America has not had sensationally good luck with dynasties in the presidential office. Presidents John Adams, Sr. & Jr. were pretty good, but consider the departing Bush line:
Many might say President George H.W. Bush Sr., was not so bad - except for his participation as vice president in the Iran-Contra affair and, as president, his pardoning his convicted accomplices. And hardly praiseworthy was his invasion of Panama with 23 Americans killed, 325 wounded and an estimated three thousand civilians slaughtered to arrest one man: a dictator and former CIA contract agent. Bush, as CIA Director, had paid him $100,000, but he claimed he had never met Noriega until photos of them together appeared in newspapers.
President George W. Bush II and his top officials “promoted the invasion of Iraq with public statements that weren't supported by intelligence or that concealed differences among intelligence agencies,” reported the Senate Intelligence Committee on 5 June 2008. That’s hardly news; rather it’s confirmation of just one of Bush deceptions too numerous to review here.
My purpose here is to argue that Senator Obama must reject Hillary Clinton as vice president, a position that would return to both honesty-challenged Clintons the influential aura of White House power. True, she has never been indicted for illegal practices, and Bill was acquitted by the Senate after his impeachment regarding his perjury in the Paula Jones trial (during which he was charged with contempt of court for misleading testimony and eventually paid Jones $860,000 to settle). But settlement and congressional acquittal don’t guarantee decency.
Despite the lurid tales of Gennifer Flowers, Elizabeth Ward, Sally Perdue, Dolly Browning, Juanita Broddrick, and Kathleen Wiley, I don’t particularly condemn Bill Clinton for “getting nookie on the side”—as did President Kennedy. I do excoriate Bill for breaking his pledge of the "most ethical administration in the history of the country” with depravity the White House had never sheltered before. For more than a year, this degenerate used the loftiness of the presidency to charm a White House intern young enough to be his child to kneel before him and perform oral sex. Was inserting a cigar into her vagina his way to reciprocate and yet claim he never had sex with her?
If so, it worked. US Senators acquitted Bill even though he admitted he had an "improper physical relationship” with Monica Lewinsky but held to the absurd defense of his perjury and obstruction of justice on the basis that oral sex is not actually sex.
In these cases, Hillary can call herself a victim. But in business, she was Bill’s equal partner, as equal as she implied she was when she bragged she was the most experienced presidential material. Strong suspicions of their activities began with the Whitewater Development Corporation, in which Hillary and at that time Governor Clinton received 50% of the stock from Jim and Susan McDougal for no cash investment. Whitewater was a murky land development that failed and criminal allegations against Clinton resulted in Special US Prosecutors and expenditure of $60 million. In the end, the Clintons were not indicted, but 14 people associated with Whitewater were convicted of 40 crimes, including Bill Clinton’s successor, Governor Jim Tucker. Clinton pardoned him and three others in the final hours of his presidency.
Another controversy included Hillary’s incredible luck in the extremely risky commodities exchange market when, with help of James Blair, she parlayed $1000 into $100,000 in just 10 months. Blair was counsel of the Tyson Chicken Empire, Arkansas's biggest employer with a chairman who viewed "politics as a series of unsentimental transactions between those who need votes and those who have money.” Tyson put money in Bill’s 1978 gubernatorial campaign. One of Bill’s first moves as governor was to recommend Blair for the chairmanship of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board.
And then there were the “gates.” Travelgate: Hillary was accused of firing the White House travel handlers to replace them with friends. Filegate: the White Houseimproperly ordered 400-900 background reports from the FBI without permission of the subjects, including top Republicans James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Marlin Fitzwater. Also files under investigation missing from Hillary’s old law firm mysteriously turned up in the family quarters of the White House. Pardongate refers to the 140 pardons and several commutations Bill signed on his last day of office.Hillary’s brother, Hugh Rodham, was paid over $400,000 dollars for getting a pardon for Almon Glenn Braswell (massive mail fraud and perjury) and a commutation for Carlos Vignali (cocaine trafficking). Her youngest brother, Tony Rodham, received $107,000 from Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory (bank fraud). After protests, the Clintons claimed that money was returned.
Along with pardons for his half-brother, Roger Clinton (drugs) and his White House counsel Webster Hubbell (convicted of defrauding clients and partners of Hillary’s former law firm out of $482,410.83), Bill pardoned fugitive criminal millionaire Marc Rich. Rich was charged in the early eighties with felony offenses but fled to Switzerland to avoid trial. Denise Rich, a close Clinton friend, gave $1 million to the Democratic National Committee, $450,000 to Bill Clinton's library fund, and $70,000 to Hillary Clinton's senate campaign.
After the Clintons left the White House and were criticized for illegally taking $190,000 worth of household goods, they announced they would pay back $86,000, or nearly half the amount. And their subsequent agreement to send back $28,000 in gifts donated specifically to the White House brought to $114,000 the value of items the Clintons either decided to pay for or return.
One wonders where they had put the goods - they had no home, having lived for years in a governor’s mansion and the White House. And now they owed more than $11 million to defense lawyers.
But miraculously they soon paid off all their legal debts and bought three homes - in Washington DC, Long Island and New York City. In just seven years they collected $110 million, partly for their memoirs and mostly for Bill’s speeches arranged by Arabic friends of Bill’s “best new friend,” George H.W. Bush. For speeches Bill collected up to $400,000 each - in 2004 alone: over $4 million.
Bill also serves as advisor to the Yucaipa companies controlled by one of his many best friends, billionaire Ronald Burkle, who contributed $1,000,000 to Hillary’s campaign. Bill receives a share of the profits in two of his funds if their returns exceed 9%. In 2005, one fund reported a gain of 51.3% and one 25.8%.
Hillary seems congenitally amenable to concocting lies to fit the occasion. When she met Sir Edmund Hillary, co-first climber of Mount Everest, she remarked she was named for him. However, his climb took place more than five years after she was born. And before his climb, he was a little-known beekeeper. While campaigning she was nailed twice in her ridiculous lie about running under sniper fire in Bosnia. Ironically she represented Obama as “elite” to blue-collar workers while her wealth put her in the upper 1% of the nation and her friends in the upper .01 %.
Her most important campaign promise was universal health insurance, but major contributions came from drug, health services and insurance corporations. Her plan’s key difference is fines for people who don’t buy, ensuring universal sales regardless of cost. Of course, she claimed costs would be low enough for anyone to afford. But judging by the history of greed and fraud demonstrated by those corporations, the only way to universal affordability is to establish a non-profit single insurance payer such as Medicare.
Even Hillary’s campaign demonstrated she is not qualified for the honest change Obama and his supporters demand. As Michael Kinsley of Time magazine wrote: “She was supposed to be the candidate of “change.” By the mere fact of being a woman, she incarnated a revolution. But then an even bigger revolution came along and her patient, methodical, I’m-a-normal-politician-in-all-respects-except-one approach left her representing the establishment.”
An establishment filled with scandal-stained opportunists.
HRH Maximiliano IV is an Amazonian Greencheek parrot who resides with William Weston, his Regent (and typist) at Marina Vallarta. He will welcome e-mail at Billweston2000@yahoo.com
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