“When Journalists Cry Corruption, Make Them Prove It”: Clinton Foundation ‘Scandals’ Are Made Of Smoke And Innuendo
Here are a couple of things you may not know about recent topics in the news.
First, no Secretary of State prior to Hillary Clinton had ever used a government email address or preserved their messages for posterity. And why should they? The law requiring cabinet members to do so didn’t go into effect until after Clinton left office.
(Presumably to make one-stop shopping easier for Chinese and Russian hackers. But I digress.)
Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell deleted his emails. Every single one. Condoleezza Rice has said that she simply never used email, which may even be true.
Second, as of 2011 former president George W. Bush had earned at least $15 million giving speeches mainly to corporate and Republican groups. Politico has found more recent information hard to find. It’s private and confidential.
In 2011, Bush pocketed $100,000 to speak at a fundraiser for a homeless shelter in McKinney, Texas. The shelter’s director called the event a success, adding that the former president was his usual charming self. Bush’s standard practice is that reporters aren’t invited and recording devices are not allowed.
“Relative to the Clintons, though,” Politico notes “he’s attracted considerably less attention.” Maybe that’s because George W. Bush has no close relatives running for president. So that when he accepts $250,000 for speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, it’s not an issue. This event is widely known as the “Sheldon Adelson Primary,” after the billionaire casino magnate who openly auditions GOP hopefuls who oppose online gambling and support Israel.
Anyway, aren’t they all up for sale, the candidates? Clintons, Bushes, Walkers, Cruzes, Perrys, the lot.
Open for business, every single one.
Somehow, however, what would appear the least objectionable buck raking by a presidential candidate during the 2016 campaign cycle has become the most controversial. I refer, of course, to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary and Bill Clinton’s $2 billion charitable enterprise
The Clinton Foundation is credited, among other things, with providing cut-rate HIV drugs to patients throughout the Third World, hearing aids for deaf children in Botswana, and earthquake relief in Haiti; the foundation even fights elephant poaching in Africa — reportedly a passion of Chelsea and Hillary Clinton’s. (And of every other decent human being on Earth.)
Interestingly, the Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold recently produced a remarkably fair, snark-free account of the Clinton Foundation and its proprietor, a veritable force of nature. Despite being a longtime acquaintance of his, like thousands of Arkansans I almost can’t comprehend the life Bill Clinton has chosen. His life of endless banquets, celebrity galas, and international jetting around would make me crazy.
But then what have I done for the destitute and afflicted? Watched a lot of Red Sox games and read a thousand novels — that’s what.
Meanwhile, the thing to understand about the swirl of innuendo and accusation concerning this remarkable enterprise is that it’s yet another “Swift Boat”-style operation. Written by a career political operative named Peter Schweizer, the book Clinton Cash amounts to little more than a conspiracy theory touted by the same newspapers that promoted the Whitewater hoax and cheered on Kenneth Starr and his leak-o-matic prosecutors.
Aptly described by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books as an “imitation of journalism,” Clinton Cash basically assembles circumstantial evidence about various potentates and high flyers in the Clintons’ orbit. Assuming venal motives, it then leaps to conclusions unsupported by fact. In most instances, the author hasn’t even interviewed his targets.
After making a promotional deal with Schweizer, The New York Times devoted 4,400 words to a jumbled narrative involving a Canadian mining executive who’d pledged half his income to the Clinton Foundation and the subsequent sale of a Wyoming uranium mine to Russian interests.
Way down at the bottom, however, the determined reader learned that Secretary of State Clinton played no role in the deal whatsoever. At least none that the Times could find. It’s pure supposition.
The newspaper then remained silent as Schweizer appeared on conservative talk shows depicting the foundation as a giant slush fund devoting only 10 percent of its budget to charity. In fact, according to the American Institute of Philanthropy, the real number is 89 percent — an A rating.
Look, any cynic can play at this. Check out your hometown society page. That doctor’s wife at the Heart Fund gala: Is it about charity, or about people back home in Turkey Scratch seeing her socializing with a Walmart heiress? How about the architect? Does he care about sick kids, or is he about getting the contract for the new hospital wing named for the heiress?
Does Bill Clinton do all this for humanity, or does he just need more attention and admiration than us “normal” people? Does Hillary want to be president for America’s sake, or for her own?
