The following anecdote illustrates, in a just a few words, a very important message for those few voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina who (unfortunately) will largely decide who the Democratic presidential nominee will be.
On last Sunday's Meet the Press, one of the discussion panelists told the following story. A reporter was talking with a small businessman in Iowa who was a lifelong Republican and self described Reaganite. He was complaining to the reporter how disillusioned he was with today's Republican Party, citing among other things the massive borrowing, spending and government growth during the Bush Administration. The man said he was so disgusted with the GOP he was actually considering voting for Democrats in 2008.
At that point, the reporter asked the man, "So, would you consider voting for Hillary?" At the mention of that name, the man's eyes hardened, and he replied with just one word:
Never!
While performing my usual Democratic missionary work among my fellow Utahns, I've seen much the same attitude. Hatred for Hillary Clinton among average Utahns is deep, visceral and unreasoning. Yes, I agree with her husband that these impressions are largely unfair, and the result of a decade and a half of unremitting character assassination by the Right. But my response to these conclusions is: So what? Politics is a blood sport, unfortunately. No matter how qualified, why would Democratic primary voters choose a presidential nominee who starts the race with almost half of Americans having a negative opinion of her?
I personally don't share those biases. I think Senator Clinton would make a good President, although she is certainly not my first choice. But Democrats do not get to choose the next President. That is the prerogative of the American people. Democrats need to remember that, and not repeat the mistake the Republicans made in 1948, when they were so assured and arrogant about winning the presidency they chose a wooden man with zero charisma named Thomas Dewey as their nominee.
With his approval ratings in the basement, President Bush likes to compare himself with Harry Truman, whose own approval ratings were quite low during much of his presidency - a nutsy thought, given Truman's liberal, populist views. It would be a shame if the Democrats did a Thomas Dewey in the 2008 election and gave more credence to that argument.
13 comments:
I too have often seen the same steely gaze when the name "Clinton" is mentioned. in fact, I got another one of those "mysteriously dead associates of the Clintons" emails the other day. Should she get the nomination it will be very interesting how this animosity is handled.
Of all the Hillary Clinton scandals and cover-ups, none is more significant than her attempt to whitewash her own personal transformation from Goldwater girl to Marxist. No mainstream media organization has examined how she is determined in her new book to keep people in the dark about what Hillary biographer, the late Barbara Olson, described as her “roots in Marxism.”
“In her formative years,” explained Olson, “Marxism was a very important part of her ideology...”
Olson’s important 1999 book, Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1999), remains the best account of Hillary’s communist connections and emergence as a “budding Leninist” who “understood the Leninist concept of acquiring, accumulating and maintaining political power at any cost.”
As an example, Hillary’s book gripes that the end to her illegal closed-door health-care task-force meetings, where a socialized medicine scheme was hatched, was the result of her opponents citing an “obscure federal law” in court. Hillary, a lawyer, never wanted the law to get in her way.
Leaving The GOP
Hillary’s book, Living History (Simon & Schuster), does attempt to explain her move from the political right to the left. But it stops far short of explaining her involvement with extreme left-wing groups and individuals in league with America’s enemies.
The book says that Hillary was the daughter of a staunch Republican and that, in high school, she read Senator Barry Goldwater’s book, The Conscience of a Conservative, and wrote a term paper on the American conservative movement. She dedicated it to her parents, “who have always taught me to be an individual.” She was a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and had “strong anti-Communist views,” she says. She also got deeply involved in the United Methodist Church, which “opened my eyes and heart to the needs of others…” Her conservative views persisted, however, into the time that she entered Wellesley College in 1965, where she served as president of the college’s Young Republicans during her freshman year. However, she says that she began having more doubts about the war against communism in Vietnam-doubts fed by a Methodist magazine she was receiving at college, as well as reports in the New York Times.
