{"id":8678,"date":"2015-09-22T11:01:41","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T18:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8678"},"modified":"2015-09-22T11:01:41","modified_gmt":"2015-09-22T18:01:41","slug":"hillary-clintons-empire-of-dirt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-clintons-empire-of-dirt\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillary Clinton\u2019s Empire of Dirt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hillary Clinton’s Freudian Slip\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Clinton
Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson\/Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But \u201cin the end,\u201d what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists \u2014 in other words, their \u201cempire of dirt\u201d?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton just released a brief video about the need for women to stand up to their sexual assaulters while demanding relief from society\u2019s unwarranted doubts about their allegations: \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to condemn campus sexual assault. We need to end<\/em> campus sexual assault!\u201d Who would not agree with that assertion?<\/p>\n

Not long ago, she went after hedge-fund operators and the Wall Street insiders who connive, avoid taxes, and profit inordinately: \u201cYou see the top 25 hedge-fund managers making more than all of America\u2019s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often, paying a lower tax rate!\u201d The liberal PolitiFact rated Ms. Clinton\u2019s assertion as true.<\/p>\n

Ms. Clinton, during this campaign season, has also sermonized on student loans and the crushing burden universities are putting on American youth, to the tune of $1 trillion in collective debt: \u201cWe need to make a quality education affordable and available to everyone willing to work for it without saddling them with decades of debt!\u201d \u201cDecades of debt\u201d is no exaggeration.<\/p>\n

She also deplored big-money donations to political campaigns and the corrupting influence they have had on presidential politics: \u201cWe need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all \u2014 even if it takes a constitutional amendment!\u201d Note the repetition of \u201cwe need,\u201d which I suppose includes herself.<\/p>\n

Transparency for public officials (\u201creal sunshine\u201d; \u201cI\u2019m trying to be as transparent as possible\u201d) has been another of her themes \u2014 as in the deplorable absence of it both in our elected politicians themselves and in the manner in which our government operates.<\/p>\n

She has also weighed in on foreign policy, defending her record, whose logical trajectory was the present non-treaty with Iran, which she wholeheartedly supports.<\/p>\n

The problem with all of Ms. Clinton\u2019s advocacies is not that the liberal positions she supports are unusual; indeed, her proposed solutions to these problems are standard progressive orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

The rub instead is that almost every issue that Ms. Clinton has raised and every position of advocacy that she now embraces are direct refutations of either her present or her past behavior \u2014 and sometimes both<\/em>. Surely she is aware of that?<\/p>\n

Bill Clinton\u2019s sordid sexual harassments are ancient history better forgotten. But Ms. Clinton must accept that her advocacy video about sexual assault and harassment unfortunately dredges them back up. Do her present boilerplate professions of believing the alleged victim amount to a sort of postmodern \u201cI will let you down\u201d confession? For two decades of Bill Clinton\u2019s political ascendance, Ms. Clinton\u2019s own attitude toward women who alleged that they were either harassed or sexually assaulted by Governor and then President Bill Clinton was that they were either delusional or gold-digging connivers. Nothing that Ms. Clinton said or did ever suggested that Juanita Broddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, or Monica Lewinsky \u2014 or scores of others \u2014 was anything other than a liar or an opportunist. All these victims advanced claims as convincing as, or more so than, the he-said\/she-said campus incidents in the news, whose resolutions apparently demand suspension of the Bill of Rights.<\/p>\n

Did Ms. Clinton ever remonstrate with political hitman James Carville for suggesting that Jones was little more than a bought, trailer-trash libertine? As a lawyer, did she refuse to defend a predator charged with the sexual assault of a girl \u2014 or muse about her legal gymnastics that got him off? As a professional woman and First Lady, did she insist that White House employees \u2014 including the President \u2014 be exemplars of gender-equality etiquette? Did she model her current proposed code of campus sexual behavior on what once emanated from the West Wing?<\/p>\n