The correct answer is all of the above.
But when journalists cry corruption, make them prove it.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 10, 2015
“Conservatives Rectitude And Piety”: Coach Denny, Grandma Nancy, And America’s Family Values
Republicans on Capitol Hill keep telling everyone how terribly shocked they are by the tawdry tale of Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House indicted last week for violations of federal money-laundering statutes in an effort to cover up alleged sexual abuse of a male high-school student many years ago.
Long upheld as a paragon of Midwestern conservative values, Hastert represented a suburban Illinois district and became his party’s longest-serving Speaker. Like Newt Gingrich, who preceded him in that post, Hastert avidly prosecuted the impeachment of Bill Clinton for trying to conceal an extramarital affair. Unlike Gingrich, whose own serial adulteries became a national joke, Hastert was evidently never suspected of any such “misconduct,” as the indictment described it.
“I don’t see how this didn’t come up on the radar before,” said a former Hastert aide following the release of his indictment. “It’s sort of beyond belief.”
But is it truly beyond belief, at this very late date, to learn that yet another moralizing politician or preacher was always an utter hypocrite? Not unless you haven’t been paying attention for the past two decades or so. Or you’ve been mesmerized into believing the propaganda that claims only one party — the GOP — represents “family values.”
A decade ago, Hastert was hailed as a partisan symbol of superior virtue, notably in John Mickelthwaite and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, which gleefully predicted endless victories for the Republicans and doom for the Democrats. Written by a pair of British Tories who then held top positions at The Economist magazine, that work invidiously contrasted then-Speaker Hastert with Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, his counterpart on the other side of the aisle – and described their districts as emblematic of red and blue America.
Mickelthwaite (now editor-in-chief at Bloomberg) and Wooldridge waxed on lyrically and at daunting length in praise of Coach Denny and “Hastertland,” while they cast a censorious gaze upon Nancy and “Pelosiville,” also known as San Francisco or, again in their words, “the capital of gay America.” Their description of Hastert — “a fairly straightforward conservative: antiabortion, anti-gay marriage” – rings with irony today. So does their depiction of Pelosi’s urban constituency as “a peculiar mix of blue bloods and gays, dotcom millionaires and aging hippies,” set against the “resolutely ‘normal’ ” people represented by Hastert, who “think of themselves as typical Americans.”
Key to understanding the two districts and therefore American politics, according to the authors, were differing attitudes toward “the importance of family life,” orthodox religion, and “social disorder.” In Hastertland, churches and families were growing, streets were clean, and vagrancy eliminated – and in Pelosiville exactly the reverse, with secularism rampant, bums everywhere, and even an outpost of the Church of Satan.
“Looking at ‘Pelosiville’ and ‘Hastertland,’“ they concluded, “it is not difficult to see why American politics has shifted to the Right.”
As it turned out, The Right Nation was mostly wrong, about the fates of the two major parties and much else besides. But what was most wrong was the insinuation that Republicans stand for more elevated values than Democrats, or that conservatives are morally purer than liberals. To take their own example, we now know what we know about Hastert – and we also know that Pelosi, mother of five, grandmother of eight, married more than 50 years to the same husband, advocate of gay marriage and reproductive rights, is today far more credible as a symbol of “family values” and family life.
None of this should be surprising, with all due respect to the shocked, shocked, shocked Republicans. In 2003, after Hastert already had ascended to third in line from the presidency, I reviewed the endless ranks of right-wing moral mountebanks – the cheating celebrity evangelists, the homophobic gay politicians, the lecherous legislators, and others too raunchy to mention here – in one chapter of a book called Big Lies. I included many stories about Hastert’s House colleagues, partying amid their pursuit of Clinton; some were amusing, some quite depressing. Of course, I didn’t know about “Coach Denny” back then.
But with or without his sad story, the conclusion would be the same: that liberals “care about families and children just as much as conservatives do – and that their more tolerant, humane policies do more to help families than the selfish and self-righteous approach of the Republican right.”
