“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women,” as Madeleine Albright informs us, which may not mean quite what you think. “Women” in this case means “Hillary Clinton,” who has meant “women” for Albright for 24 years, as on Sunday it was almost 24 years to the day that Hillary went on “60 Minutes” with Bill on Super Bowl Sunday to give him a pass on his past transgressions, and preserve their ascendant careers.
Days before, Gloria Steinem had gone on the Bill Maher program to explain that young women are leaving Clinton in droves for Bernie Sanders, a disheveled male socialist even older than she is, because it’s a great way to meet men. “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie,” she said.
This may be so, but the facts remain that 24 years ago, the two put their eggs in a very frayed basket, whose structural weakness — Hillary’s undisguised hunger for money, her habit of lying and her husband Bill Clinton’s more than prurient interests — was already inherent, though at the moment, still hidden from view.
By 1978, as the wife of the attorney general running for governor, she had turned a $1,000 investment in cattle futures into a gain of $100,000 with the assistance of friends in high places who helped her skirt rules. “Because [Red] Bone never demanded it, both [Jim] Blair and Hillary were able to make large sums of money without being saddled with large margin call payments,” Carl Bernstein informs us .”They would simply ride out the lows.”
According to nursing home proprietor Juanita Broaddrick, in 1978, Bill Clinton had raped her in a hotel room in Little Rock in the course of a state conference; and according to her, on May 8, 1991, Paula Jones, a state employee, had been escorted to the hotel room in Little Rock of Gov. Clinton, who then dropped his pants and told her to “kiss it.” (In 1998, Kathleen Willey, a volunteer, would say she had been groped and assaulted by President Clinton in the White House itself.)
Broaddrick says she believes Hillary knew what had happened, and we know that in Arkansas Hillary and Bill’s aide Betsey Wright was in charge of the suppression of “bimbo eruptions,” i.e., the harassment of Bill’s flames and/or victims who might have thought about bringing complaints.
Bill was later whitewashed by his friends as having a “JFK problem,” but the difference was that JFK knew how to take no for an answer, and his wife wasn’t involved in his office’s efforts to harass or to silence his “friends.” In short, the woman they hailed back then as a brave and ground-breaking co-partner was in reality a greedy and dishonest woman, involved in a pact with a skilled politician, who relied on his skills to boost her to power in exchange for helping to cover his sins.
In fact, her own skills were so poor that she is resisting her party’s attempts to clear the field for her, losing in 2008 to an untested young and minority senator, and flailing now against an erstwhile fringe figure, a cranky old man with white hair.
Albright and Steinem look at Hillary now and see who she seemed, while others see who she was and turned into, and don’t want to support what that is. If this means what she says, and the polls are correct, there is only one possible potential solution: Many more “special places” in hell.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
