Clinton scandals

Historian Victor Davis Hanson asks,

Does anyone still remember Travelgate, Whitewater, Filegate, shady cattle futures, defiance of subpoenas for billing records at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, the fact that she is the only first lady in history to be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury, and the mysterious presidential pardon during her Senate campaign of convicted Puerto Rican terrorists in New York? The common denominator in all these fiascos was her assumption that she was above the law — that, and petty avarice. Or rather, Hillary always believed that progressive warriors such as herself needed the resources to do noble work and therefore should be exempt from legal scrutiny.

...Clinton also calculates that voters will not care much that she has always been a gaffe-prone and wearying public figure. She has clumsily feigned an African-American patois in front of black audiences. In her failed 2008 presidential bid, for a while she tried to construct a white-working-class persona. When angered, her voice becomes eerily shrill. In impromptu interviews she can and will say almost anything.

...When questioned about the circumstances surrounding the four Americans’ being killed in Benghazi, Clinton blurted out, “What difference — at this point, what difference does it make?” She once whined that when the Clintons left office they were broke and could barely pay the mortgages on their million-dollar-plus properties. Note the plurals.

...As secretary, she also received millions of dollars in gifts for her family’s quarter-billion-dollar-endowed Clinton Foundation from foreign heads of states and wealthy foreign nationals. Obviously, it is improper, to say the least, for the chief foreign-policy officer of the United States to solicit for her family foundation when dealing with foreign governments. Clinton’s aides must have assumed that none of those tawdry shakedown communications were recorded electronically on her private e-mails — as if checks arrived in the U.S. spontaneously without prior discussion. In fact, Hillary Clinton was the chief fundraiser for her family foundation and had the ideal platform from which to garner big checks.

...Ms. Clinton of course emphasizes her gender and, by association, feminist issues. One might ask whether she ever worried about the gender apartheid practiced by the very Middle East monarchies from which she solicited gifts. In addition, her husband’s past philandering is no longer just ancient history. It was recently reported that Bill Clinton flew more than a dozen times on the private jet (dubbed “the Lolita Express”) of convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who had a sick habit of procuring underage girls for his Caribbean-island getaways. The fact that Hillary Clinton herself, while a U.S. senator, paid female staffers substantially less than their male counterparts for the same work hardly gives her sufficient feminist credentials to negate the embarrassing fact that her husband cavorted with a convicted sexual predator and a group of underage girls. Does such hypocrisy matter? It has not mattered much in the past, given the liberal tenet of exemption: A progressive man with a large libido can mouth liberal platitudes while treating women as he pleases, on the assurance from other women that a few unfortunate Monicas or Paulas are a small price to pay for advancing abortion rights or affirmative action. If on public occasions Joe Biden in creepy fashion hovers over young girls and other men’s wives, or if Al Gore is accused of sexually harassing a masseuse, who really cares? Can’t we put up with Bill Clinton on a plane where there are frolicking teenagers if the alternative to his liberalism is a staid Ted Cruz stopping late-term abortions?

Note two facts about the Clinton scandals. One, hypocrisy is at the core of them all: lecturing about feminism, but silent about unequal pay when she was the paymaster. Or decrying the old-boy system, while ignoring her own husband’s callous treatment of women, some of them subordinate employees. Hillary sent a memo reminding State Department employees not to break the law concerning non-government e-mail correspondence that she herself so readily broke. She talks eloquently of inequality and fairness but then charges universities the sort of fees that ultimately only add to the exorbitant price of a college education.

Two, there is never an end to Clinton scandals, precisely because both Bill and Hillary assume that the media will not fully investigate what they do, and that their progressive agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them. And because their habitual expectation of government and media privilege is now four decades long, and because they have not entered ethical rehab, there will be lots more embarrassment to emerge. The latest are reports that Hillary Clinton’s youngest brother, Tony Rodham, was part of a U.S. consortium that sought a rare sweetheart mining concession from the beleaguered Haitian government, which was still reeling from the disastrous earthquake — at precisely the time it was negotiating with the U.S. government for massive American relief aid. Add it all up: Natural disaster, poor people of color, thousands of wrecked lives, an impoverished nation — and the secretary of state’s brother and a foreign mining corporation were conniving to obtain a concession to mine gold at a reduced rate from a corrupt government.

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