What should have changed by now, whenever conservatives start to cluck about their rectitude and piety, is whether anybody still listens.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, The National Memo, June 3, 2015
“His Path To The Nomination”: The Graham Strategy; Chicken Little Winging It
Before the next presidential candidate announcement makes us forget about him for a while–maybe a good while–it’s worth a brief consideration of Lindsey Graham’s supposed “path to the nomination” beyond the obvious fact that he’d need to win in his home state of South Carolina, one of the four privileged “early states.” Jonathan Bernstein may have nailed it yesterday: Graham’s spent so much time hanging out with his amigo John McCain that he figures he can emulate the lightning the Arizonan caught in a bottle:
McCain in 2000 accidentally wound up finishing second. He was too moderate for the Republican Party, but his biggest hurdle was his push for campaign finance reform, which turned Republican-aligned groups, who felt targeted by it, against him.
Instead of waging a conventional campaign — spending a year glad-handing Iowans and big-shot national Republicans — McCain instead hung out in New Hampshire with political reporters. Normally, that would have produced a few nice feature stories and nothing more. But in 2000, George W. Bush quickly dispatched his serious Republican rivals before or in the Iowa caucuses. New Hampshire voters (who famously love upsetting the Iowa winner, from Walter Mondale in 1984 through Barack Obama in 2008) punished Bush for wrapping up the nomination early by voting for McCain, thereby making him the last man standing against W.
McCain’s 2008 adventure was, if anything, even more unlikely. McCain spent the beginning of Bush’s first term in open revolt against his former rival before returning to the ranks of loyal Republicans just in time for the 2004 election — and the beginning of the 2008 nomination fight. McCain then put together a typical Republican front-runner campaign, heavy on corporate-style bureaucracy, only to have the whole thing collapse halfway through the cycle.
But once again, McCain was lucky. No candidate emerged who combined normal qualifications for the presidency, positions well within the mainstream of the party and the ability to build a competent presidential campaign. McCain came close enough on each of those scores to wind up as the nominee.
That’s almost exactly my analysis of McCain’s presidential nominating campaigns, especially the successful one in 2008 which was something of a demolition derby with a flawed and weak field.
The odds of it happening again, especially with the vast size of the 2016 field, are vanishingly small. And as Bernstein points out, Graham doesn’t have the war hero thing going for him, which always put a relatively high floor on GOP attitudes towards him.
It’s possible, of course, that Graham has no strategy at all, other than the indulging in the twisted pleasure professional politicians get from the abattoir of a presidential campaign. When he drops out, he’ll have his Senate gig, his access to the Sunday shows, and four more years before he has to face voters again back home. And in the back of his mind (I will not make Rand Paul’s mistake and suggest it’s in the front of his mind) Graham may figure that if something bad happens on the homeland security front during the nomination campaign, having a well-established identity as Chicken Little could change things considerably.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 2, 2015
“The Political Consequences?: Will Republicans Suffer Politically If The Supreme Court Strikes Down ObamaCare? Don’t Count On It
Next month, the Supreme Court might rule in King v. Burwell that the Affordable Care Act does not make subsidies available on insurance exchanges established by the federal government. In a rational world, this argument would be laughed out of court, as even former Republican politicians and congressional staffers have suggested. But that’s not the world we live in.
So it’s worth considering the political fallout if the Supreme Court’s Republican nominees throw the U.S.’s health care market into chaos. The short answer is that, with some notable exceptions, Republicans could very well get away with it.
The policy consequences of such a ruling are much clearer: It would be a disaster. Without subsidies, the vast majority of people would not be able to afford insurance, and therefore would not be subject to the mandate to carry insurance. As a result, younger and healthier people would drop out of the insurance market, creating an actuarial death spiral in which more and more expensive policies are offered to fewer and fewer customers — until the exchanges collapse. Millions of people stand to lose their insurance as a result.
This, of course, is why Congress did make subsidies available on the federally established exchanges. It certainly didn’t go to the trouble of creating a federal backstop that was designed to fail. And until a few libertarian fanatics willfully misread the law as a Hail Mary in their legal war on the ACA, nobody on either side of the aisle involved in the bill thought otherwise.
Should Republicans be careful what they wish for? Possibly. “Fear of change has been the right’s most powerful weapon in the health-care wars since they began under Harry Truman,” writes New York‘s Jonathan Chait. “Seeing their weapon turned against them is a frightening sensation, one they are likely to experience many times again.” The GOP “might be better off if the court just left the law as is,” agrees The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent. Even The Wall Street Journal editorial page is worried.
