Posted on 04/04/2008 1:25:53 PM PDT by joanie-f
Hillary Clinton’s campaign ads here in Pennsylvania are focusing significantly on the slogan, ‘The purpose of my life has been standing up for people who weren’t getting a fair shake.’
I’d like to take a look at just three, of countless, people Hillary Clinton has ‘stood up for’ and then ask the readers here whether they would want to be the recipient of Hillary’s particular brand of altruism:
Juanita Broaddrick, who very credibly claims she was raped in 1979 by Ms. Clinton’s husband -- and then advised to ‘put some ice on it’ -- stated the following during an interview with Sean Hannity, in which Ms. Broaddrick described what occurred at a fund-raiser that took place just two weeks after the rape:
She made her way, just as quick as she could, to me.
I got nauseous when she came over to me. She came over to me, took ahold of my hand, and said, ‘I’ve heard so much about you, and I’ve been dying to me you. I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate what you do for him.’
I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I started to turn and walk away. This little soft-spoken – pardon me for the phrase -- dowdy woman, who seemed very unassertive, took ahold of my hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Do you understand? Everything that you do.’
I could have passed out at that moment. I got my hand from hers and I left … I mean cold chills went up my spine. That was the first time I became afraid of that woman.
[Hannity: You interpret that to mean that she knew about the incident?]
I certainly do. And she was saying ‘Thank you for keeping quiet.’
I perceive Juanita Broaddrick to be a woman who hasn’t been given a fair shake and I would give anything to be able to ask Ms. Clinton whether her treatment of Ms. Broaddrick should be broadly defined as ‘standing up for’ such people.
Billy Dale had worked in the White House Travel Office for three decades. He had served eight presidents in that capacity. But Hillary Clinton wanted to replace Dale and his staff with a group of political cronies who had donated to the Clinton campaign, and who had provided a million dollars in deferred travel expenses for the campaign, thus allowing that money to be used to foot other campaign expenses.
So Hillary had Dale fired. Just three months after her husband took office, Dale and all of the other employees of the Travel Office were given one hour's notice to pack up their belongings, and they were escorted from the White House grounds in a windowless van. Their replacements, the Clinton cronies, were hired without the customary receiving of competitive bids.
Ms. Clinton then spearheaded an effort to have Billy Dale and the rest of the Travel Office staff accused of, and prosecuted for, improper financial practices during their employment in the Travel Office. In addition, the Internal Revenue Service was told to investigate Mr. Dale’s personal finances. Yet, despite Hillary’s obsessive efforts to defame a man whose record was without blemish, and who was well thought of by all who knew and worked with him, all charges against Dale and the other Travel Office workers were eventually determined to be groundless and were dismissed.
I perceive Billy Dale to be a man who hasn’t been given a fair shake and I would give anything to be able to ask Ms. Clinton whether her treatment of Mr. Dale should be broadly defined as ‘standing up for’ such people.
Back in 1974, Hillary Clinton attempted to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the Watergate investigation. You see, if Nixon had enjoyed the benefit of counsel, then E. Howard Hunt (who coincidentally knew a great deal about crimes committed during the Kennedy administration -- crimes that would have made Watergate look like a walk in the park) could have undergone cross-examination. Hillary and her ilk wanted to prevent such cross-examination, at any cost – even the Constitutional rights of a sitting president.
In order to garner enough votes on the House Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny Nixon the right to counsel, Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief. And in order to disguise her brief as factual, she removed all files that would have revealed the lies contained in her brief. She had them taken to her office, which was not accessible to the public.
When the investigation ended, Jerry Zeifman, who was then chief of staff of the Judiciary Committee, fired Hillary from her position on the committee staff as a result of her attempts to defraud and deceive, and, to this day, he asserts that, if Hillary had submitted her deceptive, baseless and fraudulent brief to a judge, she would have run the real risk of facing disbarment proceedings.
No matter one’s feeling about Nixon, the man, I perceive him to be a man who was judged by a different yardstick than that used to judge others, before or since. In that way, he hasn’t been given a fair shake. And I would give anything to be able to ask Ms. Clinton whether her treatment of Mr. Nixon should be broadly defined as ‘standing up for’ such people.