Defending The Black Panthers
She moved on to Yale Law School in 1969, which was a hotbed of activity on behalf of the violently racist Black Panther organization. She writes that, “The world and its realities came crashing down on Yale in April 1970, when eight Black Panthers, including party leader Bobby Seale, were put on trial for murder in New Haven. Thousands of angry protesters, convinced the Panthers had been set up by the FBI and government prosecutors, swarmed into the city. Demonstrations broke out in and around campus. The campus was bracing for a huge May Day rally to support the Panthers when I learned, late on the night of April 27, that the International Law Library, which was in the basement of the law school, was on fire. Horrified, I rushed to join a bucket brigade of faculty, staff and students to put out the fire and to rescue books damaged by flames and water.”
So Living History portrays Hillary as someone who didn’t participate in the pro-Panther demonstrations but just tried to save some books from a fire.
Panther Justice
Former sixties radical David Horowitz says that both Hillary Rodham and Bill Lann Lee, who later became President Clinton’s head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, helped organize the pro-Panther demonstrations at Yale. Others sympathetic to Hillary contend that she was merely among a group of law students who monitored the trial on behalf of the ACLU, which was concerned that law enforcement was violating the civil liberties of members of the party. But Hillary says nothing in her book about even this role.
What is not in dispute is that she served on the Board of Editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, a “progressive” alternative to the school’s traditional review, and that its fall 1970 issue was devoted to the trial and glorifying the Panthers.
The Red Lawyer
During the summer of 1971, Mrs. Clinton writes in her book, she was a law clerk at the Oakland firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. “I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case,” she said. In fact, however, the public record shows that Clinton worked for Robert Treuhaft, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and Harvard-trained lawyer for the party.
Citing public sources, Peter Flaherty’s book, The First Lady (Vital Issues Press, 1996), says that “Hillary was recommended to Treuhaft by some of her professors at Yale. She was looking for a ‘movement’ law firm to work at for the summer. As it turns out, Hillary would continue her association and support of the Black Panther cause while working as a law clerk for Treuhaft.” Flaherty notes that Treuhaft told Herb Caen of the San Francisco Examiner, “That was the time we were representing the Black Panthers, and she worked on that case.”
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Mrs. Clinton’s involvement with Treuhaft is no secret, although Hillary clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. A New York Times obituary of Treuhaft, who died in 2001, said that he had “accepted a young Yale lawyer named Hillary Rodham (now Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton) as an intern.” A British newspaper, the London Times, said that “generations of liberal lawyers were groomed under his [Treuhaft’s] tutelage, including a young Yale law student named Hillary Rodham.”
These two obituaries are posted at a website in honor of Treuhaft’s famous wife, British author Jessica Mitford, herself a member of the CPUSA whose lobbying of Bill Clinton on the death penalty issue was reportedly facilitated by Hillary.
The Harvard Law Bulletin said about Treuhaft: “He belonged to and served as attorney to the Communist Party of the United States for many years and defended the civil rights of groups such as the Black Panther Party, Vietnam War draft resisters, and members of Berkeley’s free speech movement.”
The London Times said Treuhaft and Mitford left the CPUSA in 1958 and that “Khrushchev’s denunciation of the crimes of Stalin had been influential in driving away lots of believers.” But Khruschev had denounced Stalin’s crime in February 1956. The Times said that “the Mitford/Treuhaft idea that the American Communist ideal should be an indigenous affair never took root,” suggesting they left the party not because of what Stalin did but because working through the CPUSA had proven to be ineffective in establishing a communist America. The British newspaper The Independent said that Treuhaft and Mitford continued to sing the Internationale, once the Soviet national anthem, after they left the party.
Barbara Olson reported, “Hillary has never repudiated her connection with the Communist movement in America or explained her relationship with two of its leading adherents. Of course, no one has pursued these questions with Hillary. She has shown she will not answer hard questions about her past, and she has learned that she does not need to-remarkable in an age when political figures are allowed such little privacy.”
