Posted on 04/26/2015 7:00:37 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
On the surface, it isn’t that hard to understand the Clinton Cash scandal that Democrats are trying very hard to ignore this week. We have a former president making millions giving speeches and doing favors for wealthy foreign entities and nations that give massive sums to the Clinton family charity that subsidizes the lavish lifestyle of the former First Family. He did this at the same time as his wife spent four years as secretary of state where she made decisions that influence the fortunes of those donors. And all this was happening while said former first lady/secretary of state is planning to run for president herself at the next opportunity. No one can deny that this smells to high heaven of impropriety, and the best Billy and Hillary’s court of admirers and apologists can say in their defense is that the evidence of a conflict of interest is circumstantial and that there is no smoking gun proving their guilt. But there is another defense that Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsch hints at in a piece published yesterday: their marriage is so dysfunctional that any alleged coordination between the two is unlikely.
As Hirsh notes, to discuss the “impenetrable” Clinton marriage is a difficult task. Upon their arrival on the national stage in the 1992 presidential campaign, Americans have on the one hand been deluged with far more information about the Clintons’ relationship than we wanted, as he confessed to having “caused pain,” while never giving us any further explanations. A few years later Bill plunged the nation into a degrading debate about the definition of sex and whether it’s OK to commit perjury about acts of sexual harassment after his dalliance with an intern in the Oval Office. Since then we’ve been asked at one and the same time to sympathize with Hillary as the long suffering wife while also being warned to keep our noses out of their private business.
Would that we could. As Brit Hume recently noted on Fox, one of the key questions about Hillary’s presidential prospects is whether the “American people want another four, eight years of the Clintons and their weird marriage.”
That sounds pretty harsh and uncharacteristically ungentlemanly coming from the courtly Hume. But he’s on to something that can neither be ignored nor swept under the carpet. Having asked us to take them as a two-for-one package in 1992, the ordeal of watching their odd contortions as a couple has become a long national nightmare that, if she wins in 2016, will have no end in sight.
If the questions about them were merely the prosaic ones about whether their continuing union is one primarily of convenience like some royal dynastic pairing rather than a conventional marriage in which two people strive to love and stay together, any queries about their private lives would be rude and even inadmissible. Whether the Clintons are in any sense a romantic couple is none of our business. But if they are still a working political partnership, then we are entitled to know a great deal about their personal interactions. In particular, we deserve to learn about how large a role Bill played as an advisor to her when she was running U.S. foreign policy. We’re also entitled to know more about her role in their charity’s insatiable campaign to raise enormous amounts of cash from individuals, companies, and countries. In classic “pay for play” style, those donors thought they could do themselves quite a bit of good by giving to the Clintons rather than more established philanthropies that were not run by former and perhaps future presidents.
Other than merely claiming that we can’t prove it to a legal certainty without a smoking gun, Mrs. Clinton’s defense against the allegations raised in Clinton Cash rests on a few shaky limbs onto which her defenders can climb. One is to assert that the actions the Department of State took that benefitted Clinton donors were handled below her level. Which is to say she was, shades of Benghazi, not in the know about crucial decisions taking place on her watch. Which is to say she was an incompetent secretary of state.
Another possible defense raised by Hirsh is that Clinton was completely removed from major policy decisions in the Obama administration. This has a ring of truth to it as Obama distrusts the Clintons and runs a top-down administration in which Cabinet secretaries have little say on important matters, though that doesn’t absolve her on issues that the president did not decide. It also further undermines her claim that her experience as secretary of state entitles her to the presidency.
Yet there is an even more credible defense that Clinton’s clique can’t raise. It is that Bill and Hillary are just so disconnected a couple that the idea that they coordinated the family charity business with her foreign-policy ambitions is absurd.
Is this true? We don’t know for sure and, as with so much else about the Clintons, we may never know. Whatever their personal problems might be, their political and business partnership seems to be intact. Moreover, that defense didn’t work for an equally dysfunctional couple, Bob and Maureen McDonnell, when they faced prosecution for pay to play charges for their actions during his time as governor of Virginia.