The idea that destroying ObamaCare would be politically counterproductive is superficially plausible. Any such decision would be a 5-4 opinion with only Republican-nominated judges in the majority, over at least one lengthy dissent. The Republican-controlled Congress could restore the subsidies by passing a one-paragraph bill, as President Obama will surely emphasize repeatedly.
Congress could try to pass the buck to Obama by passing a “fix” loaded with poison pills that the president would have to veto, but I agree with Chait and Sargent that the Republican conference is too dysfunctional to pull this off. And when Congress fails to act, overwhelmingly Republican-controlled statehouses could solve the problem by establishing their own exchanges — could, but in most cases won’t.
So a Republican Supreme Court takes health insurance away from millions of people, and Republican-controlled governments fail to take simple steps to solve the problem. That has to be a political disaster for the GOP, right?
Not necessarily. “If the Obama Administration loses in the Supreme Court,” argues New Yorker legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, “the political pain will fall almost exclusively on the president and his party.” And counterintuitive as it might seem, political science favors Toobin.
The problem is that a separation-of-powers system dilutes accountability, and voters generally lack the information that will allow them to sort out the blame for a given disaster. Presidents generally get both more credit and more blame for what happens under their watch than is justified by their power.
This is reflected in the fact that the ACA — a statute that required immense congressional skill on the part of Democrats to pass — is commonly known as ObamaCare. To voters who aren’t Democratic partisans, Republican assertions that Obama is at fault for any bad outcomes that arise from ObamaCare will carry a lot of weight. The media, which tends to give credence to even hare-brained Republican notions out of a misguided effort to remain balanced, is unlikely to make it much clearer.
It may also seem as if Republicans would take the rap for a decision written by a bare majority of Republican-nominated justices, but this overlooks how little the public knows about the Supreme Court. Only a little more than a quarter of the public can name the chief justice. The vast majority of voters will have no idea whether the decision was 5-4 or unanimous, let alone the partisan details of the split. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might write her greatest dissent, but it’s hard to imagine it changing many minds, given that only a tiny minority reads Supreme Court opinions and almost all of them know what they think about the case beforehand.
So in general, I do think Toobin is right. Republicans in Congress and in deep red states can probably avoid any consequences. But there is one twist. Republicans are most vulnerable in states with federally established exchanges that are led by the GOP, but tend to swing to the Democrats in presidential elections. Voters in those states are more likely to blame Republicans for not establishing a state exchange.
As it happens, one such state is Wisconsin, whose governor is a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2016. The Republican primary electorate will prevent Scott Walker from signing a bill establishing a state exchange, but his refusal will make it harder for the GOP to duck the issue. In this instance, it might be harder for Republicans to deflect responsibility to Obama than it would be otherwise.
Ultimately, the political consequences of a Supreme Court ruling against the government are difficult to predict. But what we know for sure is that it would be best for the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare — so we don’t have to find out.
By: Scott Lemieux, The Week, May 27, 2015
“Is Rubio Really Hillary’s ‘Nightmare’?”: If This Is Her Nightmare, Hillary Is Getting A Good Night’s Sleep
Well, 14 more Republicans announced their candidacies, but clearly, Marco Rubio was the It Boy on the Republican side this week. It started last weekend with a Times article advancing the idea that Rubio as the GOP nominee is a “scary thought” for Democrats for all the reasons you can reckon on your own—he’s Latino, he’s young, he’s charismatic, he has a “million-dollar smile” (not kidding!), and of course he might be able to defeat her in “vital” Florida with its 29 electoral votes.
Mmmm, okay. He is most certainly Latino and young, not much arguing with those. He is reasonably charismatic. He has about a $627,000 smile, which isn’t a million (a little too on the boyish and elfin sides to project the proper Reaganesque, enemy-smiting mien) but isn’t peanuts.
I would add other and I think even more substantive claims for him. He’s not stupid, in policy terms, and more to the point isn’t intentionally stupid, constantly playing down to his most rigid base’s lowest common denominator. He does that only about 78 percent of the time, which in the context of today’s GOP is almost impressive. I could picture a President Rubio dragging the party to a couple of places where most of it really would prefer not to go. Not a lot of places, but a couple, which is two more than most of them would do.
