http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2014/05/12/3137/Henry I. Miller, Contributor
I debunk junk science and flawed public policy..
5/12/2014 @ 3:26AM
I'm Sick To Death Of Bill And Hillary
I am an optimist where the Clintons are concerned. By that I mean that I am among those who still believe that in the end civic virtue will prevail and justice will be served. In other words, I remain hopeful that Bill and Hillary will spend their twilight years together in a federal penitentiary.
I know what you’re thinking. The polls and the legions of Bill’s and Hillary’s friends and the sycophants in the media all insist that she is the odds-on favorite to secure the Democratic nomination for president. But belligerence and intimidation have always been their stock in trade, and they’re only trying to frighten everyone else out of running. Surely there must be someone left in the Democratic Party who is opposed to corrupting the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes, backing programs that benefit drug lords and gun runners, retreating in the face of terrorism, covering up political misdeeds and incompetence, and exploiting the worst aspects of domestic ethnic and racial divisions in order to win elections.
Obama didn’t invent this stuff, after all. These derelictions of duty and principle and so much more were all part of the ethical chamber of horrors that were the Clinton Years.
There must be someone, somewhere who remembers the days before 1992, when the Democrats still stood for something. Isn’t there…someone?
The good news is that every step Hillary takes toward running should help to remind the nation of just how tawdry and tormented those years were. And the closer she comes to the spotlight, the clearer it becomes that nothing has changed.
For example, Bill and Hillary are currently supporting the primary campaign of Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky, who is trying to recapture the suburban Philadelphia congressional seat she lost after serving one term two decades ago. The fact that Mezvinsky is the mother-in-law of Chelsea Clinton makes all this deliciously ironic. As a Democratic member of Congress, she cast the deciding 218th vote for President Clinton’s controversial 1993 budget. That blunder cost her and 33 other Democrats their House seats and ushered in the 1994 “Republican Revolution” in Congress.
Without Ms. Mezvinsky and all the other lemmings who marched into electoral oblivion that year, the GOP would not have gained control of Congress. And that, in turn, made possible the Whitewater investigation, Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the many layers of Clintonian corruption, and eventually Bill’s impeachment.
Surely we don’t need Monica Lewinsky to remind us what life was like with the Clintons in the White House. The former Clinton White House intern has emerged from obscurity for an article she wrote for the current (June) issue of Vanity Fair in which she describes her notorious affair with Bill. But Clinton was not impeached in 1998 for diddling a child who was young enough to be his daughter. He was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in the falsely sworn testimony he gave in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by another former female employee, Arkansan Paula Jones.
The Senate subsequently failed to obtain the required two-thirds vote for conviction. But Clinton still paid Jones almost a million dollars for her victimization. And for lying under oath about his affair with Lewinsky, the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct called for Clinton’s disbarment in his home state. In 2001 he was fined and his Arkansas law license was suspended for five years. And when Clinton loyalists tried to make the case that perjury by the Chief Executive was no big thing, even his law school was moved to announce that that wasn’t what they taught him at Yale.
Bill’s disgusting behavior and the more recent efforts to cover up Hillary’s responsibility for the events leading to the murder of our ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi are nothing out of the ordinary for this pair. In his stunning 2003 book Dereliction of Duty, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a presidential aide and carrier of the “nuclear football,” offers many examples of President Clinton’s gross irresponsibility and reprehensible behavior. He describes an incident in which the president — the commander-in-chief — groped a female steward on Air Force One. As an enlisted person in the U.S. Air Force, she opted not to make an issue of it and settled for a personal apology from the president. (This has been confirmed to me by a former pilot of Air Force One.) Patterson wrote: “I brooded over the fact that if our commander in chief had been actually serving in the armed services, he would have been jailed. His immunity struck me as completely unacceptable.”
Hillary herself has more baggage than could fit into Air Force One. Perhaps the largest and most malodorous piece is the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of court-subpoenaed law-firm records belonging to her. After going missing for years, they suddenly turned up in her book room on the third floor of the White House. The FBI’s fingerprint analysis of the billing records revealed only the prints of Hillary and White House lawyer Vince Foster, who had committed suicide under suspicious circumstances.
The records were needed to show the extent of Hillary’s legal work for a savings and loan involved in fraud. Although Hillary has consistently denied knowing how the billing records found their way to her book room, the Senate’s Whitewater investigation of shady financial dealings in Arkansas by the Clintons’ friends and associates concluded that Hillary was the person most likely to have put the billing records in her book room, or to know how they got there. Shortly after the discovery of the records, Hillary made history by becoming the first First Lady ever to appear before a grand jury inquiry.
Haven’t we had enough of government officials lying to us and covering up their misdeeds? Don’t we deserve more transparency, honesty and integrity? It’s long since time for the Clintons to go. Why would we ever want them back?