#share#Mindboggling was the variety of charges against Bill Clinton. They represented a primer on the current debate over what constitutes both felonious and nihilistic male aggression against women: coerced rough sex; on-the-job roughhouse groping; demands for humiliating ad hoc sex acts; the use of power and position by the employer to leverage quickie, on-the-desk gratifications from young and vulnerable female interns. In other words, Bill Clinton became iconic of just the sort of multifaceted sexual assaults \u2014 and of male denials and conspiratorial female efforts to demonize the victim \u2014 about which Ms. Clinton now shakes her finger. At various stages of his life, Bill Clinton has played the archetypal wild campus womanizer, the vain, sexually manipulative careerist, the lecherous employer, and the immune sex harasser, all of which current campus assault advocacy targets. Surely she knows that?<\/p>\n

We all understand the principles of medieval liberal exemption. Progressives often voice abstract anguish to win psychological absolution and political cover for their own moral lapses and hypocrisies: The louder the condemnation, often the greater the guilt and the need for absolution. The implosion of former senator John Edwards was a case in point. But in Ms. Clinton\u2019s case she has taken such pre-Reformation penance to a new low. Had she, after four or five of these habitual and sordid episodes, finally, in true feminist fashion, disconnected from Bill Clinton, she would have done far more truth-to-power advocacy for abused women than any cheap after-the-fact video that is now peddled to save her campaign.<\/p>\n

Why is Ms. Clinton railing about big money? If she is really willing to change the Constitution to end the Big Money\/Big Politics nexus, she might do two things. One, she could scold Barack Obama for being the first presidential candidate in the history of campaign-financing laws to have refused public funds, with the limiting and transparent protocols that they require, in order to be freed to raise the largest privately funded war chest in presidential campaign history \u2014 as well as to set records as the greatest recipient of Wall Street cash. Nothing has been more deleterious to the progressive idea of barring the piling up of unlimited money for presidential races.<\/p>\n

Two, she might repudiate the enormous amounts of cash from the global financial elite that have poured into the Clinton Foundation (whose motto is now suddenly \u201cA Commitment to Honesty, Transparency, and Accountability\u201d) on the expectation of a quid quo pro from the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

Transparency? Ms. Clinton\u2019s private server and e-mail accounts will be textbook examples of what high public officials must never do again. The agenda of her personal server and accounts was to hide her official communications from audit and indeed from historical appraisal itself. Everything<\/em> she has told us about the scandal has so far proved either half true or outright false \u2014 and on the premise that she had the clout to avoid the repercussions that lesser offenders with fewer connections routinely face. The Clinton e-mails will rank with the Nixon tapes as the most desperate examples of political dishonesty and historical distortion of the last half-century. As for now, Ms. Clinton\u2019s legal future for the next 16 months rests entirely on the degree of pique that Ms. Valerie Jarrett, White House consigliere, feels in any given news cycle.<\/p>\n

If Ms. Clinton is worried about the clout and lucre enjoyed by hedge-fund operators \u2014 the sorts that Donald Trump routinely castigates as tax evaders and paper shifters, in contrast to supposed men of action like himself who at least build tall eponymous towers with their fortunes \u2014 she need not lecture the right wing about them. Ms. Clinton lives and breathes hedge-fund money.<\/p>\n

Here would be a better five-point Clinton lesson: 1) Always pay the IRS the full amount of all<\/em> taxes owed on profits from market speculation. 2) Don\u2019t allow a daughter to work for such suspect hedge funds or, barring that, at least suggest to her that those under 35 don\u2019t routinely end up worth $15 million without some sort of inequity. 3) Don\u2019t lecture America on Wall Street profiteering until you have advised your own daughter and son-in-law about the sources of their fortune. 4) Don\u2019t solicit hedge-fund profits for the Clinton Foundation. 5) Don\u2019t speculate in futures markets on the premise of using insider contacts to leverage a $1,000 investment into $100,000, at the expense of someone else less connected, and at odds variously calibrated at somewhere in the vicinity of 250 million to one.<\/p>\n