I also suspect that the waitresses she has stiffed, the campaign workers whose health insurance premiums she has neglected to pay on time, the White House staff who were instructed never to look her in the eye when they passed her in the hallways, and countless other ‘little people’ with whom Hillary has crossed paths during her saintly life of devotion to bettering the lives of ‘the underdog’ might also take issue with the portrait that her campaign advertisements paint of Saint Hillary.
In an unprecedented occurrence, more than one hundred thousand Pennsylvania republicans have changed their registrations to democrat for the upcoming primary election on April 22nd. It will be interesting to see for which of the democrat candidates these 'temporary democrats' cast their ballots. Both candidates are Marxists. Both are pathological liars. And both are megalomaniacal, self-serving ideologues in humanitarian clothing.
Talk about a rock and a hard place.
~ joanie
Allegiance and Duty Betrayed
What I think is reflected in the sum of my posts. All of them are easily accessible to you on this and similar threads. If you are really interested in what I think, you can go back and read those and related posts by others who were pinged and responded in a similar manner (you can consider this the "due course" part).
That just about says it all, marron. Certainly I don't disagree with a word of it.
With that said, I am not quite as sure as some of you are that John McCain would be an defender of the Constitution. Granted, he has held fast on a number of Constitutional issues, but his abandonment of that precious document on an equal number of other issues worries me deeply.
Take McCain-Feingold. On the surface, it would appear that our national sovereignty, and our ability to keep Islamic terrorism at bay, are more important considerations than our First Amendment rights.
But are they?
One of the reasons we find ourselves in this terrible dilemma this election cycle rests in the fact that so much of our modern-day election process has literally been taken out of the hands of the people. The nominees are chosen by an ever more circuitous process in which ‘the people’ have less and less say – some states having caucuses and primaries; some having delegates that really are uncommitted; some having ‘super-delegates’, etc. The representation of the people’s will in our election process has become so convoluted as to be almost laughable anymore.
Our voices, no matter how loud and impassioned, are now channeled through so many mazes that they become all but inaudible. Special interests have hi-jacked the political process, and individual candidates, unless they are independently wealthy, have very little opportunity to rise to the top.
What is really more important, bottom-line, than the ability of a free people to speak their minds, especially in the process of electing those who will lead them (those who will make the major decisions regarding our national sovereignty and the determination with which we will battle Islamic terrorists)?
If our leaders don’t reflect our wishes, because of the convoluted, unconstitutional process by which we put them in office, then our ability to effectively do the things about which you and I are so concerned is compromised from the start.
John McCain contributed mightily to that circumstance in co-authoring McCain-Feingold, one of the most insidious affronts to personal liberty in recent memory.
He is also on board with many other left-wing, liberty-robbing agendas, whose sole purpose is to destroy our capitalist foundations and amass unbridled power for the ruling elite. His support of global warming initiatives is a sterling (but not the only) example of such a mindset.
Every national leader who supports such initiatives knows how phony, deceptive, agenda-driven and perilous they are. Those 'leaders' aren’t dupes. They’re the authors of the hoax. Global warming advocates, put simply, are placing the amassing of political power above the safety and sovereignty of our republic every bit as much as those who want us to retreat from our mission in Iraq. They steadfastly handcuff our energy policies, prevent us from developing our own oil reserves and building new refineries, etc., which results in our dependence on our ideological enemies (and those who perceive our annihilation as their destiny).
John McCain is pandering to supporters of such agendas.
His sponsoring of the ludicrous Patients’ Bill of Rights served as more evidence that he tends to march in lock-step with those who author altruistic sounding, liberty-robbing legislation. The bill was just another major step toward universal healthcare/socialized medicine, in that it deliberately imposed onerous regulations on the insurance industry and opened the door for a myriad of additional frivolous lawsuits against healthcare providers. The ultimate purpose of all such legislation? To turn the best medical care in the history of the world into an expensive bureaucratic nightmare. The inevitable ‘solution’? Nationalize healthcare.
