Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and walked away with a reported $400,000 in fees. Such compensation is almost as profitable as Hillary\u2019s long-ago cattle-future trading, in which as a talented rookie speculator she beat one-in-several-million odds by parlaying an ![\"Photo](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton_Chatham_House_Prize_2013_Winner_10209889514.jpg?resize=300%2C202&ssl=1\" "\\"Photo")
original $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit.<\/p>\n
That Goldman\u2019s shenanigans were central to the 2008 housing and financial meltdown \u2014 and were empowered, in part, by Bill Clinton\u2019s own prior twofer of deregulating Wall Street and appointing to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae greedy, though liberal, incompetents of the likes of James Johnson, Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick \u2014 apparently meant nothing to Hillary.<\/p>\n
Her current frenetic speaking career is consistent with the ethics that allowed Anthony Weiner\u2019s wife, Huma Abedin, to freelance as a six-figure private \u201cconsultant\u201d while simultaneously working as Hillary\u2019s aide and representing the U.S. State Department. With the Clintons, government service is never quite inseparable from private lucre. The more public anguish is voiced over fairness, and the more loudly the undue influence of big money over big government is criticized, the more both are drawn to just that. The Clintons must think of Wall Street the way the Reverend\u00a0Jimmy Swaggart used to talk of \u201cthe Devil\u201d \u2014 a dark force that nonetheless always alights on their shoulders, improperly but successfully seducing them.<\/p>\n
Soon Hillary may even outpace Bill in speaking fees, especially after she finishes up her private-equity rounds at places like KKR and the Carlyle Group and follows his footsteps abroad. So much for the revolving door, influence peddling, and all the other Obama reform blather we\u2019ve been saturated with since 2008. I don\u2019t think we are going to see any Occupy Wall Street protesters break into mahogany-paneled rooms to decry Hillary\u2019s post-public-service profiting, doing so little work for so much money from a firm that did so much damage to so many.<\/p>\n
In Hillary\u2019s defense, she is not doing anything differently from the host of other former Obama hope-and-change reformist influence peddlers, from Peter Orszag and Larry Summers to Robert Gibbs and Anita Dunn. Her efforts are just more lucrative. Of course, revolving high-finance politics is a bipartisan habit. Yet when one tries to simultaneously pose as an egalitarian, the additional smell of hypocrisy is overwhelming.<\/p>\n
The formula for liberal elites is to damn the 1 percent, call for higher taxes on those who did not build their equity empires, shriek about Wall Street, maybe praise Mao Zedong, and then, having obtained enough divine exemption from guilt, get really rich by leveraging past and future \u201cpublic service.\u201d After all, Goldman kingpins were not paying Hillary for her demonstrable expertise in foreign policy vis-\u00e0-vis Russia, her proven record in dealing with the Arab Spring, or her compassion shown to the next of kin of the Benghazi dead.<\/p>\n
It is thought of Hillary that she will be a shoo-in not just for the Democratic nomination but also for the presidency itself in 2016. Perhaps \u2014 given that she is certainly publicly pivoting away from the disastrous leftward positions that have given us five years of economic doldrums for just about everybody but Goldman Sachs. She is also said to have had smart timing, bailing out just in time from a sinking Obama administration so as to remind Democratic stalwarts that they supposedly made a terrible mistake in the summer of 2008.<\/p>\n
But is that completely true? The currently imploding Obamacare is simply a lighter version of Hillarycare, and branded with the same liberal arrogance and dissimulation with which a technocratic class in Washington, always exempt from the concrete ramifications of its own ideology, can dictate from on high what is good for Americans through bigger government, higher taxes, and supposedly enlightened redistribution. And because it is usually impossible to sell more and better things for cheaper prices, lies always ensue. Obamacare may well follow Hillarycare into the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n
Aside from conventional wisdom about Hillary\u2019s bright prospects, there is also still her record as a senator and secretary of state. Those tenures were not impressive, and were on occasion notably callous.<\/p>\n
Hillary voted for the Iraq War. In October 2002, she gave a fine speech explaining why we had to remove Saddam Hussein \u2014 fulfilling the pledge of Bill\u2019s Iraq Liberation Act and his incomplete 1998 Desert Fox bombing \u2014 only to become a fierce critic of her 2002 position when the polls went south on the war and she started eyeing the presidency. The complete pullout from Iraq in 2009, while she was secretary of state, turned a successful post-surge landscape back to 2006, and was one of the real blunders of the last five years.<\/p>\n
Hillary gave a screeching stump speech in 2003 about the right of dissent and her own heroic efforts to speak truth to power about the Iraq War (e.g., \u201cI am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you\u2019re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration\u201d) \u2014 and then as secretary of state did her best to keep State Department employees from talking to the press about Benghazi, while working for an administration that monitored Associated Press journalists, used the IRS to go after political opponents, and saw the tentacles of the NSA wrap around the German chancellor\u2019s cell phone. And while George W. Bush did not call any critic \u201cunpatriotic,\u201d that is precisely what Barack Obama once called Bush.<\/p>\n
