To Play the Queen: The Case Against Hillary Clinton - Part 2.

To Play the Queen.

The case against Hillary Clinton - Part 2.

During the time I have spent writing this, the second part of the précis of a case against Hillary Clinton, an American friend and occasional correspondent - and a potential Clinton voter - posed me three questions, which can be fairly summarised as follows:

1) Is it not both unfair and irrelevant to focus so much of my argument on Clinton's personal life?

2) Is it not the case that her tenure as Secretary of State has given her the experience necessary to manage the office of President?

3) Would it not be good for the United States to elect its first female president and, more broadly, is she not likely to be better than anyone (Bachman, Bush, Cain, Christie, Paul, Ryan, etc.) running as a Republican?

The sentiment of these questions is more important than the content because it mirrors that expressed by the supporters and defenders of Bill Clinton throughout his tenure as president, and because we are likely to see similar arguments proffered by the votaries of Hillary Clinton. They, like their forebears in the nineties, will almost certainly claim (with hurt in their eyes and pain in their voices) that those who hold and express views like my own are demonizing their preferred candidate who, let's not forget, "has done so much for us!"

My first response went something like this: If you can look at the charges put by myself and others and still hold the view that they are vulgar personal attacks, and that they bear no relevance to Ms Clinton's political career and aspirations, then that is very much your problem, and you will likely be rewarded with exactly what you deserve.

That said, and in case my answer be deemed to evasive or dismissive, I intend to incorporate more detailed answers to these questions within the next – and final – part of this series. If by its conclusion the reader feels that any of the above have been left unanswered, then either I have failed in my task, or you have failed in yours.

So, without any further meandering:

6) The Brothers Rodham.

"If my sister doesn’t end up with the nomination, I gotta take a look at who I’m gonna vote for.”

So said Tony Rodham to a reporter from the LA Times, who found him stewing over a pint at a bar opposite the Washington hotel which was playing host to the Democratic rules committee.

To the uninitiated, this might seem a trivial anecdote; an expression of brotherly bias, and nothing more. To those on the Clinton staff, a Rodham brother mouthing off to a journalist is seen as a minor crisis.

Never mind that his preferred candidate, should Hillary not get the Democratic nomination, was John McCain or Bob Barr (both Republicans, and the ease with which a Clinton or a Rodham can make the transition from Democrat to Republican is a theme which runs throughout both houses); the Rodham brothers are bad news.

If one looks through newspaper archives or on the internet, one is struck by how many gaffes and scandals and sinister dealings that Tony and Hugh Rodham are associated with. That their plans and designs almost always end in failure is testament to their incompetence, for which the United States owes a debt of gratitude to nature, which has been so unkind to them.

One of the most amusing and well known episodes came when the brothers put their collective brain to the task of creating and orchestrating what we are obliged to call a 'get rich quick' scheme. This involved the peculiar and, at first glance, innocuous enterprise of growing hazelnuts in the former Soviet state of Georgia, and exporting them to the West.

In a feat befitting of a comic relief duet, this banal venture caused a major diplomatic scandal.

The brothers had, more by accident than design, embroiled themselves in the complex world of post-Soviet politics. The Clinton administration had gone to considerable efforts to support the then-president of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze, who was accommodating of US interests in the region.

The Rodham brothers, apparently ignorant of this delicate state of affairs, bypassed the government of Georgia and went instead to the president's great rival, the pro-Russian Aslan Abashidze (a man who more closely resembles an egg than a lion). Abashidze took the opportunity to flaunt what he claimed was the personal support of Bill Clinton, which unsettled Shevardnadze, and this in turn compromised relations between the US and Georgia.

Tony Rodham seems to have acted as the puppet of a disreputable Georgian gentleman named Vasili Patarkalishvili. This is the man responsible for the conception of the hazelnut plan, as well as the founder of a bank which opened just long enough to take hundreds of thousands of dollars before closing (with the money still somewhere inside), and who attempted to use Tony's influence to arrange a meeting between Bill Clinton and the then-mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov, with the aim of winning Luzhkov's support for another shady scheme involving smart debit cards. Luzhkov, incidentally, was rumoured to have links to mobsters, and allegedly had an American businessman murdered.

Hugh, meanwhile, has been accused of using his influence to negotiate a lucrative tobacco settlement, and both have been accused of acting as covert lobbyists for various interest groups, taking a significant amount of money in the process.

7) The Issue of Race.