Anti-Anti-Communist
In her book, however, Hillary does write about some of her radical associates. She notes a meeting in 1969 with David Mixner of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, an anti-Vietnam war protest group that came under investigation by the House Internal Security Subcommittee for its involvement with communists and backing from Hanoi. Mixner would go on to become a leading homosexual activist, adviser to and friend of President Clinton. He was credited with delivering some six million votes to Clinton in 1992.
Former conservative David Brock’s book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, links Hillary with Robert Borosage, a Yale Law School graduate and one of the founders of the Yale Review, who would later become director of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Marxist think tank. Borosage is now co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a group trying to move the Democratic Party further to the political left.
Hillary writes about her involvement with the Children’s Defense Fund, headed by Marian Wright Edelman, but omits any mention of the New World Foundation (NWF). Hillary followed Edelman’s husband, Peter, as chairman of the NWF. Mrs. Clinton chaired the group during a time, 1982-1988, when it gave grants to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a front group for the communist terrorists; the National Lawyers Guild, a one-time-identified communist front; and the Christic Institute, an extreme left-wing group of lawyers which practiced “legal terrorism” against citizens, retired military and intelligence officials, and others who were perceived to be supporting the cause of freedom from communism in Central America.
The Cover-Up Continues
Peter Flaherty writes, “Hillary’s official biography prepared by the ’92 Clinton campaign makes no mention of her stint as NWF chairman, despite the fact that she oversaw some $23 million in foundation assets. A few journalists, like Dan Wattenberg of The American Spectator, did report on the NWF grants during the summer of 1992, but the major media paid almost no attention. There was no need for Hillary to defend herself.”
Hillary also took advantage of Bill Clinton’s radical connections, many developed in his trips abroad. Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton had been Rhodes Scholars in England together, for example, and Talbott and his wife, Brooke Shearer, “became friends of mine,” she writes. Brooke’s brother, Derek Shearer, another Yale graduate, became a friend of Bill and pro-Marxist economic adviser to Clinton.
Talbott, who also graduated from Yale and is now president of the Brookings Institution, became Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration. Before that, he had been a columnist for Time magazine, writing a July 20, 1992, column, “The Birth of the Global Nation,” that in the next century “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete,” that we would all some day become world citizens, and that wars and human rights violations in the 20th century had clinched “the case for world government.”
To help accomplish this, Talbott pressed for the use of the U.S. military to restore an extreme leftist, defrocked Catholic priest Jean Bertrand Aristide, to power in Haiti in 1994. Confidential documents from the U.N., publicized by AIM at the time, said that Talbott and other officials viewed an invasion as “politically desirable.”
Aristide, a Marxist-oriented advocate of Liberation Theology, had been booted from the presidency by the military because, among other things, he was inciting mobs to threaten to burn to death judges and legislators if they did not do his bidding.
Hillary’s book describes this as a case of “the elected President” of Haiti being returned to power “after a harrowing year of diplomacy and the landing of American troops.” But the book, Voodoo Politics by Lynn Garrison, tells a far different story, exposing Aristide as an anti-American figure not only allegedly involved in murder but drug trafficking. Garrison was an adviser to one of the generals involved in the anti-Aristide coup.
The political reasons for the invasion can be seen in the make-up of the “Aristide Foundation for Democracy,” whose board included left-wing Democrats such as Reps. Maxine Waters, John Conyers, and Joseph Kennedy, and former Rep. Michael Barnes.
Talbott’s global left-wing vision was endorsed by President Clinton, who had sent a June 22, 1993, letter to the World Federalist Association (WFA) when it gave Talbott its Norman Cousins Global Governance Award. In the letter, Clinton noted that Norman Cousins, the WFA founder, had “worked for world peace and world government” and that Talbott was a “worthy recipient” of the award.
Hillary And China
Hillary doesn’t discuss communist Chinese financial contributions to her husband’s campaign for re-election, but she admits that the communist dictatorship wanted to use her appearance at a 1995 U.N. women’s conference in Beijing as “a public relations tool to improve its image around the world.” Hillary went anyway. She doesn’t mention that radical feminist and Marxist Bella Abzug played a role in getting her to go. Hillary was a big fan of Abzug, having hailed her work and career in a major speech at the U.N.
