Archive for November, 2015

Chronic Clinton Fatigue Disorder

Bernie Sanders is once again tired of hearing about Hillary’s emails.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t even been elected President, and she’s already returned Clinton Fatigue to Washington.

Clinton Fatigue is that sense of exhaustion you get when trying to sort through the various lies, deceptions, evasions, inventions, and circumventions necessitated by various legal, ethical, and tangles, large and small, engaged in by the Clintons and their friends.

Clinton Fatigue was one of the major contributing factors to the election of George W. Bush in 2000.  People were exhausted by the sense that when they read the news coming out of Washington, they were forever walking in on a guilty child whose first reaction, like that of all guilty children, was to make something up.  They had rejected a second term for George H.W. Bush in the 1992 elections, putting these very same Clintons in charge.  Only eight years later, they elected his son of (nearly) the same name, so strong was the nostalgia for a time when the adults were in charge.

And now, with Madame Hillary holding no public office, only a candidate for President, it’s back.

It’s back in the lying about the lying about Benghazi.  In the emails that Bernie Sander is already impatient to move on from, and the classified information that was on them.  In the form that Hillary signed about the handling of classified info.  In the tax returns that the Clinton Foundation can’t seem to get quite right.  In the evidence that the Foundation had donors with business before the State Department.

It’s in the Hillary trying to turn herself into a hero of post-9/11 downtown reconstruction (where her daughter was not, in fact, jogging on that infamous day).  For the record, because we cling to the hope that the record still matters, was how Hillary was received by the families of the NYPD and FDNY just a few weeks after 9/11:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xa6BZXnGOQ[/youtube]

It’s in the lies she tells because she has to and the lies she tells because she wants to and the lies she tells because she just can’t help herself.

It’s in the “can’t remembers” when she doesn’t like the memory, or the lingering questions that never get answered but always have been.

It isn’t helped by the conspiricists who insist that Vince Foster was shot or that the MENA Airport was a major hub for drugs, murder, and mayhem all overseen by the then-governor but that doesn’t make the fatigue any less real.

The Clintons don’t just bring the Fatigue with them, they’re carriers.  This time, it’s Huma Abedin who was personally put on the State Department payroll, signed a separation agreement which included the handling of classified information.

These lies, shadings, convenient memory lapses don’t just appear of their own accord.  When someone compiles that kind of a record, it’s because of character.

She is, by turns, personally venal and politically vindictive.  Does anyone doubt that she was selling access and potentially contracts the way she and her husband sold the Lincoln Bedroom a decade earlier?  Does anyone think that she would shy away from using the IRS to punish political opponents?

She is contemptuous of the people she claimed to represent, and claims to want to lead.  That booing in the post-9/11 video above came after her motorcade ran down a New York police officer there to provide security, and Madame Hillary couldn’t be bothered to stop to see if here was all right.  Her first response, “Don’t worry, I’m ok.”  With respect, we didn’t really doubt you were.

Whatever political skills Bill may have had, it should by now be abundantly clear to anyone who isn’t a hopeless partisan hack that Madame Hillary has, quit literally, none of the personal characteristics necessary for the Oval Office.

Does anyone doubt that a decade and a half of this sort of thing would irreversibly damage and distort our political institutions?

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Debating to Win

Tuesday night, Neil Cavuto asked the question about the bank bailouts, and whether or not a President Cruz, or Rubio, or Paul, or Bush, or Kasich, would help organize a government rescue of, say, BankAmerica if it were on the verge of going under.

Almost all those who answered the question – with the exception of Bush and Kasich, both of whom worked for banks, and both of whom answered incoherently – all of them said, no, they would let BankAmerican fail.  When Cavuto pressed them on the question of people’s savings, they continued to say no, they wouldn’t bail out BankAmerica, they’d let it go under.

And that was it.  No elaboration of what that would mean for people, no discussion of the consequences.  Just talk of “too big to fail” and how lousy Dodd-Frank is

I cannot begin to describe how awful an answer that is.

Without even talking about the policy, which might or might not make sense (although these same candidates for the most part didn’t want to talk about breaking up the “too big to fail” institutions, or how interconnected all the banks are), the answer as an argument to the people who were watching at home was catastrophically bad.