No, I'm not talking about the 'race card' supposedly played by Obama on Bill Clinton. He can claim otherwise, but the former president (who later attempted to deny saying what, thanks to the internet, we can still clearly hear him saying) betrayed another less-than-clean aspect of his character.

The Clintons have never been shy of deploying race as a tactic. Bill Clinton did it in 1992, making overtures to minorities and then veering sharply away to reassure the rednecks. The 1994 “white hands” TV advert, authored by that most capable of Clinton stooges Dick Morris, deliberately played on a particularly nasty kind of race-based animosity; exploiting the plight of the white working classes and directing their ire at the job-stealing minorities. He launched something like an attack on Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition via the proxy of Sister Souljah in 1992, whilst the execution of Ricky Ray Rector served a double purpose: it made him look tough at a time when his credibility was threatened by the Gennifer Flowers affair, and it appealed to the more stupid and sadistic of his voters in the most visceral way possible. "Look, I'm not too pro-black; here I am supervising the execution of a black man.”

Bill Clinton's record on this is perhaps worse than that of his wife, but we must remember that he was officially a part of her campaign team. We must also remember that the odds of Bill joining the White House as an advisor to his wife are exceedingly good. (We live in a world in which the opinions of someone like Barbra Streisand – one of the few women besides Hillary to have been close to the president who hasn’t later attempted to sue him, or join the law suits of others – are taken seriously.) The ‘whites only’ golf club might have been forgotten by the voters, but we have no reason to abandon our doubts about his character in this regard.

Hillary Clinton adopted a slightly more nuanced approach, making the occasional reference, but rarely doing anything more explicit than implying or insinuating that Obama was and is too black to be a president.

Take this, for example: "Sen. Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," she told the paper, citing as evidence a recent Associated Press story on voting trends in Indiana and North Carolina. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on."

And Bill eventually began towing the less conspicuous line, saying this in North Carolina: "I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics." That said, his unprompted comparison between Obama's victory and those of Jesse Jackson in the 80s does not really deserve to be called a 'veiled reference"

.

8) Under Fire in Bosnia?

Despite her appeals for clemency and understanding (because the campaign trail is long and tiring, whilst the office of president is, presumably, a breeze by comparison), Ms Clinton did not simply 'misspeak' when she fabricated a record for herself in Bosnia.

Here is one version of her claim, from a speech at George Washington University in 2008:

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

If you are going to lie in an attempt to boost your credentials, it is probably best to choose something that is hard to prove or disprove. It is certainly not a good idea to lie about a trip on which you were accompanied by an entire camera crew from the broadcaster CBS, the singer Sheryl Crowe, and the comedian Sinbad.

The CBS footage has been uploaded to Youtube and juxtaposed with the comments made by Ms Clinton as seen above. It makes for an amusing watch but, for those readers who do not have instant access to the internet, here is a brief description of what actually occurred, written by Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post's 'The Fact Checker' blog:

"As a reporter who visited Bosnia soon after the December 1995 Dayton Peace agreement, I can attest that the physical risks were minimal during this period, particularly at a heavily fortified U.S. Air Force base, such as Tuzla. Contrary to the claims of Hillary Clinton and former Army secretary Togo West, Bosnia was not "too dangerous" a place for President Clinton to visit in early 1996. In fact, the first Clinton to visit the Tuzla Air Force base was not Hillary, but Bill, on January 13, 1996.

Had Hillary Clinton's plane come "under sniper fire" in March 1996, we would certainly have heard about it long before now. Numerous reporters, including the Washington Post's John Pomfret, covered her trip. A review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the First Lady. "As a former AP wire service hack, I can safely say that it would have been in my lead had anything like that happened," said Pomfret.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony... shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss."

Well, her head was down. But, flippancy aside, I draw the reader's attention to what I wrote in the first part of this case. (It's called A House of Lies and it can be found in the previous issue of the Lion, or on my blog.) Hillary Clinton is at least partly responsible for the Clinton administration (temporarily) reneging on its promise to end the campaign of rape, murder and genocide carried out against the Bosnians under the auspices of Ratko Mladic and Slobodan Milosevic. That Clinton had the gall to repeatedly lie about her role in Bosnia, and to try and claim the country, its people, and the atrocities committed against them as political capital to further her own cause is, to put it politely, egregious in the extreme.

9) Dodgy Donors & Farcical Financiers.

Well, where does one begin to tackle this subject?

