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Roger Simon reviews Blood Feud by Edward Klein.
… And unlike the Times, Blood Feud is a compulsive read. I dare you to put it down. The book reminds you of nothing so much as an episode of Shonda Rhimes’ television series Scandal — and a particularly excessive episode at that. Even at its most seemingly illogical, Klein’s work has the ring of truth. He’s on to something, even if he hasn’t hit the bull’s eye.
The main characters here — Hillary, Michelle, Barack, Bill and, to an extraordinary extent, real “power behind the throne” Valerie Jarrett — read like a group of Borgias set free on today’s Washington, loathing each other and plotting revenge while living a lifestyle even the one percent could barely dream of.
The idea that these people could even utter the words “income inequality” is farcical. At some point they may have had political ideas of some sort — who knows — but that was in a galaxy far, far away and has been lost forever in the latest round of golf, $200,000 speeches to Arab potentates or spur-of-the-moment trips to Maui to woo Oprah at her mansion.
A lot of the book too reads like a companion piece to Hillary’s latest — well, not exactly, since no one appears to be interested in that door stopper –because most of the leaks appear to be from people anxious to differentiate Hillary from Obama. POTUS, as we know, is not exactly popular these days and anyone seeking the presidency would be well advised to separate herself from him as far as possible. This accounts for much of the amusing dish in the book, Hillary even dropping the F-bomb in front of some of her amazed old classmates from Wellesley when referring to Obama’s undeniable executive incompetence. …
… Barack Obama’s brand of narcissism seemed quite attractive to many early on with all its soaring talk of hope and change. Voters had no idea this man had only scant interest in the nitty-gritty task of governing. And the person they were really electing, as Blood Feud makes abundantly clear, was someone almost none of them had then heard of and most still haven’t — President Jarrett.
In another hint the media have had enough of Hillary’s money grabs, WaPo with a story on the almost $2 million she has sucked out of universities in the last nine months.
At least eight universities, including four public institutions, have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak on their campuses over the past year, sparking a backlash from some student groups and teachers at a time of austerity in higher education.
In one previously undisclosed transaction, the University of Connecticut — which just raised tuition by 6.5 percent — paid $251,250 for Clinton to speak on campus in April. Other examples include $300,000 to address UCLA in March and $225,000 for a speech scheduled to occur in October at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
The potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate also has been paid for speeches at the University at Buffalo, ColgateUniversity and HamiltonCollege in New York, as well as SimmonsCollege in Massachusetts and the University of Miami in Florida.
Officials at those five schools refused to say what they paid Clinton. But if she earned her standard fee of $200,000 or more, that would mean she took in at least $1.8 million in speaking income from universities over the past nine months.
Since stepping down as secretary of state in early 2013, Clinton has given dozens of paid speeches to industry conventions and Wall Street banks. But Clinton’s acceptance of high fees for university visits has drawn particularly sharp criticism, with some students and academic officials saying the expenditures are a poor use of funds at a time of steep tuition hikes and budget cuts across higher education. …
More on administration foreign policy errors from Mary Anastasia O’Grady. This time we learn how our ambassador has insulted Canada.
President Obama once promised to remake America’s image around the globe. He has kept that promise—only not in the way many voters who backed him had hoped.
Mr. Obama’s latest step in the image makeover is to tell Canada—the U.S.’s largest trading partner, largest supplier of energy and most loyal ally in war and peace—that its long-nurtured special relationship with the U.S. is not so special after all. To carry out the mission, Mr. Obama has sent a new U.S. ambassador to Ottawa.
Bruce Heyman, a former Goldman Sachs banker based in Chicago and a top Obama campaign bundler in both 2008 and 2012, may have deserved an ambassadorship for his services. But that’s what all those tiny islands in the Caribbean are for. Appointing Mr. Heyman—who is diplomatically challenged, to put it diplomatically—his top representative to Canada says a lot about what the president thinks about his northern neighbor.
