It’s Wednesday, May 20th, 2015…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of National Journal, though he still refuses to recognize the true degeneracy of the Clintons’ character, even Ron Fournier has to recognize their credibility gap is as wide as Hillary’s hips:
I don’t believe her. I don’t believe Hillary Rodham Clinton when she says—as she did at a brief news conference on Tuesday—that she has no control over the release of her State Department email. “They’re not mine. They belong to the State Department.”
I don’t believe her because a person’s actions are more revealing than words: She kept her government email on a secret server and, only under pressure from Congress, returned less than half of them to the State Department. She deleted the rest.She considered them hers.
I don’t believe her when she says, “I want those emails out. Nobody has a bigger interest in those being released than I do.”I don’t believe her because I’ve covered the Clintons since the 1980s and know how dedicated they are to what former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry called “telling the truth slowly.” The fact is that she would rather delay the document dump until early 2016—and then have the email released on a single day to overwhelm the media and allow her to declare herself exonerated. That was her strategic choice, Clinton advisers confirmed for me, until a federal judge ordered the State Department on Tuesday to release the email in stages.
I don’t believe her answer to this question: Is there a conflict of interest in accepting huge speaking fees from special interests seeking government action? “No,” she replied.
I don’t believe her because I saw how hard Clinton and her husband, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, worked to pass the state’s first sweeping ethics initiative. I don’t believe her because I’ve heard Clinton and her husband rail against GOP politicians who were guilty of less-obvious conflicts of interest. I don’t believe her because there have been far too many credible news reports about the blurring of lines between family finances, the family foundation, and her political and government interests.
I believe the public has a right to know whether any of the deleted email involved correspondence about the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Foundation or its donors. I believe she’s getting bad advice: The hide-and-attack tactics of the 1990s won’t work as well—if at all—in a post-Internet era that honors transparency, authenticity, and accountability.
I believe she wants us to take her at her word, but we can’t—not even those people like me who’ve known the Clintons long enough to respect their service and appreciate their many virtues. It hurts to witness the self-inflicted wounds and hemorrhaging of her credibility. But this is no time for sentimentality.
Blind faith doesn’t get you elected president.
“Respect their service”? How on earth can one respect as service what was obviously a power-fueled wealth-creation scheme from the get-go?!? As for appreciating “their many virtues”, the list is as short as Hillary’s accomplishments as Secretary of State…assuming of course one discounts conveniently enriching herself…
…and killing four brave Americans in Benghazi. We challenge Fournier to list one Clinton “virtue”…just ONE!
Meanwhile, out on the Left Coast, Steve Boss forwarded yet another example of the inescapable products of Progressivism, as…
Will the last business to leave California please close the door behind you…and lock it?!? Perhaps then the tens of millions of illegals bankrupting the once-Golden State won’t follow you to the more productive parts of the country.
In a follow-up to Monday’s item detailing John Kerry’s peculiar proposition to practice his powerless Progressive diplomacy on Pyongyang, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens reports on the Administration’s latest attempt to obfuscate an glaringly inconvenient truth:
Susan Rice & Ben Rhodes: one will lie and the other will verify it!
“Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, has been offering a reassuring view of the Iranian nuclear deal in the face of some Arab skepticism. “If you can diplomatically and peacefully resolve the nuclear issue in a way that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters last week, “we believe that will lead to a much more stable region.” Mr. Rhodes also contends that with a deal “there will be no need to see [a] regional arms race.”
So what’s more frightening: That Mr. Rhodes believes what he’s saying?Or that he does not?…”
In other words…
Life’s tough; it’s even tougher when you’re stupid. But life’s problems become well-nigh insurmountable when you couple stupid with an adamant refusal to recognize your mistakes, i.e., you become the very embodiment of Einstein’s definition of insanity.
Next up, writing at NRO, Kevin Williamson makes the case for why…
“…Conflicts of interest are common in small-town journalism. I employed a columnist who was a Democratic activist and public-relations consultant, who sometimes needed to be reminded that she wasn’t allowed to write articles about her clients.
…But ABC News isn’t the Muleshoe Journal; ABC News can hire whomever it wants. But Washington, too, is a small town, with a substantial overlap between journalism and politics. And hiring George Stephanopoulos wasn’t a terrible idea: He’s smart, he’s articulate, he knows everybody. He was a Clinton functionary with deep ties and longstanding loyalty to all things Clinton. Is that a problem? Sure, of course, but it’s a problem that can be addressed in no small part with simple disclosure.
Which is to say, the one thing that ABC News and Stephanopoulos needed to do is the one thing that they failed to do.