“The story behind story is that America is in an era of sharply rising inequality, with a few at the top doing fabulously well but most Americans on a downward economic escalator.

That’s why Diane Sawyer asked Hillary about the huge speaking fees, and why the Guardian asked whether she could be credible on the issue of inequality.

And it’s why Hillary’s answers – that the couple needed money when they left the White House, and have paid their taxes and worked hard for it — seemed oddly beside the point. 

The questions had nothing to do with whether the former first couple deserved the money. They were really about whether all that income from big corporations and Wall Street put them on the side of the privileged and powerful, rather than on the side of ordinary Americans.”

Robert Reich, once a friend of the Clintons and Secretary of Labor in their administration, was probably correct in his analysis. The fuss following Hillary Clinton’s absurd claim – that the family was ‘broke’ after leaving the White House – was largely due to the fact that, for a great many Americans, the term ‘broke’ entails an inability to pay rent and feed the family.

As noted by Philip Bump in The Washington Post: “In 2000, the couple had no more than $2 million in assets, but perhaps as much as $10 million in debt... But if the couple was broke as they walked out of the White House, it took very little time to recover financially. In 2001, Bill made $13 million in speaking fees, and Hillary brought in nearly $2.5 million, presumably from her advance for "Living History." By 2004, the debt was erased.”

The article, which can be found here, notes that a significant portion of the $10 million in debt can be attributed to legal fees.

As is his fashion, Mr Reich does not care to look beyond the biggest of big pictures. The ‘tempest’, as he puts it, might not have been “about how they earned their money,”  but perhaps it should have been. Perhaps it would have been, too, had people like Mr Reich deigned to tell us exactly what caused those legal fees to soar, and how the Clinton’s have so often chosen to pay their debts.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Ms Clinton will almost certainly run in 2016, and much of her campaign infrastructure will be funded by Super PACs created by a group of people – former and current advisers, business associates, and the like – that we might loosely call ‘friends of the family’. This was made possible when, in 2010, the Supreme Court voted to ease restrictions on spending by ‘outside political organisations’.

This has not stopped her indulging in what her friends on Wall Street call ‘progressive populism’. In April this year, she criticised SCOTUS for “removing a limit on the total number of candidates one can donate to in one election season;” a move likely to mean that more private money enters the realm of electoral politics.

But I hope that the reader is not so easily fooled. There’s a reason Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan occupy first, second and fourth place on a list of Ms Clinton’s donors. There’s a reason these companies will pay $200,000 for such insights as “Leadership is a team sport,” “You can’t win if you don’t show up,” and “A whisper can be louder than a shout.” And there’s a reason that, in July of this year, a front-page article in the New York Times opened with the following: “As its relationship with Democrats hits a historic low, Wall Street sees a solution on the horizon: Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

This is Hillary’s Triangulation. It doesn’t really deserve to be called a variant of the Clintonian model, because it differs from the strategy of the Nineties in no meaningful respect. It is, after all, a family business, and Hillary herself employed it in a move that would see healthcare consolidated in the hands of a select few insurance companies.

I turn to Christopher Hitchens who, in No One Left To Lie To, summarises this episode of Triangulation more effectively than I can. He quotes a speech made by Ms Clinton in 1993 which closes as follows: “What you don’t get told [in adverts attacking the proposals for healthcare reform] is that it is paid for by insurance companies. It is time for you and for every American to stand up and say to the insurance industry: “Enough is enough, we want our health-care system back!”

He then goes on to make the following observation: “It is fortunate for the Clintons that this populist appeal was unsuccessful. Had the masses risen up against the insurance companies, they would have discovered that the four largest of them— Aetna, Prudential, Met Life, and Cigna— had helped finance and design the “managed-competition” scheme which the Clintons and their Jackson Hole Group had put forward in the first place.”

“The ‘triangulation’”, he says, “went like this. Harry and Louise sob-story ads were paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), a group made up of the smaller insurance providers. The major five insurance corporations spent even more money to support “managed competition” and to buy up HMOs as the likeliest investment for the future. The Clintons demagogically campaigned against the “insurance industry,” while backing— and with the backing of— those large fish that were preparing to swallow the minnows.”

(Back to the present: This perhaps goes some way toward explaining Ms Clinton’s reaction to the SCOTUS decision mentioned earlier. She claimed, in the same speech, that: "With the rate the Supreme Court is going, there will only be three or four people in the whole country that have to finance our entire political system by the time they are done." We’ll ignore, at least for the moment, the fact that Ms Clinton is describing the status quo and not the future. Her problem with the SCOTUS decision is that it leaves those three or four people free to donate to candidates who aren’t her. In 93 she could monopolise the support of Aetna, Prudential and Cigna, and until recently she could monopolise the support of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Though it has by no means destroyed it, SCOTUS has ensured that she will have to work a little harder to maintain this monopoly.)