And his stand on immigration – at least the one he formulated before the American people rejected it – would have rewarded criminal behavior and dramatically changed the fabric of our society, without the necessary means to ensure future enforcement of immigration laws. He authored a pretty package that had no teeth. And he knew it.
In short, while I do believe that McCain would conduct the war against Islamic terrorism as we would want him to, I believe he also embraces policies that would endanger our liberties and place our national security in jeopardy in other equally perilous ways.
He has succeeded in stifling our voices in our efforts to elect those who represent our views.
He has authored and supported measures that could soon alter, in a major and irretrievable way, the complexion of our society (according genuine patriots such as you and I less and less of a voice about the direction in which our republic travels).
And he embraces leftist environmentalist/climate/healthcare policies that dramatically tighten the sociliast grip, and make us dependent on some of the worst terrorist leaders of the world.
Sometimes the threats that lie beneath the surface, and that receive minimal attention, can be every bit as menacing as those that we discuss openly and frequently.
Rick Santorum, my former Senator, for whom I have a great deal of respect, observed a few months ago:
It’s amazing to hear what John McCain is trying to convince the voters he is all about. The bottom line is, I served twelve years with him, six years in the Senate as one of the leaders of the Senate, trying to put together the conservative agenda, and almost at every turn, on domestic policy, John McCain was not only against us, but leading the charge on the other side.
I was determined until recently that I would simply sit out this presidential ballot (for the first time in forty years). Since recent disturbing revelations about the company that Barack Obama keeps, I have wavered in that decision. At this point, I am not certain how or whether I will be casting my vote for president. I cannot vote for Obama, but I believe McCain is a far greater threat to our liberty and sovereignty than most of us are willing to admit. The fact that he isn’t a conservative represents just the tip of the iceberg.
~ joanie
Allegiance and Duty Betrayed
Thank you both so much for all of your insights and your outstanding essay-posts!
An understandable dilemma but one with respect to which--and I know you will understand this--I am determined not to become ensnared. I refuse to attempt to make distinctions among the various degrees of treason which each of the three candidates exemplify and then assign a grade from which a candidate can be chosen. With these three candidates, such a process would take the classic "least worse" evaluation and stand it on its head. All three are so obviously unfit for office as to make one wonder there can be any doubt of that at all. I refuse to legitimize the least treasonous one with a vote. To hell with all three of them.
Although it may not sound like it, I can empathize with those of us who are having such a difficult time with this. To them I would say be patient--the "unfit three" have plenty of time to embarrass themselves further and to demonstrate, conclusively, why none of them are fit for office. To name one of these phony political hacks President is to spit on the U. S. Constitution and insult our Founders as well as all of the brave souls who have sacrificed life and limb to defend the United States.
You really hit the nail on the head with this observation, joanie-f. This election cycle is positively rancid, on both sides, because the people have been marginalized in the selection process. The democrat's byzantine nomination system is specifically designed for this purpose, to the effect that the nominee that emerges from the selection process will have effectively been chosen by the party elite: the people cannot be trusted to make the "right choice," you see.
On the Republican side, which generally has a clear-cut, "winner take all" majority-rule primary system, the Republican candidate had effectively been chosen for us by the mainstream media, by February. (These early, bunched primaries have been a disaster for the GOP.) Of course, the print and television media picked for us the least conservative candidate in the field by simply withholding coverage of the others. In the TV debates, the true conservatives were barely heard from because questions were not directed to them.
Meanwhile, McCain gets a free ride, and lots of free publicity on the evening news. Jeepers, the NYT endorsed him in December -- for GOP nominee, mind you; they didn't endorse him for president. Then again, later they trashed him for a supposed affair with a lobbyist. You can't get more cynical than that. The whole point of this (failed) exercise manifestly was to clear the field for Obama, the media darling -- because Obama's as hard-left as they are....
What really rankles is that McCain evidently intends to give the back of his hand to conservatives. Evidently he believes he doesn't need us to win, preferring to reach out to "Reagan Democrats" and independents. If this strategy succeeds, he will feel justified in marginalizing conservatives and the conservative movement once in office.