Whatever form their personal relationship now takes, it’s too late to say that the vast charitable and political web they have woven is none of our business. Both Bill and Hillary have benefitted enormously from their charitable empire and so have those who donated to it.
Getting to the bottom of the Clinton Cash problem may require us, as Hirsh says, to “unscramble the omelet.” The putative 2016 Democratic Party candidate for president has shown no signs of being willing to speak candidly about these questions and a presidential campaign is a bad time for the pair to sort out their marriage for the public. It might be the best defense she can offer, but Hillary is unlikely to try to acquit herself of any involvement in the Clinton Foundation’s dirty business by telling us the truth about how disconnected the two really are.
Paying Bill Clinton $500K for speech is like paying $1,000 for a bottle of champagne at a gentlemen’s club (or so I hear). The expected “performance” is no surprise to ANYONE.
The key is to pray for God’s will.
I have a hemophiliac brother in law who is now a twisted skeleton thanks to the Clintons. That’s how i remember.
shes being thrown under the bus....
the left doesnt want her to drag them down
they simply can not afford to jeep hillary around any longer
This is yet another vast right wing conspiracy.
Soros was backing both nobama and klintoon, Soros called the shots and probably made and will make billions on U1.
Unlikely any President will ever be arrested much less imprisoned.
Sadly for hitlery there is no such political philosophy prohibiting conviction of an ex-Senator or ex-SOS. She might indeed be taking a detour up the river.
Exactly, it’s always been a money laundering system. The Mafia uses things like this. The Clintons are no better than the Mafia families
And who, pray tell, is going to prosecute her?
That deserves a big fat - WRONG!
Bill and Hillary's court of admirers simply have no respect for the law and no moral bearings. They don't care what kind of crimes are committed by the Clintons including felony conduct, assault, treason and possibly even murder. Regardless of the crime, or the level of premeditation people on the left are fully willing to see it pushed aside to further their individual causes.
Nobody who went through watching that election and then through the gore snippy fit probably backed by the bubbas readying their third term then watched the bushes and the majority congress just waste it, then go through it twice again with mcwacko and Romney throwing the debate will be able to physically get to the polls and vote for a romp as president again
That doesn’t even consider The new GOP congress giving Bo everything
I don’t care if it’s Hillary. I will not be able to vote for a rink
If that makes the losers in the GOP happy, fine. But this is not going to be another Romney election. An opinion of course
I do not see it
It always was a marriage of convenience in which they help each other’s ambitions.
NO IT WILL NOT!!
because we wont let it. We will support Cruz at all costs.
Hucksterby, Fatso, The Spanish wannabe, Linda, dont go away mad just go away.
Fiorina is a great attack dog and can say things men cant about Hillary. Give her a position in the next administration.
Paul gives some good retorts at dems but he must back out down the line.
Carson doesn’t have what it takes. That is obvious from some of his very unsavvy comments
Rubio is the one that worries me. ALOT of people like him in my family and even friends.
Rink and romp are autocorrect code words for rino
Rubio should scare you. He is nothing a big nothing. His background is weak his education is weak. He fell for the schmooze of the gang of eight.
People like Rubio because he is good looking and charismatic. Any Irish grandmother would tell you so is the devil in disguise. And they’d be cute but 100% correct. From experience
Rubio. No. Anyway he’ll fold like a cheap suit under the glare of the debate stage lights after first delivering his points for an hour in Spanish to HIS people then showing up needing to bounce over dufus-like to grab a little bottle of water
Let’s hope so. Before he gives the rest of everything away
The grifters shook down people to pay for Chelsea’s wedding. I wonder how many foreign governments chipped in.
haven’t seen waterbottlegate yet lol.
Cruz is my man.
Walker doesn’t do it for me but I would vote for him based on what I’ve read he’s accomplished.
Cruz seems to say what I want to hear every time.
Sent him an email asking why he approves of the trade agreement. Some freepers are for it, most are against it.
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