…It is impossible to see how Stephanopoulos could do his job with any integrity in an environment in which the Clintons and their foundation will be central to the political news for the foreseeable future. Certainly not after concealing his relationship with the foundation. ABC News owes it to itself to live up to at least the standards of a small-town weekly newspaper. It owes them a lot more than that, in fact, but it cannot deliver the goods with Stephanopoulos at the desk.”
All true; but like the NFL‘s refusal to assess Tom Brady and the Patriots the penalty their cheating genuinely warrants, ABC may well be unwilling to eat the value of Snuffleupadouche’s recently-inked $150M contract without realizing some expenditure of effort on his part, blatantly biased though it be.
Turning to the “It’s Art If Liberals SAY It’s Art!” segment, also brought to you by NRO, Jonah Goldberg relates how…
“…Thomas Jefferson said it well: “To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
But whenever Congress attempted to curtail funding of offensive art, editorial pages, faculty lounges, and museum boards launched a nationwide elite freak-out. In 1989, when the Senate voted to restrict some funding for offensive art, Richard Koshalek, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, told the New York Times that he felt that the vote was “a form of psychological tyranny, trying to put the art world into a state of terror.” Painter Robert Motherwell exclaimed that “for Congress to act as censor is outrageous. The ultimate end is fascism.”
Similar reactions sprouted up like mushrooms on manure throughout the 1990s. For instance, in 1997, the Miami Herald editorialized that having a legal standard of “decency and respect” for arts funding was a possible invitation for the Supreme Court to “scuttle the First Amendment.”
Speaking of manure, there was the time the taxpayer-subsidized Brooklyn Museum of Art ran an exhibit in which a portrait of the Virgin Mary was partly made of pornographic pictures and elephant dung — because, you know, art.
Note: None of the critics said such work should be banned. They said it shouldn’t be publicly showcased on their dime. And yet, opposition to a taxpayer subsidy was almost universally seen as unambiguous censorship and violence against the First Amendment. Another interesting tidbit: Christians didn’t try to murder these artists.Nor did Christian organizations exhort their members to do so.
Which brings us to Pamela Geller. I’m consistent: I didn’t like “Piss Christ,” and I don’t like insulting drawings of Mohammed. If Geller wanted an NEA grant to dunk Mohammed in beautifully illuminated urine, I would disagree quite strongly.
But that’s not what she’s doing. She’s contending that in America, people are allowed to say offensive things without risking execution.I am at a loss as to why anyone would disagree withthat. But I am utterly baffled how people who think it’s censorship to withdraw funding for anti-Christian “hate speech” can argue that private individuals have no right to express anti-Muslim views.
“While we have freedom of speech,” a New York Daily News columnist insisted, “we also have freedom of religion, which shouldn’t be impinged upon.”CNN’s Chris Cuomo, a law-school grad, tweeted that Geller’s “hate speech” isn’t protected by the Constitution. At first Cuomo suggested proof of this could be found in the Constitution itself. He then hastily clarified that it fails the “fighting words” doctrine of the Supreme Court.
I’m dubious about that. But if he’s right, the lesson is clear: Violence pays…”
But not nearly as well…
…as lying! Hillary’s biggest problem? She isn’t NEARLY as believable as Bill…and has absolutely ZERO personality; which makes the overinflated fees she earns for her less-than-inspiring speeches all the more questionable.
And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Investors.com, more proof, as if any were needed, Green is the new Red:
“The U.N.’s climate chief is scheduled to visit Australia, where she’ll be welcomed by an advisor of the prime minister who isn’t mincing words in explaining to his countrymen what their guest is all about.
Maurice Newman, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Abbot’s Business Advisory Council, doesn’t seem too thrilled about the visit from Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. Writing in the Australian, Newman said the “climate catastrophists” are “opposed to capitalism and freedom” and aim to establish a “new world order under the control” of the United Nations.
The British Telegraph reports that Newman’s critics describe him as a “whacko.” But he is correct: The goal of those who want the world to believe that man’s carbon dioxide emissions are dangerously changing the climate is to pull down capitalism. And that’s not us saying it. Figueres herself has admitted this.
“This is the first time” in history, she said earlier this year, that there’s a chance “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Newman points this out in his op-ed, warning fellow Australians that “the real agenda is concentrated political authority.” Global warming? It’s merely “the hook.” He also notes that Figueres “is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model.”…”
Seriously, if you haven’t caught on to the fact the Environazis are every bit as Red as Uncle Joe, Chairman Mao and B. Hussein, wake up and smell the Socialism, sucker!
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