Smart Parting Shots by Barbara Olson
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 25, 2001
DAYS AFTER COMPLETING HER BOOK, The Final Days, Barbara Olson died aboard the airliner that terrorists skyjacked and flew into the Pentagon. The first half of this set, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton, soared onto best-seller lists in 1999 and left the First Lady spitting with fury at the truth it revealed about her.
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No wonder, then, that while the rest of America mourned the deaths of Barbara Olson and 5,800 others in the hours after the attacks of September 11, Hillary Clinton and her operatives reportedly were frantically trying to stop publication of Olson’s surefire best-seller sequel. Barbara Olson’s intelligent and honest voice had been silenced, and Hillary wanted her last book dead and buried too.
Open the covers of this magnificent book to any page and you will immediately see why Hillary wanted to kill The Final Days. Detail by shocking detail, using her vast experience as a former Justice Department attorney, congressional investigator, and general counsel in the United States Senate, Olson lays out an indictment of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s relentless arrogance, greed and corruption.
Does this matter, now that the Clinton Administration is a fading nightmare in the rear-view mirror of history? It does, and the ammunition this book provides is urgently needed on every American bookshelf, for at least three reasons.
This book remains vitally important to our nation’s future because the Clintons are yet with us. Senator Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.) is positioning herself to be, at minimum, her party’s Vice Presidential nominee in 2004 and its Presidential candidate in 2008.
Rush Limbaugh used to say that a national shrine should be erected to Mary Jo Kopechne because her tragic drowning in a car in water only six feet deep at Chappaquiddick guaranteed that Ted Kennedy would never become President.
Barbara Olson likewise merits a national memorial. Her two splendid books could be the stake through the heart of Hillary Clinton’s megalomaniacal Presidential ambition. These books could thereby save our nation. In the phrase originated on my radio show, these books continue to scream out "America, wake up and smell the Clintons!"
The right response by any moral person to Hillary, wherever she appears, is the one given by heroic New York City firefighters and police at the benefit concert last weekend.
The second reason is that the Clintons still control the Democratic Party through their appointed sock puppet Terry McAuliffe. Its values and morals are toxic Clinton values and morals.
The third – and to me most important – reason why everyone should read this book comes from words Olson quotes from Democratic National Committee member Paul Goldman. President Clinton, said Goldman, had "made hollow a key tenet of Democratic philosophy – that the president is the moral center of our political system and must lead by example to capture the power of America’s principled idealism."
The co-presidents Clinton did lead by example, but to where? In Goldman’s words, "Mr. Clinton didn’t just take the White House china; he took its soul and flushed it down the toilet."
Today the Clintons remain like a giant billboard in front of our children, who daily read there the message: "CHEATING PAYS! Look at us," Bill and Hillary’s example shouts. "We lied. We cheated. We broke every moral, ethical, and legal rule you can think of. And we have walked away with glory, a U.S. Senate seat, book deals worth $10 million and $8.5 million respectively, and a good shot at returning to the White House for another eight years. You kids who play by the rules are suckers!"
My only quandary here is that by giving your children Hell to Pay and The Final Days, you will show them that the filth that is the Clintons has been recorded, dissected, and ridiculed. But you might also hear your kids, like yourself, muttering: "Wow, they got away with even more than I knew!"
In this movie, at least thus far, the bad guys are the winners. Isn’t this one of the messages we condemn Hollywood for putting into the minds of our children?
So what will readers learn or recall about the Clintons from The Final Days? This devilish duo knew how to milk the maximum quid from every pro quo. Even in leavin’, Bill and Hillary took with them White House furniture not nailed down and put the rest of the Executive Branch up for auction to the highest bidders.
Among those buying last-minute Presidential pardons was wealthy fugitive Marc Rich, whose ex-wife Denise funneled at least $1.5 million to Clinton interests. Of this loot, $1.2 million went to the Democratic National Committee, $75,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, and $450,000 to the Clinton Library, Bill’s personal "piggy bank" slush fund. She also gave expensive gifts to the Clintons and, according to some rumors, had a very close relationship with Bill. Another of many such pardon purchasers was Pincus Green.
Olson quotes comedian Dennis Miller: "We’ve all been watching in astonishment these past few weeks as the Clintons merrily parade their greed and corruption past us like a garish Mardi Gras float powered by the drivetrain of Bill Clinton’s gargantuan sense of entitlement. Hillary steers, while Bill sits on the top tossing pardons out to the crowd like a drunken Bacchus with a perpetual h**d-on for a scepter…. You almost have to admire the sheer audacity of granting pardons to two tax-scamming billionaire fugitives named Rich and Green. If the symbolism were any more obvious, Andrew Lloyd Weber would be writing music for it."
Barbara’s beautifully-written book is relieved with much wit, but this laughter catches in the throat and leaves a bitter aftertaste. The Clintons did evil things not in a Fellini Satyricon fantasy but in our White House, using our taxes, and selling our government (in ways far beyond renting the Lincoln Bedroom) for their personal profit.
Another who pocketed a Clinton pardon was convicted cocaine kingpin Carlos Vignali. Such pardons prompted Hardball’s Chris Matthews to say: "Before this, we laughed at poor little countries that drug dealers and international crooks could buy. We mocked the Third World capitals where a little money…would open doors or close eyes. Thanks to Bill and Hillary Clinton, we have now forfeited that small national vanity."
The Clintons sold to the devil whatever soul was left of the Democratic Party, turned the Congress (as even President Ronald Reagan had been unable to do) Republican, and transformed America into a kind of banana republic ruled by Executive Orders, emergency decrees, expropriations, and la mordida – bribery and extortion.