But is Rubio really Clinton’s nightmare candidate? First of all, let’s say this. Elections are far less about the dollar value of smiles and whether a candidate colors her hair than journalists would like to think. They’re more about what the political scientists call “the fundamentals,” by which they mainly mean the economy. If the economy is still chugging along in the fall of 2016, creating 225,000 jobs a month—and by that time, if the streak holds, wages would probably be going up as well—then nobody is Clinton’s nightmare. All right, two other ifs: no terrorist attack, and no giant, quid-pro-quo Clinton scandal. If all that holds the only drama ought to be whether she tops 350 electoral votes.
But if all that doesn’t hold, then we have a race. I suppose Rubio is as plausible as any of them and more than most of them. But let’s stop and take a look at the bases of these nightmare claims. There are two.
The first is that he’ll compete with her among Latinos. The data point you’ll often see invoked here is that when first running for Senate in 2010, Rubio drew 55 percent of the Latino vote against two opponents. That he did. But here are two reasons that impressive number doesn’t necessarily translate to a presidential race.
Number one, neither of his opponents that year had much going for them among Latinos. Independent Charlie Crist wasn’t really trusted by anyone because of his party flipping, and Democrat Kendrick Meek just never fired, as they say in the horse-racing business. Number two, voters understand, Latino voters included, that a vote for senator and a vote for president aren’t the same kind of vote. For the Senate, independent and even a few Democratic Latinos would be more willing to cast an “identity” vote, just for the sake of seeing one of their own (more or less their own, since there are many different kinds of Latinos in Florida) in the Senate. The candidate’s positions matter, of course, but if voters know he’s only one of 100 in a body that never does much anyway, positions aren’t dispositive.
But a presidential vote is a different thing. There, you’d better believe positions matter. And here, Rubio has the same problems with Latino voters all the Republicans have.
Spend a few minutes on this web page, brought to you by the Seattle-based Latino Decisions. The polling I’m about to cite is from last November, so things may have changed. But still. It’s a bucket of icy water on the nightmare thesis.
Rubio favorable-unfavorable among Latinos: 31-36. Rubio favorable-unfavorable among Latinos in Florida: 39-42. In seven states with sizable Latino voting blocs, Rubio was underwater in six of them (all but Texas). Oh, and in six of the seven states (all but Florida), Clinton’s favorable numbers among Latinos were more than twice Rubio’s.
Why would this be? Are Latinos uniquely immune to the charms of high dollar-value smiles? No. The answer is his positions. Latinos support a path to citizenship, President Obama’s executive actions, and Obamacare. Rubio opposes them all. Those positions, especially on immigration, are deal breakers for a big majority of Latino voters, most of whom don’t feel an intense natural bonhomie for Cuban-Americans, who’ve always been seen to occupy a different political space from Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Central Americans.
Now as I say that was last November. Things have probably shifted a little in his direction since then, just because some people may have forgotten his lame immigration reversal. I called four pollsters to try to get current numbers on Clinton vs. Rubio head-to-head among Latinos, but oddly, none had anything current based on large enough sample sizes. If we start to see such numbers and Rubio is with 15 points or so, then Clinton should worry a little. But the overall numbers, in which she has essentially the same narrow-ish lead over Rubio that she has over everyone else, don’t suggest that he’s doing much better among the small subsets of Latinos in these polls than any other Republican is.
And now, to our second point (remember, there was a second point way up there!): “vital” Florida. I really wish people who write about politics would bother to understand the electoral map. This is a longer conversation and another column but please remember: Florida is vital to Republicans, but it’s gravy for Democrats. Obama won Florida in 2012, but if he’d lost it, he’d still have received 303 electoral votes.
Think of it this way: The Republican can win all the normal red states plus the violet quartet of Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as Iowa and New Hampshire—two states that have gone Republican just once each since 1992—and still have only 262 electoral votes. The Democrat can afford to lose Florida and still have a number of paths to 270. The Republican cannot.
Rubio has some strengths the others don’t. But if all this adds up to a nightmare, I’d think Clinton is sleeping pretty well at night.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 29, 2015
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