her own team. There are clear-eyed assessments and daunting challenges. The State Department neighborhood is known as “Foggy Bottom.” She proudly quotes a speech she gave in 2008. “You will always find me on the front lines of democracy—fighting for the future.”
Ladies and gentleman, that is the authentic sound of 2016. Shoot me now.
Why do Democratic politicians talk like this about themselves, putting themselves and their drama at the ego-filled center, instead of policy ideas, larger meanings, the actual state of the country? In this she is just like Barack Obama.
Free Beacon reports UNLV students incensed over Hillary Clinton’s speaker’s fee.
The University of Nevada-Las Vegas is set to host Hillary Clinton on October 13 as their speaker for their UNLV Annual Foundation Dinner. Clinton will be paid $225,000 to address attendees at the fundraiser. Her sky-high speaking fee has raised eyebrows and caused a stir on the UNLV campus.
UNLV student government leaders expressed their outrage at the university’s decision to pay the former Secretary of State such a hefty fee. “We really appreciate anybody who would come to raise money for the university, but anybody who is being paid $225,000 to come speak- we think that’s a little bit outrageous. And we would like Secretary Clinton, respectfully, to gracefully return the money back to the university or to the foundation,” Daniel Waqar, Public Relations Director for the UNLV Student Government, told Jon Ralston on Ralston Reports.
UNLV Student Body President Elias Benjelloun agreed and weighed in on Clinton’s controversial speaking fee. “We’re excited that Hillary Clinton would come to the university to fundraise on behalf of our university. We’re excited anyone wants to come to UNLV and fundraise on our behalf. When we heard $225,000, we weren’t so thrilled…We’d hope that Hillary Clinton…returns part or whole of the amount she receives for speaking,” he said.
Carl Cannon posts on the 15 most annoying political phrases.
… 2. “AT THE END OF THE DAY” When Bill and Hillary Clinton arrived on the national scene, they brought pizazz to politics. They also popularized this unfortunate phrase. “At the end of the day” is simultaneously addictive and grating. Its first usage can be traced to 1826, although it really caught on in the 1990s. In Britain, it so offended BBC host Vanessa Feltz that she issued a fatwa against the phrase, which she rescinded when no guest was able to speak aloud without using it. In this country, it quickly spread beyond the Clinton circle. Everyone says it now: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, baseball players, football coaches, prosecutors, bartenders, movie stars. In 2004, an organization called The Plain English Campaign surveyed its members in 70 countries and pronounced it “the most irritating phrase in the English language.”
1. “FOLKS” U.S. presidents love this word, which they find, well, folksy. It’s been invoked by our chief executives some 4,400 times since Herbert Hoover occupied the Oval Office. Bill Clinton loved “folks” so much he used it publicly eight times during his last month in office. But it’s proliferating. George W. Bush used it 21 times in his first month as president. Then he started misusing it. His most discordant example was his reference to “al-Qaeda, the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th.” There must be something in the White House water supply because Obama matched Bush’s January-February 2001 record by saying “folks” 21 times in only two debates with Mitt Romney. The first time he used it in the Oct. 22, 2012, debate was the most jarring. Discussing military intervention in Syria, Obama said he wanted to make sure “we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or allies in the region.” At least he didn’t say, “Look, frankly, at the end of the day—as Ronald Reagan knew—Syria is a no-brainer.”