Such Clinton behavior was "disgraceful," said former Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s former Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan described the First Couple as "grifters…a term used in the Great Depression to describe fast-talking con artists who roamed the countryside, profiting at the expense of the poor and the uneducated, always one step ahead of the law, moving on before they were held accountable for their schemes and half-truths."
And their fellow freebooters were the same sort, like Bill Clinton’s "spiritual advisor" in matters of sexual addiction, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Clinton pardoned Jackson’s operative and Rainbow/PUSH Coalition official Dorothy Rivers. She had pled guilty to stealing $1.2 million in government grants intended to help homeless children, using the money instead to buy herself a $35,000 fur coat, a Mercedes, clothes for her live-in boyfriend, a $250,000 record company, a home on Lake Michigan, as well as political donations to Democratic candidates and various other self-indulgent things Olson details.
The Clinton M.O., as Barbara Olson recognized, has usually been to "engage in some marginally lawful and blatantly abusive conduct, often actually violating existing laws. When caught in the act, they could call for new laws making their prior conduct illegal and decry the flaws in the system that allowed them to misbehave in the first place. It was like O.J. Simpson calling for an investigation to find the murderer of his wife. Except that the Clintons trotted out this maneuver again and again."
Hillary’s sub-gambit at such times was to claim ignorance or a failure of memory, and then to play the victim rather than the victimizer. Thus, when it was revealed that her own attorney brother Hugh Rodham had received more than $400,000 from Vignali and another pardon applicant he had pushed on the President, Hillary denied knowing anything about it. This, she said, was "regrettable" and left her feeling "disappointed."
This tactic, wrote Olson, was "Hillary’s version of the virgin birth." Or maybe the immaculate deception. No wonder she is now known as "Slick Hillie."
But as Barbara sagely observed, such chicanery and twisted values have created large contradictions in the life and pretenses of Hillary Rodham Clinton. As a candidate for Senate, Hillary claimed co-presidential credit for every Administration accomplishment, boasting that she was deeply involved in making every policy and decision. But whenever this was inconvenient, she claimed to "have no knowledge" and to not be "involved" in things that obviously happened with her knowledge and likely instigation.
One larger contradiction noted by Olson is that Bill and Hillary are "the ultimate members of the ‘me generation’" who "used the power of the presidency to assure the perpetuation of their own careers in the regal style to which they had become accustomed and which they saw as theirs by entitlement. Royalty, once assumed, is hard to relinquish."
Hillary may "crave luxury" and wealth, spending on herself up to $2,400 for a cashmere jacket. On the verge of leaving the White House, she registered "with luxury retailers," wrote Olson, "as though she were about to become an impoverished new bride," and then made clear that she expected others to purchase costly gifts of her desiring. "No first lady," wrote Olson, "had ever been quite so crass."
But at the same time, observes Olson, Hillary may be a materialist, but ideologically she is a dialectical materialist, a committed, hard-core Leftist. Hillary, writes Olson, "was shaped by liberation theology, a Marxist variation of the Christian faith, radical feminism, and the outer reaches of the political Left. In 1972, she interned for former Communist Party lawyer Robert Treuhaft, husband of the prominent communist writer Jessica Mitford. Both were Stalinists and rigidly pro-Soviet…. Hillary Clinton has never repudiated her involvement with these extremists or explained her opinion of their beliefs…. Few journalists seem motivated to ask the questions…. Hillary has never had to answer even soft questions about her lengthy flirtation with leftist radicals."
Perhaps Hillary, if I may speculate, is the reincarnation of Friedrich Engels, heir to an industrial fortune who lived in luxury but co-authored works such as The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. We used to have "limousine liberals." Hillary is a "millionaire Mercedes Marxist."
Olson's book reminds America that Clinton pardons were given for more than profit. A Weather Underground member linked to killing two policemen was pardoned, as was SLA victim-member Patty Hearst. And during Hillary’s senate race, Bill Clinton pardoned a spate of Puerto Rican FALN terrorists who had wounded many and killed six, including police. These cop-killers were freed to win Puerto Rican and other Hispanic votes for Hillary. But the FALN, Olson reminds us, is also a Marxist group whose politics parallel Hillary’s own. And their release did, as Olson wrote, "send a signal" that the Clinton Administration could cozy up to terrorists (as in the Elian Gonzalez case it showed comradeship with Fidel Castro and used Gestapo tactics against Americans).
(FALN types, Olson notes, in 1950 killed police while trying to assassinate Democratic President Harry Truman. She does not mention that in 1954 FALN terrorists machine-gunned Congress, killing five lawmakers as well as police. Nor does she mention that in 1977 and 1979 Jimmy Carter pardoned four of the 1954 killer terrorists and one who tried to kill President Truman. I call that "Disgraceful.")
So who will get the last laugh? Hillary failed to block publication of Barbara Olson’s magnificent book. But Barbara, who died not as a victim but as a warrior "casualty" of the war against terrorism and evil, has now left us with a last, smart parting shot. Hillary only loses if America learns what she is really like. Hillary Clinton wins if you do not get and read The Final Days, the second half of Barbara Olson’s brilliant indictment against her. This book – bequeathing her knowledge and insight to immunize us against another ugly infection of Clintonic Hillaragic Fever – is a survival tool you and our nation may need in 2004, 2008, and beyond. Buy and read this book, and you will be helping to wipe that smug, arrogant smile off Hillary’s face.