As a conservative, I would deeply resent this. I suppose I could just throw a hissy fit and say "I'm gonna stay home on election day." But you know my concern here, that if either Hillary or Obama wins the White House, they will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, leaving the Middle East in chaos, emboldening the Mullahs in Iran and their terror networks, and increasing the probability of a catastrophic strike on our homeland and/or on our allies.
I figure a vote for McCain is not so much a vote for McCain as a vote against Hillary or Obama and the evils they portend WRT foreign policy, national security, and national sovereignty.
I find it delicious that McCain's unconstitutional campaign finance reform is about to bite him on the rear end, with the impending Soros/Brock $40 million anti-McCain publicity initiative. McCain is hoist on his own pitard! He will live to regret these 527 "issue-oriented" groups that McCain-Feingold spawned.
Oh well, I'm not a happy camper. This is the single most rotten, thoroughly depressing presidential campaign I have ever seen in my life. It is an understatement to say conservatives have no choice that they can feel good about. But for reason of the war in Iraq/international Islamofascism alone, I'll probably be taking mother Lillian's advice and just "hold my nose and vote for her son."
If anybody has a better idea, please let me know. The unacceptable outcome would be a Democrat in the White House, so don't anybody try to tell me this would be a good thing, for instance by strengthening the hand of conservatism post-2012. It's the next four years that are critical. We need a war president in office these next four years, not an arrogant, left-progressive sociopath, let alone a closet Black separatist who detests his country.
Thanks so much for your insightful essay-post, joanie-f!
UNLESS Obama, Clinton and McLaim are merely "liberal" plans A, B, and C.. all along.. In which case they all would accomplish the same thing.. ultimately.. Saying one of them is worse than the other is a losers dialog I think.. Especially if they are just figureheads.. or mastheads on the ship of state..
If so, then it a quite brilliant plan.. How they did it is a mystery to anyone I know.. but they did do it.. The only way for "this" to happen is with a shadow gov't of some kind.. If the "Coup" has already happened.. then this election(2008) is merely the aging process of it becoming more mature.. Which to say "IT" happened back during the Clinton cycle and we are just getting/seeing the results NOW..
A conspiracy?... Why not.. Sandy Burgular and many of George Bushs actions fly in the face of logic.. Theres something very fishy going on.. Its hard to identify it all but you can "smell" it.. McLaim becoming the republican candidate clinched it for me.. That stinks..
I caught a whiff of "conspiracy" too, dear 'pipe. On the one hand, that seems farfetched. But on the other, anti-democratic, anti-liberty forces have been gathering strength in recent times. You don't necessarily need a formal conspiracy when the people in power (in gummint, in the news media, in academe, etc.) are all like-minded....
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts, dear brother in Christ!
A formal conspiracy?.. LoL.. Excuse me.. Thank you very much.. Pardon me... LoL... How nice... LoL... I think you have termed a new term.. "A formal conspiracy"...
Thats opposed "I suspect" to a deep down, ugly, profane, stinky, not well dressed, nose picking conspiracy.. You have a way with words my dear.. Damn; Its not easy being a conpiracist these days..
You must pick the false diversion wild goose chase, type conspiracys from the really nasty in your face and up your nose real ones.. Its not easy being a conpiracist these days.. Boopy, its so easy to be WRONG and RIGHT at the same time.. Would be an ingenious plan if it was planned that way, wouldnt it..
The poor sheeple havnt a chance to keep their wool.. do they..
Not short of a tax revolt, they don't. :^)
Getting the gummint back on a short leash, directly answerable/accountable to the people, ain't gonna be easy.... But if We the People can't do that, then our country will have been stolen right out from under us.
I wish I did.
joanie,
Thank you for sharing your insights and doing so with such brilliance and clarity.
I think that the only thing that I disagree with you on is the steadfastness and sincerity of Mr Santorum. I no longer respect him.
BTTT
Yeah, me too. Time to put on the ol' thinking cap.
When I did, an image of the Boston Tea Party popped up — a fine example of a tax revolt, in the grand American tradition — in this case against the Crown of King George III and his government, located 3,000 miles away.
It seems to me the Achilles heel of the federal government is its incessant need to vacuum up as much tax revenue as possible, from productive Americans, in order to buy the votes of unproductive Americans; and this system is supposedly "voluntary."
