{"id":5013,"date":"2017-11-22T03:51:45","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T03:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/22\/conrad-black-on-hillary-on-what-happened\/"},"modified":"2017-11-22T03:51:45","modified_gmt":"2017-11-22T03:51:45","slug":"conrad-black-on-hillary-on-what-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/22\/conrad-black-on-hillary-on-what-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"Conrad Black on Hillary on What Happened"},"content":{"rendered":"

Believe it or not, I actually have Hillary Clinton's What Happened<\/em> checked out of a local library and have read chunks of it.  But there is no need for me to comment on the 492 page exercise in self-deception and outright lying inasmuch as Conrad Black has done a fine job<\/a> of it.  Here are some excerpts:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

More alarming than Mrs. Clinton\u2019s ungraciousness is her dishonesty. She all but accuses Trump of treasonable collusion with Russia, and Russian interference in the election looms even larger than misogyny and Comey\u2019s skullduggery in her demonology of causes of the national tragedy of her defeat. But all the \u201cevidence\u201d she cites of Trump\u2013Kremlin collusion is taken from the now-infamous Christopher Steele dossier. Since the publication of this book, it has come to light that the Clinton campaign paid $10 million for Steele\u2019s unverifiable pastiche of defamatory gossip and fabrications against Trump. The entire case against Trump has, after 16 months of FBI investigation, turned up no evidence. The Clinton campaign denied, until the facts came to light, that it had any knowledge of the origins of the Steele dossier, and now says that it doesn\u2019t matter who paid for it; and she now refers to it as \u201ccampaign information.\u201d The bipartisan leadership of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has confirmed that this dossier <\/strong>is the sole basis for the continuation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller\u2019s investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

She has an unblemished record, she implies, and the fact that the majority of Americans don\u2019t trust her is due to the \u201cviciousness of the Republican smear merchants.\u201d <\/strong>She says that the timely release of the Billy Bush tape of Trump\u2019s verbal indiscretions eleven years before (about the ease for a celebrity of groping women), though it was clearly fired as an intended game-ender, came as a surprise to her, and that she was heroic in \u201cwinning\u201d the second presidential debate two days later, given the pressure she was under. In fact, Trump, with his campaign apparently in shambles and principal figures deserting or taking their distance, was under more pressure than anyone in the history of those debates going back to Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and he won the debate. Trump\u2019s production, earlier in the day, of a trio of women who alleged sexual assault against her husband was, in Mrs. Clinton\u2019s view, a tawdry and outrageous resurrection of those she memorably described in the past as \u201cthe bimbos.\u201d Trump\u2019s coarse locker-room reflections are apparently disqualifying, but Bill Clinton\u2019s scandalous and possibly criminal sexual assaults on various women when he was governor and president do not alter the Norman Rockwell marriage of Bill and Hillary.<\/span><\/p>\n

The author is a relentless partisan: Republicans are under-educated pessimists, \u201cthe deplorables,\u201d as she called them last year. Reagan \u201csapped the spirit of the country,\u201d though he restored the country\u2019s confidence. (He also led the greatest economic boom in modern U.S. history and won the Cold War, but she doesn\u2019t mention that.) Dwight Eisenhower isn\u2019t mentioned at all, apart from having been Adlai Stevenson\u2019s opponent, and Richard Nixon was a criminal, never mind that Nixon ended school segregation and conscription, extracted the country from the Democrats\u2019 war in Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, opened relations with China and the Mideast peace process, signed the greatest arms-control agreement in history with the USSR, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, reduced the crime rate, and stopped the endless rioting in American cities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the publication of this book, former party chairman Donna Brazile has written that Mrs. Clinton rigged a number of primaries in her struggle with Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. Mrs. Clinton dismisses Whitewater (which led, circuitously, to the impeachment of her husband), Travelgate, the Benghazi tragedy (where the American ambassador to Libya was murdered by terrorists and she and Obama pretended that it was mob anger provoked by an anti-Islamic video produced by a private American citizen), and the email controversy that \u201camounted to precisely nothing\u201d (I think not). She does not mention her speech of apology to the world\u2019s Muslims, a toe-curling embarrassment to the entire Western world, nor her inability to utter or write the words \u201cIslamic terrorism or extremism,\u201d nor the very disconcerting pay-to-play activities of the Clinton Foundation, including the payment or pledge of $145 million and a $500,000 speech fee for Bill Clinton at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s agreement was required to approve a sale of uranium assets in the U.S. to Russian interests.<\/span><\/p>\n

Democratic senators whom she praises in comradeship have turned on the Clintons: Elizabeth Warren accuses her of cheating Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand says that Bill Clinton, because of his peccadilloes, should have resigned. They may be unjust, but this is what the Clintons\u2019 allies now think of them. Her righteousness is moth-eaten and threadbare.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here I must register a pedantic objection. A peccadillo is a little sin; but rape is not a little sin. (Juanita Broderick alleges that Bill Clinton raped her.) Nor are perjury and obstruction of justice, the crimes that he was alleged to have committed when he was impeached. And yes, he was<\/em> impeached, although he was not removed from office.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mrs. Clinton believes she is a good and sincere Christian, though she makes it clear that joining a church and being a communicant in it should be with the purpose of turning that church into an agency for leftward political action, what she calls \u201cprogressive reform.\u201d By this, we are left in no doubt, she means rounding up all those who are beneath the average in prosperity or acceptability in mainstream-majority society, or if not, at least highly dissatisfied with the lot of those who are, and mobilizing them as a democratic majority to impose transfers of wealth and status from those who have earned or inherited it to the less fortunate or successful. This is a constant process of evaluating where the electoral majorities are, pitching to them as victims in the name of a benign state, and representing to those who pay for these transfers that it is their Christian and social duty and that they should rejoice in their opportunity to better the quality and stability of American life and society.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Mrs. Clinton\u2019s America, spiritual inspiration exists to pursue redistributive materialism, all \u201cprogress\u201d apart from a little doughty self-help is the result of state intervention, the state has a practically unlimited right and duty to correct meritocratic as well as inherited or exploitive socioeconomic imbalances, and the U.S. Democratic party must be a secular church militant where those who oppose abortions (about half the American public) are, along with many other large groups, unwelcome. All politics is a constant process of \u201creform,\u201d in which, miraculously, the majority gain at the expense of the more accomplished (as well as more fortunate) minority. This isn\u2019t really Christianity or democracy; it easily slips into rank acquisition of votes with the money of part of the electorate in a cynical and corrupt manner, and Mrs. Clinton convicts herself of such attitudes with this astonishing display of rage, affected humility, idealism, and myth-making. It is a sobering and a disturbing read.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>Here's how much the Clintons and Obama received from Harvey Weinstein<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/a>Two kinds of truth: actual and political<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Believe it or not, I actually have Hillary Clinton's What Happened checked out of a local library and have read chunks of it.  But there is no need for me to comment on the 492 page exercise in self-deception and outright lying inasmuch as Conrad Black has done a fine job of it.  Here are … Continue reading “Conrad Black on Hillary on What Happened”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}