Then there was her crude September 2007 grilling of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. In a joint session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, Hillary trumped the simultaneous\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0discounted ad \u201cGeneral Betray Us\u201d by calling America\u2019s most successful general and ambassador in a generation, who were honestly explaining the progress of the surge, veritable liars. In an effort to match the anti-war stance of her fellow senatorial inquisitor and presidential candidate Barack Obama, she summed up their combined testimony with the following sarcastic dismissal: \u201cDespite what I view as your rather extraordinary efforts in your testimony both yesterday and today, I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief.\u201d That was an odd sort of editorial accusation of mendacity from someone not known for veracity and who, a few months later, would really suspend disbelief to brag that she had dodged imaginary gunfire in Serbia.<\/p>\n Do we remember her grand talk about reset with Russia? That particular version of \u201cBush did it\u201d led to Russian obstruction of U.S. efforts at every turn, culminating in the triumph of Putin in Syria.<\/p>\n She was said to have been one of the architects of \u201clead from behind\u201d in Libya, which managed somehow all at once to diminish the role of the U.S. among its allies, violate U.N. resolutions limited to no-fly-zones and humanitarian aid (a con that would come back to haunt Obama in Syria through, once again, Russian obstructionism), and bring about a Mediterranean version of Mogadishu. In Egypt, the dumping of Mubarak, the promotion of Morsi, the non-coup, non-junta of the generals, and the sorta, kinda cutoff of U.S. aid had the common denominator of demonstrating American incoherence and earning hatred from Egyptians of every stripe.<\/p>\n Do we remember how Hillary tried to explain why we were removing Qaddafi and not Assad, on the grounds that the former was a far more serious threat? The latter, remember, she referred to as a \u201creformer\u201d (e.g., \u201cThere\u2019s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he\u2019s a reformer\u201d).<\/p>\n Then there was Benghazi. Every major statement that Hillary Clinton offered about Benghazi required a suspension of disbelief. The violence in Libya was never predicated on a video, but was a pre-planned hit. She knew before the attack that there was inadequate security, and later, after the violence commenced, she requested no help when help would have mattered. There was never an honest answer given about why Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi in the first place, why he was worried about his safety, and what exactly the State Department was fronting for.<\/p>\n Hillary told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: \u201cWhat difference \u2014 at this point, what difference does it make?\u201d Lots. When even liberal commentators now talk of a listless and directionless foreign policy, they should finish their sentence with references to a four-year Hillary Clinton tenure as secretary of state. And behind Hillary\u2019s latest odyssey \u2014 from Benghazi to Goldman Sachs \u2014 are four dead Americans, and little other than untruth for their kin.<\/p>\n \u00a0NRO\u00a0contributor<\/em>\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the\u00a0Hoover Institution<\/a>. His latest book is\u00a0<\/em>The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From Senator Clinton’s tergiversations on Iraq to Secretary Clinton’s lies on Benghazi by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[150,185],"tags":[1045,1029,1053,902,442,879,40,242],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Kh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8643,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillarys-campaign-has-already-begun-to-derail\/","url_meta":{"origin":6713,"position":0},"title":"Hillary\u2019s Campaign Has Already Begun to Derail","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 8, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Hillary Clinton\u2019s second race for the presidency is only about a quarter through, but she already seems to be causing general fatigue. The lurid revelations about the Clinton Foundation proved that it was not so much a charity as a huge laundering operation. Quid\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hillary Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Hillary Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/public-figures\/hillary-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Win McNamee\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/hillary-clinton-scandals-an-exhausting-spectacle-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9576,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/has-clinton-topped-nixon\/","url_meta":{"origin":6713,"position":1},"title":"Has Clinton topped Nixon?","author":"Megan Ring","date":"November 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Town Hall | Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure. 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After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic\u2014and prescient\u2014appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2016"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2016","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/campaign-2016\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"hillary_stunned","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/hillary_stunned.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5935,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/neither-secretary-clinton\/","url_meta":{"origin":6713,"position":3},"title":"Neither, Secretary Clinton","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Hillary Clinton\u2019s now infamous second question that followed, \u201cWas it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they\u2019d go kill some Americans?\u201d: \u201cWhat difference at this point does it make?\u201d is rightly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8592,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-clinton-reactionary\/","url_meta":{"origin":6713,"position":4},"title":"Hillary Clinton, Reactionary","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media\u00a0 Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton\u2019s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. 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By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online This year was supposed to be Hillary Clinton\u2019s \u201cturn,\u201d after her humiliating loss in 2008 to Barack Obama. She has paid her dues as secretary of state for Obama. And\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6715,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6713\/revisions\/6715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}