FBI files obtained by AIM identify Abzug as a member of the Communist Party USA. She ran for Congress but was opposed by the Socialist Party for having shown “a general unwillingness to be outspokenly critical of Communist actions threatening the peace and freedom of the world.”
Not too far from the five-star hotel where Hillary and the feminists were meeting in Beijing, baby girls and boys were being starved to death at Chinese orphanages.
Pictures of this brutality were smuggled out of the country by Human Rights Watch. One showed an emaciated 11-year-old girl tied down to a bed, withering away to nothing. A British film about the problem, The Dying Rooms, showed children tied to wooden toilets, sleeping in their own excrement.
The brutality reflects the Chinese policy of one child per family, enforced through mandatory abortions, sterilization, and outright killings. Hillary calls such a policy “barbaric” in her book but admits that in her speech to the conference she did not criticize China by name. Ironically, all of this is recounted in a chapter entitled “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.”
For Hillary, the villains are not the Communists and fellow travelers but the “extreme conservatives” who oppose them. She rails against conservative talk-radio, suggesting that it played a role in provoking the 1994 Oklahoma bombing. This is a ridiculous charge that Bill Clinton had used in a brazen political attempt to discredit his political opponents on talk radio. Hillary takes it further, claiming that executed bomber Timothy McVeigh was a member of the “extreme right-wing” and had ties to “militant anti-government groups.” This is an exaggeration that borders on fantasy. McVeigh may have attended a meeting of a militia group at some time, and he did have some anti-government views stemming from the violent federal assault on the Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. But the evidence developed by McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, and other experts suggests that foreign terrorists may have ultimately been behind the Murrah Building bombing. However, the Clinton administration stopped the investigation and prosecution with McVeigh and his alleged partner, Terry Nichols, both of whom had served in the Army. Jones’ book, Others Unknown (Public Affairs, 1998), explores this, and terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, author of The War Against America (Regan Books, 2001), has also cited evidence of a foreign or even Iraqi role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Foreign Policy Expert?
Mrs. Clinton, who abandoned her pro-Palestinian stance and became pro-Israel when she ran for the Senate, speaks out on foreign policy, confirming the role of co-president she assumed in domestic and foreign affairs. Her book defends the Clinton administration’s military campaigns on behalf of the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. She says the Bosnian Serbs were attacked because they “were besieging the Muslim town of Srebrenica in a frenzy of ‘ethnic cleansing.’” In fact, Srebrenica, a so-called U.N. “safe haven,” was being used to train and refurbish Muslim troops, and may have been serving as a base for foreign terrorists in the region. Hillary conveniently ignores the Clinton-approved “ethnic cleansing” by Croatian forces against the Serbs.
“I had spoken out strongly in favor of Bill’s leadership of NATO in the bombing campaign to force Slobodan Milosevic’s troops out of Kosovo,” a province of Yugoslavia, she says. But the House refused to authorize the bombing, making the intervention illegal. The bombing campaign, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, amounted to interference in a sovereign state that posed no threat to the U.S. Indeed, the bombing benefited the Kosovo Liberation Army, a group linked to al Qaeda. In Hillary’s book, though, President Clinton “sounded the alarm on global terrorism” and tried to get the “diabolical” Osama bin Laden.
In Rwanda, she writes, “rape and sexual assault were committed on a mass scale, tactical weapons in the genocidal violence that raged there in 1994.” Yet she also notes that Bill later “publicly expressed regret that our country and the international community had not done more to stop the horror” of perhaps one million dead. The program, Triumph of Evil, noted that the Clinton administration even hesitated to label it genocide.
With this record of devious pronouncements, Hillary reportedly wants to run for the White House some day.
More Lies By Hillary
Dick Morris, a former Clinton political adviser, said on July 21 that Hillary, lured by the drop in Bush’s ratings, might seek and win the Democratic nomination next year. Her background will be a problem for her, but even more damaging are the lies she has told about her close friend, Webb Hubbell, who went to prison for stealing from his partners and clients of the Rose Law Firm.