The vast spike in college costs \u2014 which have risen far faster than the annual rate of inflation \u2014 is due to the growth of administrative bloat (much of it in diversity bureaucracies), the expansion of universities into lifestyle landscapes, from upscale rec centers to advocacy programs and outreach (including the sort of guest lecturing in which Ms. Clinton is paid $300,000 for a 30-minute talk), and universities\u2019 lack of fiscal restraint due to federally guaranteed student loans. If Ms. Clinton were sincere about the plight of campus victims, she might jawbone that part-time lecturers be treated at least with the same dignity as Wal-Mart check-out clerks and be given pay parity with them, or that bundled student-loan interest-rate packages should be no higher than those on used-car loans. Her $10,000-a-minute fee for a hack ramble is emblematic of college financial mismanagement, the effects of which fall ultimately upon indebted students.<\/p>\n

As for Iran and Ms. Clinton\u2019s record as secretary of state, history is already the judge. The disastrous U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Middle East in general was established on her watch. Her team favored the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, set the stage for the U.S. abdication from a once-quiet pre-ISIS Iraq, was in charge of the \u201clead from behind\u201d\/ \u201cWe came, we saw, he died\u201d fiasco in Libya, established the security protocols in Benghazi and then blame-gamed a video-maker for the violence, dubbed Assad a \u201creformer\u201d before he was to be red-lined out of power, estranged Israel from the U.S., invited the Russians into the Middle East, and gave pseudo-deadlines to Iran before dropping all the conditions that were once said to be non-negotiable requisites for non-proliferation talks.<\/p>\n

Many in the Democratic party worry that Ms. Clinton\u2019s lackluster performance so far might suggest that, actually, she has always been a mediocre politico. Or they privately fret that she is not vigorous on the stump and makes someone roughly her age and in her profession \u2014 say, Senator Elizabeth Warren (born a mere year and a half later) \u2014 seem two decades younger by comparison.<\/p>\n

Perhaps so. But the real problem with the Clinton candidacy is psychological.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Hillary Clinton has developed a strange but habitual tic of railing and remonstrating about hot-button issues and egregious behaviors that offer windows into her own plagued soul, past and present. It is as if Hillary has become an ailing Johnny Cash singing \u201cHurt\u201d \u2014 draped in black at the end, a faint simulacrum of his once combative self, seeking new resonance through a rocker\u2019s lyrics for the confession of his own sins: \u201cI wear this crown of s\u2014 \/ Upon my liar\u2019s chair<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her Freudian calls for solutions to the sort of ethical and moral transgressions that have defined her own long career, near the end of it, Hillary Clinton seems to be asking in vain of her dissipating cadres of true believers, \u201cWhat have I become?\u201d<\/p>\n

Answer?<\/p>\n

As she limps along, wounded, on the campaign trail, her flat, half-hearted sermons are best translated as, \u201cYou could have it all, \/ My empire of dirt. \/ I will let you down. \/ I will make you hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hillary Clinton’s Freudian Slip\u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But \u201cin the end,\u201d what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists \u2014 in other words, their \u201cempire of dirt\u201d?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":[185],"tags":[997],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2fY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8974,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-many-contradictions-of-hillary\/","url_meta":{"origin":8678,"position":0},"title":"The Many Contradictions of Hillary","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax \"schemes\" in the Caribbean. 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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":8386,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/remember-when-the-left-welcomed-exposes-of-the-clintons\/","url_meta":{"origin":8678,"position":3},"title":"Remember When the Left Welcomed Expos\u00e9s of the Clintons?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 6, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ NRO- The Corner In July 2008 Todd Purdum wrote a devastating and controversial take-down of Bill Clinton for Vanity Fair, outlining the sort of ethical and personal lapses that are back in the news seven years later. 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