To avoid hypocrisy, we here have to redefine the meaning of the word "voluntary" to extend to "voluntary because I have a gun to my head."
Payment of the federal income tax, for example, is said to be "voluntary." But God help the man who "unvolunteers."...
The Boston Tea Party model seems inapplicable in the present situation.
Just wool-gathering here.... Thanks so much for writing metmom!
Thank you so much for your outstanding essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!
We elect enough congressmen and senators, who, among other conservative bedrock principles, run on the following tow planks:
This plan could easily be started at, or extended to, the various State Houses as well.
- Any new law passed by the Congress (House and Senate) REQUIRES two laws to be aborgated/stricken from the books for it to become law.
- Any new Tax or fee passed by Congress (House and Senate) REQUIRES a correspong 150% decxrease in taxes or fess before it can become law.
I greatly admire your Washington "Two-fer" strategy. I do wonder, however, how implementable it is. Moreover it seems to me the Boston Tea Party model does not hold up here. The Tea Party was executed by the Sons of Liberty, personally risking their necks to make the point that "no taxation without representation" was completely non-negotiable as far as the Colonials were then concerned.
Today, we are taxed and -- to the extent that the voice of the people cannot find a response in the presently-constituted mode of governmental power -- we have no representation. The elite consensus seems to be that We the People -- supposedly sovereign in this nation, as guaranteed by the federal Constitution -- are unfit to conduct our own affairs. We are told wiser minds than ours "know better." So, just let the wiser minds rule, and we the people can just shut up and comply with their wise decisions for us.
Which of course is a complete canard. The presently constituted authorities are devoted to upholding the privileges of an entrenched status quo (racialist, unionist, anti-life, secularist/atheist, etc.). They don't care what happens in the world, or to America, so long as they continue to succeed in that enterprise.
The other manifest problem is political office these days draws the worst possible candidates. Men of honor, honesty, character, integrity, devotion to our constitutional order of equal justice under the rule of law, know better than to run for public office. People like that -- men who demonstrate what the Founders would have called "civic virtue" -- do not run for public office these days. Instead, political office has become the first resort of would-be scoundrels.
So if we're gonna find and elect conservative candidates, and ask them to take "the Two-for Pledge," and they'd freely take it to secure our votes, what guarantee do we have that they would actually honor their pledge? Congress is so toxic these days that even the most virtuous would likely become compromised in short order, just in order to survive in that pestilential, money- and power-driven environment.
Congress no longer exists to serve the People, who alone legitimatize Congress (since the People created it in the first place, gave it its mission, and required it to be accountable to them as the primary agent of majoritarian will -- which is the backbone of our constitutional sociopolitical order).
But if the Boston Tea Party model does not work, then maybe we could look to other instances of tax revolt from American history. The Whiskey Rebellion comes to mind.
But this would not be a good model for us right now. For one thing, people on both sides fired guns in the Whiskey Rebellion. Frankly, I don't think American society is quite ready for that sort of thing these days....
So what to do that might be useful?
My humble proposal: We conservatives have every perfect right to be in high dudgeon over the trashing of our country, of our constitutional order, that the Progressive Left has been wreaking on our constitutional, traditional, specifically American order for the past 80 or so years.
To great effect as far as they're concerned: They have largely succeeded in removing God and morality from the public discourse, and so have succeeded in reducing the human being, the free human individual taken with regard to personal, familial, and social connections, and turned him into a more or less anonymous member of a larger group, carved out in terms of its political significance and benefit to political parties and their ambitious candidates.
In short, I, a constitutional, social, and economic conservative, do not want to play into such diminished political dynamics, which are antithetical to the principles of our constitutional founding.
So what can conservatives do -- together? These days, it's hard to tell. In our own little microcosm of Freerepublic, we find conservatives lashing out at each other, whenever they aren't simply moaning in pain. Seemingly there is no core principle around which we might unite.
If so, let me suggest a core principle around which we conservatives might unite and rally: The federal income tax code itself.
This is neither a "Boston Tea Party" nor a "Whiskey Rebellion" sort of "debate."