The same author published an essay in The Nation in 2000, in which he makes mention of donations to Ms Clinton from the Pakistani government, made via the law firm of another family friend.

“Remember when every liberal knew how to sneer at George W. Bush, not only for forgetting the name of Pakistan’s new dictator but for saying that he seemed like a good guy? Well , General Musharraf’s regime has now hired, at a retainer of $ 22,500 per month, the DC law firm of Patton Boggs, for which Lanny Davis, one of the First Family’s chief apologists, toils.

Perhaps for reasons having to do with the separation of powers, Patton Boggs also collects $ 10,000 monthly from Pak-Pac, the Pakistani lobby in America, for Davis’s services in its behalf. Suddenly, no more Dem jokes about ignorance of Pakistan. Last December, after Clinton announced that Pakistan would not be on his itinerary when he visited the subcontinent, his former White House “special counsel” arranged a fundraiser in Washington at which lawyers from Patton Boggs made contributions to the First Lady’s Senate campaign that now total $ 25,500. So, not very indirectly, Pakistani military money was washed into her coffers from the very start. Then, in February, another Pak-Pac event, in New York, was brought forward so as to occur before the arrangements for the President’s passage to India had been finalized. Having been told that the First Lady did not grace any event for less than $ 50,000 upfront, the Pakistanis came up with the dough and were handsomely rewarded for their trouble by the presence of Lanny Davis and by a statement from Mrs. Clinton that she hoped her spouse would stop off in Pakistan after all. And a few days later, he announced that, after much cogitation, he would favor General Musharraf with a drop-by.”

Moving both forwards and backwards through time in a manner only marginally more ridiculous than an entry from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 was haunted by a ghost from 1996, when Norman Hsu, a Clinton campaign “bundler” (and who, along with the likes of Elton John and Steven Spielberg, rose to the title of “Hillraiser”), was revealed to be a fugitive from justice. He had failed to appear for sentencing after being convicted of fraud in 1992 and, after a report in The Wall Street Journal alleged that he had ‘mishandled’ a considerable amount of bundled campaign finance contributions, he disappeared again.

The Clinton team can, if you’ll forgive the bad play on words, be said to have “bungled” its response to the Hsu scandal. It supported him, then it distanced itself, then it supported him, then it distanced itself again. It announced it would return the donations, then it would return some of the donations, then it would return only the donations relating to the 2008 campaign and not those made for Ms Clinton’s re-election campaign in 2006, for which Mr. Hsu also served as a “bundler.”

Fair enough, one might possibly forgive this oversight. It was a busy campaign, and Ms. Clinton had an inexplicably large number of donors. It wasn’t quite at the level of the 1996 campaign finance scandal, in which somewhere in the region of 50 donors with links to the Chinese military-industrial complex fled the country rather than appear before the senate, a good deal more pleaded the 5^th amendment, and the likes of Charlie Trie, Johnny Chung and Maria Hsia were eventually compelled to give us a glimpse of a huge and murky network of illegitimate donors to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. (That this scandal concluded without a conclusion is testament in part to the work of Janet Reno.) However, when you consider that the 2008 campaign hadn’t even considered performing background checks on its largest donors, one has cause for suspicion. And when you add contributions from Abdul Rehmann Jinnah, William Danielczyk, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (believed to be a front for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which the United States lists as a terrorist organisation) and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the poorest households in New York’s Chinatown (the LA Times report features imaginary people, Chinese crime syndicates, exploitation of migrants and many more unpleasant realities), the whole episode takes on a distinctly sinister tone.

It has dawned on me that I will close this lengthy section having not even touched on Whitewater or the cattle-future trades. (The latter was just one of the occasions on which Ms Clinton used her daughter as a shield. In this case, she hadn’t even been born!)

10) Unanswered Questions.

I turn to Robert Scheer of The Nation to sum this up. On the NSA:

"Did Secretary of State Clinton know that such massive spying on the American people was going on and, if not, why isn’t she grateful that Snowden helped to enlighten her? With her scurrilous attacks on Snowden, Hillary Clinton is either a fool or a liar."

And, alas, I am out of space.