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Bill Clinton Tag

Rand Paul said it just a couple of weeks ago, but a lot of people have thought it for a long time:
I think the thing is about the Clintons is that there’s a certain sense that they think they’re above the law.
There are some good reasons the Clintons might have come to believe that. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton have always been powerful people, even as young adults. As early as college and law school they were both widely considered to be brilliant and charismatic, albeit in somewhat different ways. Recall, for example, that Hillary was chosen to give a commencement speech in her graduating year at Wellesly, a very unusual honor. The main speaker was Senator Edward Brooke, but she stole his thunder:
Clinton, then just Hillary Diane Rodham, was chosen by her peers to be the first student speaker to deliver a commencement address at Wellesley College. Clinton electrified 400 of her peers at the women’s liberal arts college with a fiery speech that captured the young generation’s disillusionment over President Richard Nixon’s war in Vietnam.

FOX News is airing a special which examines claims made by the new book Clinton Cash. Special Report host Bret Baier interviews author Peter Schweizer and investigates alleged abuses of power and money by the Clintons from the efforts to rebuild Haiti to the questionable Uranium deal that benefited Russia. The special premiered last night and airs again today at 5 PM, Sunday at 3 PM and 10 PM.

When discussing Hillary Clinton's email and server scandal, I dismissed arguments that the scandal in and of itself would sink Hillary's impending campaign. There are far too many powerful people invested in Hillary for President to let mere paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence stop Hillary. In fact, to Hillary's core supporters, paranoid and obsessive control coupled with destruction of evidence is a feature, not a bug. Rather, I argued that the damage from Emailgate (or is it Servergate or Deletegate?) was in shaping Hillary's image for voters who never knew the Hillary older voters know:
While it’s way too early to assess the overall damage to Hillary Incorporated from the email, now document destruction, scandal, is does appear to be hurting Team Billary in ways that are hard to change: Public perception of a politician. While Billary is dreadfully tiresome and transparently faux in its lack of transparency, to much of the electorate Billary is simply a nice old lady with a grandchild. Well, she does have a grandchild, but that’s about where the nice ends. And that unhappy end product of a secretive, controlling, fear-mongering, basically incompetent presidential candidate is coming into public view and that view may be hard to change.
And there seems to be dramatic movement in that direction, as Hillary's favorability numbers have been dropping steadily.

The former first lady's situation seems to worsen by the day. First it was revealed that Hillary had a private email account for the duration of her tenure as Secretary of State. Then it was discovered that her private email account was run through servers reportedly in her home. And no one in Obama's administration seemed to have been aware that Mrs. Clinton was operating an extra-governmental account. Or at least that's the current story. When asked if they could prove with certitude that no classified information was exchanged via Hillary's private email, the State Department replied, "that's not a pertinent question." Late last week, the State Department changed their story saying it was up to each Secretary to determine what was relevant and then submit that information back to the DOS for record keeping. Email problems aren't the only obstacle the Clinton's must overcome ahead of a 2016 Presidential run. Former President Bill Clinton came out in defense of the Clinton Foundation yesterday, an organization that accepted donations from foreign governments like Saudi Arabia while Hillary served as Secretary of State. "I believe we've done more good than harm," President Clinton said. Rewind to 2011. February 15, 2011, then Secretary Clinton spoke about Internet Freedom at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 2011 Hillary made a great case for why 2015 Hillary should disclose her emails to the public. Take a look:

President Bill Clinton appeared on the Seth Meyers show last week and offered some common sense about the double standard of Islamic radicals who take advantage of freedom in western countries. Clinton's view is distinctly different than what we've heard from the Obama administration which is having trouble even naming America's enemies. Greg Gutfeld and the panel of The Five analyzed Clinton's comments on the air yesterday: Naturally, liberal news outlets are ignoring that part of Clinton's appearance, instead choosing to focus on another segment.

Hillary Clinton's interview with Diane Sawyer is getting a lot of attention because Hillary explained the $100 million plus she and Bill have made giving speeches as necessitated by their near poverty upon leaving office:
SAWYER: You've made five million making speeches? The president's made more than a hundred million dollars? CLINTON: Well, you have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard and it's been amazing to me. He's worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts. You know, you had to make double the money because of, obviously, taxes, and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.
The problem is not that the Clintons made a fortune. This is America, after all. People are entitled to make a fortune so long as they do so lawfully, and we've not yet reached the point where the law dictates when people have made enough. The problem is that Hillary is not being straight with the public.

Who among us is surprised by this report by Alana Goodman at The Washington Free Beacon about Team Billary trying to impress upon the NY Times the importance of LEAVE HILLARY ALONE! Hillary to New York Times: Back Off:
Some of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides blasted the New York Times for what they said was unfair coverage of the former first lady during a recent secret meeting with the paper’s Washington bureau, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Sources said the meeting included Clinton advisers Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, as well as Times Washington bureau chief Carolyn Ryan and national political reporter Amy Chozick, who has been on the Clinton beat for the paper. During the closed-door gathering, Clinton aides reportedly griped about the paper’s coverage of the potential 2016 candidate, arguing that Clinton has left public office and not be subjected to harsh scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the discussions.
Even CNN mocked control freak Billary (via IJR Review):

From Vanity Fair, Monica Exclusive: Monica Lewinsky Writes About Her Affair with President Clinton:
After 10 years of virtual silence (“So silent, in fact,” she writes, “that the buzz in some circles has been that the Clintons must have paid me off; why else would I have refrained from speaking out? I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth”), Lewinsky, 40, says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)” ..., “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. . . . The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”
Which brings to mind this Branco cartoon:

What's in a name?...

What's in a name?...

Alana Goodman at The Washington Free Beacon has published The Hillary Papers (embed at bottom of this post). Here's Alana's summary:
The papers of Diane Blair, a political science professor Hillary Clinton described as her “closest friend” before Blair’s death in 2000, record years of candid conversations with the Clintons on issues ranging from single-payer health care to Monica Lewinsky. The archive includes correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium. Diane Blair’s husband, Jim Blair, a former chief counsel at Tyson Foods Inc. who was at the center of “Cattlegate,” a 1994 controversy involving the unusually large returns Hillary Clinton made while trading cattle futures contracts in the 1970s, donated his wife’s papers to the University of Arkansas Special Collections library in Fayetteville after her death. The full contents of the archive, which before 2010 was closed to the public, have not previously been reported on and shed new light on Clinton’s three decades in public life. The records paint a complex portrait of Hillary Clinton, revealing her to be a loyal friend, devoted mother, and a cutthroat strategist who relished revenge against her adversaries and complained in private that nobody in the White House was “tough and mean enough.”
Much of the portrayal is of the bitter, brutal, belligerent Hillary we all know. But her early support for single-payer, despite later denials, is directly relevant to the Obamacare debacle that will be an issue in the 2016 election. Again Alana summarizes:

Why didn't Bill Clinton run for President in 1988? I never really thought about it. Larry Sabato, as part of a post explaining why Hillary is not a "slam dunk" (h/t Hot Air), explains: After all, with just one exception, a Clinton has always tried for public office...