We conservatives have every right to feel "disaffected" this political year. The main problem is we never got an opportunity to choose our own candidate for president. The candidates of both parties have been preselected, prescreened, and then simply presented to us.
I do not hear "the voice of the People" in this selection. And yet, thanks to "the powers that be," we are constrained, limited to a choice of candidate(s) we didn't select, or even want in the first place.
We conservatives can't win under these tactical rules. So let's just change the subject altogether.
Let's mount a challenge to the Achilles Heel of the federal government -- the federal Income Tax. Let's continue to knaw them about the ankles of this preposterous, unconstitutional attack on individual liberty, productivity, and (4th Amendment) privacy; not to mention the collective social peace.
* * * * * * *
Today I completed my federal and state income tax filings for 2007. So the FIT and MIT are very much in my mind at the moment.
These are the things that I find wrong with the income tax system:
(1) Both the federal and state systems claim to be "voluntary." But of course, this is total hogwash. Just try to "unvolunteer" and see what happens. The claim of "voluntariness" is wholly, completely refuted by the fact that the respective taxing authorities invest literally billions of dollars in effecting "taxpayer compliance." "Unvoluntary" miscreants can wind up losing their homes or businesses, etc., or serving time in federal prison. So much for the "voluntary" aspect of the federal income tax.
We are plainly and simply led to believe a lie, if we conclude the federal or state income tax system is "voluntary."
(2) The federal income tax system is plainly unconstitutional, for it treats different citizens unequally. Our Constitution requires equal treatment for all citizens. Yet the progressive rate structure of the tax code discriminates among citizens in terms of their economic success. The more successful, in effect, must pay extra compensation for the less successful. The Constitution does not provide a basis for legitimizing such a result. The Constitution simply says: "Thou shalt not discriminate among individual citizens; for all are equal under the law."
(3) The level of detail demanded by the federal authorities to even complete a tax return these days is invasive of the Fourth Amendment privacy protections of American citizens. God help you if you have a health savings account, or miscellaneous 1099 income to report for tax year 2007. Why the feds need to delve into this level of detail is beyond me; but I strongly doubt it truly serves any good public purpose.
(4) I am a citizen of the United States of America; and I expect to pay my fair share to recompense the government for the benefits it provides to me, my family, my community. The only "hitch" to that statement is: I expect the federal (and state) government to deliver only the benefits that it can properly deliver under the Constitution that ultimately legitimizes it.
As a citizen of the United States, and a taxpayer theoreof, I have absolutely ZERO responsibility for the extra- or un-Constitutional projects that the presently sitting governental authorities may wish to undertake.
Back to the Main Theme here: No taxation without representation.
Just some stray thoughts on a Sunday night. Thank you ever so much for writing Jeff Head!
(5) Any system of voluntary compliance legitimately must rest on the capability of the individual taxpayer to assess and pay his own liability to the system. When the system becomes so complicated that expert help must be hired, just to execute an annual tax filing, something is wrong with the system.
Or in other words, if educated, reasonably intelligent people can't file their own income tax returns because they involve questions that reasonable intelligent people can't answer without hiring a professional, something is WRONG with this system.
Any binding tax liability/assessment should be as transparent, logical, and simple in its requirements as possible, such that any average American taxpayer can figure out what that assessment is, on what basis, and find it legitimate.
In other words, a taxpayer should not need to engage the services of a professional class of specialist in order to fulfull his duty as a citizen of the United States of America.
How can you be taxed on something you own?..
If you can be , (and you can be) then you are renting "IT" from the government..,
Taxes while the constitution was being written was ONE thing..
What taxes have become is entirely ANOTHER THING..
The perversion started with the federal reserve.. (central bank)..,
Several founders warned against a central bank..
SOme study should be done on HOW taxes change without a central banks into something ELSE with a central bank..
Taxes, licenses, permits, fees, penaltys, and a hundred other charges and payments to some gov't agency effects everyones life in some negative aspect.. Little wonder communists give up and say let the government OWN EVERYTHING.. including the PEOPLE.. for Socialism is indeed SLAVERY BY GOVERNMENT..
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