Seemingly, Hillary Clinton is in “trouble.”
News reports are saying Senate Judiciary Committee head Sen. Charles Grassley is renewing his demand for the State Department to hand over information about a program that let Hillary Clinton aide and confidante Huma Abedin and others work for the government while hanging onto lucrative private-sector jobs.
It will be the second inquiry into the presumptive Democratic presidential front-runner; Clinton’s already facing a probe by a House committee that wants to pore over her emails related to the 2012 deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, The Washington Post reports.
According to the Post, State Department records show a half-dozen of Clinton’s political allies were granted the special designation during her tenure, though not all of them are collecting government salaries.
By the standards of a political soap opera, which has replaced policy and ideological debate in our political system, I suppose this is a story. But it really isn’t a story, not by any substantive standard.
Hillary Clinton is just another politician who does not wish to apply rules to herself that she happily applies to private citizens, or even people in the government she considers her inferiors.
What’s newsworthy about that?
When the people of a country allow government to take on powers it was never intended to have, and should not have, then you will inevitably attract career politicians who are arrogant power lusters. Obama was able to gloss over this image, at least with the majority who don’t think critically or pay much attention. Hillary, with her perpetually resentful and generally “pissed off” demeanor, will face a harder time as her decades-long quest to become Queen of the Entitlement State reaches its painstaking climax.
Most of what our federal government today does is way outside the bounds of the Constitution, and even way outside the bounds of what our post World War II welfare state was supposed to do. Obama has almost single-handedly cancelled out the judicial and legislative branches of government by instituting a soft dictatorship. So long as the loot keeps coming, the majority remains quiet. And the entrenched beneficiaries in both parties are quite happy with the Establishment as we know it, whether their name is Clinton or Bush.
If we insist on giving all this power to government, then what kind of people will be attracted to that government? People like Hillary Clinton. Those who want government to do what it does deserve her, because she is the logical and inevitable embodiment of that anti-Constitutional statism.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has nothing whatsoever to do with integrity or competence. The only question is whether she will be able to use the “gender” card the same way Barack Obama managed to evade competence and honesty by playing the “race” card, over and over.
Barack Obama counted on a majority of the people overlooking his lies and ineptitude because of the perception that he’s black (in fact he’s only half black, as his mother was white), and the incredibly and willfully ignorant belief that if you criticize the first black president, that makes you a racist.
Hillary Clinton will count on a majority of people overlooking her longer standing reputation for duplicity, hypocrisy and imperial arrogance because of the fact she is a woman. It’s so easy to predict that it seems almost shameful, that the highest officials in our land have become such intellectual lightweights.
If you didn’t support Barack Obama’s policies, you’re called a racist who hates black people. If you don’t support Hillary Clinton’s policies and behaviors, then you hate women. She will try this tactic. Watch it play out, first with email-gate and then with other scandals to come.
Will it work for her as well as it did for Obama? That remains to be seen. Her last run for the presidency suggests it might not. She probably will get the nomination, assuming she seeks it. But will she win the presidency? Against the hapless Republicans, it’s entirely possible.
The real story is the fact that this “email-gate” is a story at all.
Obama and Hillary do have one thing in common. They both appeal to people in the Era of Entitlement. The entitlement mentality is best summed up by the attitude, “I shouldn’t have to…” Every time you look at Obama, he has a defensive sneer on his face, at least on the rare occasions when he’s confronted with any dissension or opposition (and even when he isn’t). He feels entitled to rule, because (in his mind, by his moral code of brother’s keeperism) he’s morally superior and the people are helpless without a massive, expansionist federal government to have power over them. (Apparently a plurality agree, because they keep supporting candidates like this in both parties.)
Hillary Clinton has been at this longer than Obama. In a bizarre and perverse way, if you accept the standards of the redistributionist-regulatory State, she is more entitled to rule than Obama ever was. She’s probably very angry and resentful over this fact, although she can’t say so publicly, because Obama was once her boss, and she can’t be perceived as being racist.
Republicans gain (short-term) from this scandal, though not only for the obvious reasons. Of course they want to bring down Hillary as a presidential candidate. But they also want to distract from the fact that their likely standard bearer (Jeb Bush, or whomever it turns out to be) differs little in principle from the kind of power lusting politicians the Democratic Party is much better at producing for an electorate who yearns for services and benefits from the great Provider in the nation’s capital.
As the Middle East burns, as ISIS contemplates moving into Europe and even America, and the American economy sinks deeper into stagnation and debt, with workforce participation rates the lowest since March 1978, and more and more people dependent on our morally and fiscally bankrupt government, there’s something honestly appropriate about someone as morally challenged as Hillary Clinton leading the whole sinking ship.
She’s Obama unmasked.
Hillary Clinton is an angry, resentful and somewhat bitter aging victim who feels her time has come. If you think she’ll go down easily, you had better think again.