Hillary says in her book that she didn’t know Webb was in serious trouble until November 24, 1994. That is a lie. She and Bill had been told in March that Hubbell faced prosecution and that he should be ousted from the Justice Department. They promptly sought and got his resignation. Fearing he would reveal their darkest secrets, they and their aides set out to raise money to buy his silence. The final OIC report says he was paid $541, 750, ostensibly for his services, but he performed little or no work.
The claim that the Clintons didn’t know Hubbell was in deep trouble until November 1994 enabled them to say they had nothing to do with the solicitation of hush money because they didn’t know that Hubbell faced prosecution. The more that lie is publicized the more difficult it will be for the Clintons to return to the White House as President and First Mate. They should have been evicted when the hush-money scandal broke.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-Cuba), speaking at a Democratic party fundraiser in San Francisco yesterday, was remarkably frank about the Democrats' intentions to use socialist redistribution policies if the party gains power after the November elections.
As reported by the Associated Press, Sen. Clinton said, "Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
With her blunt statement, Sen. Clinton has drawn clear the difference between the two major parties: The Marxist Democratic party will "take things away from you on behalf of the common good" while the Republicans will defend your right to spend your money as you see fit because they know it's your money, not the government's.
Remember this during the long slog to the elections this year. The choice is clear: Marxism or freedom. Vote wisely.
ok dude... how do you really feel?
Cover up? what a bunch of crap. It will be interesting to see what kind of garbage the Repubs come up with on Obama when he wins next November. Among the favorite "cover up" lines that Repubs love to use on the Clintons is Dick Morris and the "socialized medicine" crap. And I love the quote about the Clinton health care was devised behind closed doors. Isn't that a little hypocritical since everything the GOP does, happens behind closed doors?
2008 will be a very interesting year and we will see the most negative campaigns ever from the Republican Party.
So c.u., your ending line of:
"The choice is clear: Marxism or freedom. Vote wisely."
Then it is only fair we can make the claim that voting for a Bush supporting,Republican is the choice between Fascism and Freedom.
Richard,
Which of your freedoms have been taken away?
Steve,
I appreciate your comments. they hold worth in the decisions we are about to make. That being said, I am a Democrat who will not be supporting Hillary for President. Why I won't support her has to do with the fact that she doesn't pass my litmus test. For those who would like to know what that litmus test is -- it's pretty simple.
First, Is the candidate at least as smart as I am? There is no question, in my mind at all, that Hillary is smarter than I am. This brings me to my next point.
Second, Has the candidate ever known, or more importantly, lived poor. It is easy to speak of having compassion for those less fortunate when you are flush and well heeled. Have you ever been on the "thin" side of things? Have you ever had to choose between your kids eating, and you eating? Have you ever had to figure out where the money for the bills was going to come from because you just lost your job - or worse, been unemployed for an extended period of time? Hillary has never known these, just like Barack, and all the others except Edwards. Only someone who has truly been where "we the people" are can ever understand.
It's because of this extreme lack of understanding I will not support another 8 years of "not so bad" government.
It's time to quit making decisions like a bunch of "Political Hacks" and start listening to our hearts.
anon:
you're kidding, right?
and what Marxist act passed to take your freedom away?
Richard,
You answer with empty rehtoric, yet you fail to answer the question.
anon:
Rather than try and prove to you that some of our freedoms are slowly slipping away, read the 1st and 4th amendments in the Constitution and see if they ring a bell.
Also, you haven't answered my question.
But, I don't expect an answer, so, don't bother. And if you haven't paid attention to the last 7 years(the Bush years), then I'm not going to waste my time. End of debate.
and we wonder why he lost his bid for office....
anon:
sounds like you are the empty one, what is your point?
Honestly anonymous, if you need an answer just look at the Patriot Act. Our freedoms have eroded right in front of our eyes inder the Bush era and you still can't see it?
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