Mr. Heyman made his debut in Ottawa earlier this month with a dinner speech at the National Gallery followed by a Q&A with former Canadian ambassador to Washington Frank McKenna. Mr. McKenna used the event to raise what Canada sees as troubling “irritants” in the bilateral relationship. Mr. Heyman used it to explain to Canadians how insignificant they are in the eyes of Washington. …
In 2008 the editors of the Billings, Montana paper endorsed the man who has become president petulant. They did this to show they can be just as insufferable as the bien pensants out East. At least the Billings people have come to see the error of their way and have recanted.
… The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal polls show that Americans are giving Obama lower marks than in 2006 when Iraq was going poorly for Bush and a tepid response to Hurricane Katrina sunk Bush’s ratings.
It’s not that popularity polling should be the final or even best measure of a president. There is that old saw that points out there’s a difference between doing what is right and what is popular.
For us, though, it’s the number of bungled or blown policies in the Obama administration which lead us to believe Obama has earned every bit of an abysmal approval rating.
Let’s recap some of the mistakes:
- Maybe the worst and most widespread invasion of privacy occurred when the Obama administration continued a controversial National Security Agency program of spying on millions of citizens culling their phone records to intercepting online information. The administration has done nearly nothing to safeguard civil liberties or put in safeguards to protect our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
- The Obama administration has continued to ratchet down on emissions from coal-fired power plants while giving consumers little new innovation to replace the power supply. Meanwhile, Obama continues to thwart other energy projects that might be helpful to the economy, like the Keystone XL pipeline. The war on carbon might not be so bad if indeed it was being counterbalanced by true innovation.
- Iraq was an inherited quagmire from the Bush administration. But six years later, Obama has to own the current situation which, as this is being written, looks perilously close to civil war and a complete breakdown of government in Iraq. …
Hugh Hewitt slams the Presbyterian Church’s Middle East foolishness.
Prominently featured at the website of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is an “An Open Letter of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to our American Jewish Interfaith Partners” which is signed by the denomination’s three senior officials and which begins:
We are reaching out to you after our General Assembly’s action, by a 310-303 vote, to recommend to the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions to divest from three North American corporations following extensive corporate engagement. The assembly concluded that further engagement would not bring an end to their pursuits that further the Israeli occupation in Palestine.
Read the whole thing at pcusa.org. It is gibberish, nonsense of the worst sort: deeply disingenuous double talk intended to skim over the biased proceedings which produced it. Now the PCUSA, as its members call it, has taken an official position against Israel and so I, as an elder in the PCUSA — no longer a “ruling” elder in my congregation, having wrapped up my second such stint last year — have to take a position for or against the PCUSA based on it.
Many PCUSA congregations across the country are already engaged in the process of “discerning” whether to remain within the splintering denomination, and this new assault on Israel and the virulent language employed — “occupation” — will no doubt make that process much easier for hundreds of thousands of us. If their congregations don’t leave, they will. They will not be part of the American intifada against Israel. …
An article from Andrew Malcolm sounds like bringing coals to Newcastle. Seems someone is pooping in the hallways of federal offices.
… On Wednesday, McCarthy informed the House Oversight Committee that, doggone it, a whole bunch of emails sought by Congress have just up and disappeared.
Quite a coincidence given the strange timing of a half-dozen crashed and trashed hard-drives over at the Internal Revenue Service containing subpoenaed evidence.
Fortunately, at least one EPA email survived and Government Executive’s Eric Katz found it. In the message to Denver employees, EPA Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor described several damaging incidents of inappropriate bathroom behavior, including toilet sabotage and disturbing deposits of human fecal material in adjacent hallways.
He said such material presented health hazards to fellow employees. Managers consulted with a workplace violence expert who warned that such anti-social behavior was not only unhealthy and unsafe but likely to escalate to something.
“Management is taking this situation very seriously,” Cantor wrote, “and will take whatever actions are necessary to identify and prosecute these individuals.” He asked EPA workers with any information on suspected hallway poopers to alert their supervisor.
An Environmental Impact Statement on the incidents is expected within a couple of years.