Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

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America’s Not Ready for Hillary

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Before the release, American Secretary of Stat...
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Hillary Rodham Clinton will not be the next president of the United States. She won’t even be the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nominee. Risky as it is to place one’s bets 18 months ahead of an election, I’m confident in those two predictions.

Why?

Well, the scandals, real and imagined, that have dogged her and her husband’s heels at every turn since the 1992 election cycle — from Whitewater to Vince Foster’s death to “bimbo eruptions” — don’t help.  Her handling of them helps even less, and the fuse is burning down on a big one: A forthcoming book by Peter Schweizer on the Clinton family foundation’s finances.

The charity is hard at work right now, massaging its old tax returns to correct “errors in reporting donations from foreign governments.” Good luck “correcting” what looks a lot like a straightforward $2.3 million bribe from Russia (with love) to then Secretary of State Clinton for approval of a sensitive uranium deal.

But it’s not financial hijinks, tall tales about Bosnian sniper fire, shrugging deflections of responsibility for American deaths in Benghazi, or even her Nixonian, and undeniably criminal, actions in controlling, concealing and destroying official emails as Secretary of State that sound the death knell for her presidential aspirations.

The real problem is that nobody seems to be able to think of any good reason why she should be elected president. Even among those Americans who are okay with politicians running their lives, there’s no great stampede on to let THIS politician run their lives. Maybe that’s because she so clearly relishes the idea.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is famous for being famous. “Power behind the throne” talk aside, she married a future president, rode his coattails to a safe Democrat US Senate seat in which she served without distinction (other than voting for the USA PATRIOT ACT and the invasion of Iraq, neither of which are exactly high points on a presidential resume these days), lost her “inevitable” 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to a freshman US Senator virtually unknown four years before, and kept the needle on her tenure as Secretary of State floating between lackluster and embarrassing.

America has a bad case of Hillary fatigue. And where her presidential ambitions are concerned, the affliction is terminal.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the alternatives, Democrat and Republican alike, aren’t any better. Even the most allegedly “libertarian” of the pack, US Senator Rand Paul, seems a lot more interested in power than in freedom.

If we all write in “None of the Above” a year from this coming November, will the politicians leave us alone for four years? Of course they won’t. But we can daydream, can’t we?

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

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RGBStock White House

Presidential candidates work hard to convince ordinary Americans that they’re just like us. Regular folks. Put their pants on one leg at a time, you betcha.

But nobody clears the airspace for me when I fly into a city.

Nor, I bet, do federal agents cordon off several blocks around venues in which you’re scheduled to speak, restricting  people who don’t like you to “free speech zones” for the duration of your visit.

And if either of us puts the pedal to the metal and flies down Interstate 89 at more than 90 miles per hour to keep appointments in Keene, Claremont and Concord, New Hampshire, we’ll be lucky if we get off with stern lectures and expensive tickets.

Hillary Clinton gets a Secret Service escort. The police don’t even consider pulling her over for a ticket. They’re there to make sure all us regular people — you know, the ones she’s just like — keep ourselves out of her way.

No, I’m not picking on Hillary. It’s all of them. I can cite experiences, my own and those of friends, going back to 1992 revealing the same disregard for the rules that bind everyone else.

In 1992, the Secret Service searched the apartment of a friend of mine for no other reason than that it happened to overlook president George H.W. Bush’s motorcade route. Later that fall, my future wife was ordered to finish her meal and clear out of a restaurant immediately. Because Bush wanted to eat there.

In 2000, police ordered me to walk about three miles out of my way to reach a “free speech zone.” Mere mortals were excluded from the streets surrounding the building where vice president Al Gore and presidential candidate George W. Bush were scheduled to “debate” (read: Tell us how much like us they are, just regular folks, folks).

In 2008, US Highway 65 between Springfield and Branson, Missouri was cleared of mere mundanes so presidential candidate John McCain’s motorcade could pass through. The local newspaper dutifully noted its police-escorted speed of 100 miles per hour.

These things aren’t the exceptions. They’re the rule. The political class is not like the rest of us. They’re not regular folks.

And I guess that’s OK. It would be a shame for any of them to be late to the microphones from which they lecture us on the importance of the rule of law.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Hillary Clinton: Shades of Watergate

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English: Richard Nixon boarding Army One upon ...
English: Richard Nixon boarding Army One upon his departure from the White House after resigning the office of President of the United States following the Watergate Scandal in 1974. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s become far too fashionable, over the decades since disgraced president Richard Nixon’s resignation, to tack the suffix “-gate” onto political scandals. The usage no longer conveys much useful information. In most cases, it’s mere cliche.

Not so when it comes to the revelation that, as US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton essentially privatized her work email. This is definitely Watergate-level stuff.

Clinton’s actions went far beyond those of Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin, who as governors got caught conducting some official business over personal web mail accounts. Clinton ran all of her office email through her own private server, registered under a fake name and physically located in her New York home.

It wasn’t the Watergate break-in per se that cost Nixon his presidency. It was his attempt to cover up his own role afterward, by erasing taped conversations, that got articles of impeachment moving through Congress.

Those articles were drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee, with advice from a legal team including among its members young Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham. Two years later, Ms. Rodham married Yale classmate Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton knew better.

She knew the Federal Records Act required preservation of her official emails on State Department Servers. Neither she nor her staff took steps to comply with that law during her time in office.

She knew that absent such preservation, her official emails would fly under the radar of Freedom of Information Act requests. That was probably one of two reasons why she did what she did.

The other likely reason was that she knew her conduct as Secretary of State could, at some point, come under legal scrutiny and wanted to maintain control of her emails to frustrate such scrutiny. Just like Richard Nixon with his tapes.

After she left office, the State Department requested copies of her official emails. It received only those her aides, as directed by her, decided to turn over.

On March 4, the US House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating the 2012 attack on an American diplomatic compound in Libya, subpoenaed Clinton’s emails relating to that attack.

Will the investigators get those emails without a fight? Will they get all the relevant emails, or just those convenient to Hillary Clinton’s version of events? And most importantly, how will they know whether or not they got everything?

As a libertarian, I oppose letting political officials keep secrets at all. It’s just too dangerous. It threatens our freedom. Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are heroes of mine for exposing the illegal and immoral activities of politicians and bureaucrats.

But one need not share my radical opposition to government secrecy to understand that Clinton’s actions go beyond the pale. She didn’t just keep government secrets. She took drastic measures to keep those secrets under her personal control, immune to discovery even by the very government she served.

This kind of behavior cost Nixon his presidency. It should cost Clinton her shot at the White House.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.