{"id":54417,"date":"2016-11-01T14:08:51","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T18:08:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=54417"},"modified":"2016-11-01T14:08:51","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T18:08:51","slug":"the-clintons-at-the-end-of-all-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=54417","title":{"rendered":"The Clintons \u2014 At the End of All Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"screen-shot-2016-11-01-at-2-07-06-pm\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Epic greed, power, and pride: Where\u2019s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there\u2019s no telling.<\/h2>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson
\nNational Review
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W<\/span>hat was the Clinton telos<\/em>? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?<\/p>\n

Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as \u2014 and why? Are they Goethe\u2019s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante\u2019s Fourth Circle of Hell?<\/p>\n

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.<\/p>\n

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail\u2013server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?<\/p>\n

The Hillary\/Bill fortune \u2014 generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary\u2019s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies \u2014 hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.<\/p>\n

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 \u201cinvestment,\u201d or Hillary\u2019s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children\u2019s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons \u2014 such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.<\/p>\n

So the Clintons finally got their millions and what such millions can ensure for their separate lifestyles. They have at last beautiful gated estates, tasteful and secluded from hoi polloi, light years away from Arkansas and the Rose Law Firm. Progressive Chelsea married a multimillionaire hedge-fund operator whose father served five years in federal prison for bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Her parents\u2019 profiteering can allow Chelsea to announce, perhaps even sincerely, that she is not interested in money. Why should she be, given her own reported $15 million net worth from maternal spin-off favors? She lives in a $10 million Manhattan residence, so her parents had no motivation to get more in order to \u201cprovide\u201d for their offspring. Instead, was bringing Chelsea down to Bill and Hillary\u2019s level as a Foundation fixer a way to leave her a post mortem primer on how to get even richer?<\/p>\n

In sum, there was certainly no need for Hillary to even have considered flying to the Moroccan autocracy on the eve of announcing her presidential candida to leverage a $12 million speaking \u201cfee\u201d from a cut-throat Moroccan mining company, Why the drive to pile profits on top of profits on top of profits? Or, as Hillary\u2019s top aide, Huma Abedin, put it of the quid pro quo fee (i.e., the mining company felt that it had gotten from the Clinton-run State Department a U.S.-financed Export-Import Bank loan of $92 million):<\/p>\n

This was HRC\u2019s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Translated: A President Hillary Clinton would probably have no regret that dozens of heads of state, the majority of them dictatorial and not especially friendly to the U.S., would feel that they had done business with Hillary and Bill \u2014 and she, as a recipient of their largess, would owe them commensurate attention.<\/p>\n

Why did multimillionaire Hillary charge UCLA, in the era of thousands of indebted students, $300,000 (rather than, say, $149,999.99) for a brief, platitudinous speech? Why did multimillionaire Bill need more than $17 million for being honorary \u201cchancellor\u201d of the financially for-profit but tottering Laureate University (whose spin-off associate organization was a recipient of State Department largesse)? Did he think the extra millions were worth the embarrassment of being the highest-paid and least-busy college executive in U.S. history?<\/p>\n

Apparently, the good life did not drive the Clintons so much as the quest for the supposed best <\/em>life. Even though they had finally \u201cmade it\u201d among the multimillionaire set, the Clintons always saw others (no doubt, deemed by them less deserving) with far, far more \u2014 whether Jeffery Epstein, with his ability to jet wherever and with whomever he pleased, or green half-a-billionaire Al Gore, who ran even more successful cons, such as rapidly selling a worthless cable TV station to beat impending capital-gains taxes, and selling it to none other than the anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, whose carbon-generated profits come from autocratic Qatar. (The media never audited Gore\u2019s attempt to become a cable mogul, unlike their current concerns about a potential Trump media outlet).<\/p>\n

The rich did not pressure the Clintons for paid favors as much as they sought out the Clintons as targets for graft. They certainly understand and smile at Hillary\u2019s boilerplate promise of \u201cmaking the rich pay their fair share\u201d \u2014 the mantra of those who are worth over $100 million and immune from the impact of any tax hikes, or, for that matter, immune from any consequences whatsoever of their own ideology.<\/p>\n

The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass\u00a0only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of \u201cdoing good\u201d while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos \u2014 and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.<\/p>\n

Power and pride were the other catalyst for Clinton criminality. I don\u2019t think progressive politics mattered much to the Clintons, at least compared with what drives the more sincere Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Hillary, like Bill, has no real political beliefs \u2014 though she doesn\u2019t hesitate to pursue a mostly opportunistic progressive political agenda. By temperament and background, the Clintons are leftists and will follow a leftist vision, sort of, but one predicated on doing so within the constraints of obtaining and keeping power.<\/p>\n

Trade deals? Hillary is flexible given the fickle public mood. Fracking? It depends on where the money is. The Keystone Pipeline? What are the pros and cons in key swing states? Wall Street criminality? One has to distinguish a wink-and-nod political fa\u00e7ade from a private flexibility. Gay marriage? She can reluctantly \u201cevolve\u201d under pressure. Immigration? It hinges on Latino demography in swing states, and how bothersome, as their aides put it, \u201cneedy\u201d Latinos and \u201cbrown\u201d op-ed writers become. Black Lives Matter? Had the black vote not won Obama the 2008 and 2012 elections, Hillary would probably have persisted in Bill\u2019s 1990\u2019s mode (when he condemned rap singer Sister Soulja for her racism and her anti-white rhetoric) and in her own critique of black \u201csuper predators,\u201d as she called gang members in 1996.<\/p>\n

For the Clintons, power is the narcotic of being sought out, of being surrounded by retainers, of bringing enemies to heel and enticing sycophants with benefits. Liberalism and progressivism are mere social and cultural furniture.<\/p>\n

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