(Fred Weinberg) – Is Hillary Clinton a crook?
Not exactly.
No more so than Richard Nixon, anyway.
When I hear about deals which enriched people that required her support if not her active co-operation and subsequent “donations” to the Clinton Foundation and subsequent speeches given by Bill for $500,000 in Moscow, I always think of the stories written after the Nixon transcripts were made available.
“How much money do you need?” Nixon asked (Presidential Counsel John) Dean early in the March 21 (1973) conversation, according to the transcript.
“I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied.
“We could get that,” Nixon continued. “On the money, if you need the money you could get that. You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”
In the ensuing discussion, Nixon went on to suggest that his personal attorney. Herbert W. Kalmbach, could be relied on to raise the money, that payments to the burglars could be made under the cover of a Cuban defense committee and that the facts could be concealed from a grand jury.
Hillary got her start in Washington as a young lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate.
Apparently she has learned from many of Richard Nixon’s mistakes, chiefly his failure to simply burn those tapes and his candid admission after the fact that he felt “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Hillary did the 2015 equivalent of burning the tapes by wiping her personal server on which she kept her personal and official email accounts in contravention of Federal rules when she was Secretary of State. She was, in effect, her own special prosecutor and decided by herself what was relevant and what wasn’t and she, of course, decided that she did nothing wrong and has to answer to nobody.
In short, when the Secretary of State does it, that means it is not illegal.
I have a friend who is quite successful and got there from very humble beginnings. He believes that Hillary is inevitable because of two factors. Demographics and the fact that the American public is not very smart.
The demographics factor is simple. We have elected our first black President and now it is time for our first female President. Hillary is already there.
The not smart factor is more difficult to quantify.
I have always argued that the American voter is actually very smart over the long haul. It is true that we have blind spots and, many times, do not look very far ahead, but this is the longest living experiment in self-government, largely because we have embraced the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
That said, it is hard to explain Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
In the end, however, the American public has comparatively little tolerance for phonies. And, when Hillary tries to play the common man, she is at her phoniest. The President actually did a pretty good job skewing her at the White House Correspondents’ dinner when he said, “For many Americans, this is still a time of deep uncertainty. For example, I have one friend – just a few weeks ago, she was making millions of dollars a year. And she’s now living out of a van in Iowa.”
She was inevitable in 2008 and that didn’t quite work out.
My guess is that my friend is wrong.
That Hillary is wearing thin with the voters.
If she keeps telling people to go to hell, she’s down to her base and that may not even be big enough to win Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr. Weinberg is publisher of the Penny Press. Get to know more about him by visiting www.PennyPressNV.com.
