April 23, 2015: Hillary Rodham Clinton reacts to applause from the crowd before speaking during the sixth annual Women in the World Summit.
In the early stages of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, she is being hoisted with her own petard. She is injuring herself with the very devices that she and her supporters use to injure others.
Tax breaks for the wealthy are obscene in Clintonian rhetoric, but tax breaks aren’t supposed to be seen or heard of when they apply, in practice, to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s wealth.
One device is the charge of “guilt by association.” The “millionaires and billionaires” she portrays as in villainous league with Republicans are the very same category of people who have donated tens of millions of dollars to both the Clinton Foundation and to speaking fees by Bill and Hillary Clinton. In Clintonworld, wealth that serves to oppose them is dirty but wealth that serves to support them is clean.
Tax breaks for the wealthy are obscene in Clintonian rhetoric, but tax breaks aren’t supposed to be seen or heard of when they apply, in practice, to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s wealth.
In the real world, that hypocrisy is having an effect. In a recent poll, a majority of U.S. voters—54%—now say that Hillary Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a view shared by 61% of independents.
Another device the Clintons use against their opponents is coming back to haunt Hillary: charges of “conflicts of interest.” In Clintonworld, it is a conflict of interest when any Republican receives a contribution from, say, a natural resource tycoon or company. But it is a shared interest when the Clinton Foundation receives millions in contributions from a natural resource tycoon like Frank Giustra, who used Bill Clinton to help broker a deal that, as The New York Times has detailed, “brought [Russian President Vladimir] Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.”
As The Wall Street Journal added, “All the while, Mrs. Clinton was serving in her capacity as Secretary of State on the U.S. Cabinet committee that screens foreign investment for national-security risks. The group approved the deal, despite critics who warned it would give the Russian government control over the world’s nuclear fuel—the same material Vladimir Putin is now selling to Iran. Oh, and don’t forget this was also amid the famous ‘reset’ of relations with Mr. Putin.”
These machinations are investigated in Fox News Anchor Bret Baier’s special report (watch an excerpt here) called “The Tangled Clinton Web,” featuring an exclusive interview with Peter Schweizer, author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Clinton Cash.”
In Baier’s special report, specifics are given about another Clintonian device that is backfiring on Hillary: charging Republicans with a “cover-up” about anything the Clintons believe is unsavory.
Baier references this exclusive story that smacks of an uncovered Clinton cover-up. Reuters found that “Hillary Clinton's family's charities are refiling at least five annual tax returns after a Reuters review found errors…[which] generally take the form of under-reporting or over-reporting, by millions of dollars, donations from foreign governments, or in other instances omitting to break out government donations entirely when reporting revenue.”
Baier told Fox News’ “The Five”: “There's a lot [of] ‘there’ there. Whether it leads to something bigger, we don't know. But when you lay it all out…it is compelling.”
Also compelling is a trio of devices that the Clintons use on their adversaries—devices that are now boomeranging on Bill and Hillary.
The Clintons decry “tax breaks for the wealthy,” “a lack of transparency,” and “greed.” You see, tax breaks for the wealthy are obscene in Clintonian rhetoric, but tax breaks aren’t supposed to be seen or heard of when they apply, in practice, to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s wealth.
In Clintonworld, Republicans and their wealthy supporters exhibit “a lack of transparency” and are motivated by “greed.” But “The Tangled Clinton Web” being untangled by Bret Baier and other journalists reveals that the Clintons’ modus operandi involve, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, put it:
“…a place of blurred lines and fungible ethics and sleazy associates. Your family’s foundation gobbles tens of millions from Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes, whose unspoken message is: ‘We’re going to give you money to go improve the world. Now leave us alone to go persecute women.’
“That’s an uncomfortable echo of a Clintonian trade-off, which goes: ‘We’re going to give you the first woman president who will improve the country. Now leave us alone to break any rules we please.’”
What we are finding out (anew) is that in Clintonworld, Bill and Hillary charge their adversaries with “stonewalling,” being “out of touch,” and being “unfair.” Never mind that recent reporting is demonstrating all of those behaviors by the Clintons.
Indeed, when confronted with the facts, the Clintons and their spokespersons revert to yet another device that they deplore in their critics: the charge of a “conspiracy.”
In the Clinton camp’s response to the findings of the “Clinton Cash” book we hear another version of Hillary Clinton’s assertion that a “vast right wing conspiracy” was out to get her husband in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
A Clinton spokesperson told The New York Times that, “the book is twisting previously known facts into absurd conspiracy theories.”
Hillary Clinton declares that, “[I’ll] be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks and I’m ready for that.”
But will voters—even Democrats—be ready to stand by Hillary if more scandals turn her into the “cognitive dissonance” candidate: forced to defend the contradictions raised by ethical scandals swirling around her?
Let’s see how high she hoists herself with her own petard.
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