Cavuto pressed this point several times, and not one of the candidates – not even Ted “Smartest Guy In the Room And I’ll Make Damn Sure Everyone Knows It” Cruz – brought up the fact that we have deposit insurance in the form of the FDIC.  Individuals probably don’t have anything to worry about in terms of their own bank accounts, even pretty well-off individuals.  But nobody thought to mention this fact.

Look, I realize that the bank bailouts and TARP are, right now, as toxic among Republicans as a tranche of subprime mortgages was in 2008 to an institutional investor.  But when people hear “bank failure,” they don’t think, “Wall Street Fat Cats,” they think Jimmy Stewart cancelling his honeymoon to go save the Building & Loan in It’s A Wonderful Life, which people have only seen a thousand times in their own lives.  They think bank runs and desperate looks and breadlines and Mary Poppins and life savings’ wiped out and lives ruined.

They think personal devastation.

And yet not one word that any of these Presidential candidates uttered did anything to reassure people that it wouldn’t happen to them.

Now think for a second how a rational, intelligent version of Joe Biden would have answered that.  (Yes, I know, imagining such a thing is like imagining a vegetarian lion, but work with me.)

He’d talk about how people count on those banks, and count on they’re being safe in order to feed their families and pay their rent or their kids’ college tuition.  He’d talk about how he’d make sure that every last one of those workers were taken care of, how not one of them would lose s dime, but how the bankers who made those mistakes and put those lives at risk would have their toys taken away.

He’d talk about how nobody would get out of paying a penny they owed, and all those loans would go to a healthy bank, one run by people who weren’t greedy, and how all those savings would be made whole.  And he’d say that thank God and FDR we have deposit insurance, so the little guy can’t get trampled when the big guys make mistakes.  Because he grew up knowing people who had lost everything in the Depression, everything being not much to begin with, and by God he wasn’t going to let that happen again.

This is no small mistake, no “nobody’s perfect” moment.  This is basic stuff that wasn’t mentioned at all, and that Cavuto pressed people on, making it sound as though individual savings were at risk.  I’m sure he knows better and had a follow-up that would have made it clear, but with nobody biting, he never had a chance to bring that out.

The Democrats are going to demagogue this to death, and there’s no reason for it.

Fortunately, right now, Hillary, Woman of the People, seems to be Wall Street’s favorite candidate, so there should be other opportunities to push this line.  Let’s hope they make better use of it.

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Hillary Goes BLM

Hillary Clinton met with the mothers of Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice Monday.  The meeting comes after several other efforts to court the Black Lives Matter (sic) organization.

There are – literally – millions of other mothers Hillary could have met with yesterday.

She could have met with the moms of some of the police officers killed. She could have met with Chris Mintz’s mom, or even Chris Mintz himself, since he’s still miraculously alive. She could have met with the moms of some people killed by thugs on the streets, or people who had their stores robbed, or people who intervened to stop those things.

She could have asked the board of the Clinton Foundation to throw a little money to the people of Ferguson who saw their town used as a staging ground for street violence, and their downtown burned to the foundations.

Instead, she decided to help legitimize that street violence by signalling to the Black Lives Matter crowd that she was on their side. For the record, she was also the very first guest on Al Sharpton’s show in his new Sunday morning time slot.

What’s at work here is the ultimately self-destructive and (one can only hope) self-defeating identity politics of the modern Democratic Party.  Barack Obama won re-election largely on the strength of an enormous turnout of black voters.

It’s also true that Hillary realizes that there’s probably no way that she can repeat that kind of performance, and that in order to win, she can’t let it slip all that far.  She needs enthusiasm, and if she can’t get that, she’ll settle for energy.  In a way, the joyless, angry Black Lives Matter is a great match temperamentally for the joyless, angry Hillary Clinton.

It’s to Barack Obama’s lasting shame (if he, indeed, is capable of such) that he has helped empower these street thugs and allowed others to think that they somehow represent the black community.  Madame Hillary may feel that she has no choice but to court them, in order to prevent the sort of disruptions that helped defeat Humphrey in 1968.  And if that means being unable to choke out the words, “All lives matter,” which are apparent now exclusive by virtue of their inclusivity, or something like that, well, that’s a small price to pay for the White House.

The problem is, it’s not a small price for the rest of us.  Interest groups can afford to be provincial.  Presidents should not, and the idea that “all lives matter,” even as a meaningless phrase, shouldn’t be controversial to the President.  The President, who will also appoint the Attorney General and help run the Civil Right Division.

After Monday, don’t say you weren’t warned.

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