This week’s media boomlet for Hillary Clinton to make yet another run for president in 2024 is either laughable silliness or further evidence that the Democratic Party is unprincipled and sclerotic.
Republicans would be thrilled if Democrats were to nominate another elderly, multiple-time loser who is a lying, cheating, authority-abusing, corruptly profiteering, election-denying, woman-shaming, left-wing ideologue so emotionally unattractive that she found a way to lose to Donald Trump.
A quick review of Clinton’s 53 years in the public eye is in order. She first gained national attention with an embarrassingly vapid graduation speech calling “for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” She then moved on to work as a staffer investigating the Watergate scandal, acting so unethically that her supervisor described her as “a liar” and refused to recommend her for other jobs. After marrying the crooked womanizer Bill Clinton, she spent decades enabling his mistreatment of women while she herself engaged in multiple sketchy financial schemes.
She lied about how her commodities broker backdated trades to arrange for her to make about $100,000 on a $1,000 investment in cattle futures; she was a leading partner at a law firm of infamously dubious ethics; she got involved in real estate and banking imbroglios that earned convictions of 15 people for more than 40 crimes and for which prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to indict Clinton but determined that conviction of a sitting first lady would be too difficult.
Clinton played important roles in her husband’s administration. She misused FBI files of Republican workers, hindered investigators in the wake of her friend Vince Foster’s suicide, wrongly fired staffers of the White House Travel Office, unethically used the Lincoln Bedroom and other parts of the White House for unsavory fundraising practices, unsuccessfully pushed a hideously complex attempted takeover of the healthcare system, and oversaw a vicious smear campaign against women whose sexual accusations against her husband she obviously knew to be true.
As she and her husband left office, they approved an ethically inexcusable series of pardons, including for Puerto Rican terrorists and for people who paid Hillary Clinton’s brother hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the time, even Democratic leaders and the liberal media blasted them mercilessly for this.
As a senator, Mrs. Clinton notched almost no notable legislative accomplishments, but she did build a record as one of the most left-wing ideologues in the whole chamber. As Secretary of State, she tried a “Russian reset” that reset nothing, presided over carnage in Syria by the dictator she had once called a “reformer,” and mismanaged the department’s budget, and worse, its cybersecurity (WikiLeaks, anyone?). She also oversaw deficiencies in embassy security in multiple places — she hideously fumbled security in Benghazi and then brazenly lied about the resultant attack and deaths there. She also trampled laws and regulations about maintaining her deparment’s and her own work product emails in a fashion so careless that the FBI determined it was “possible that hostile actors gained access” to some of her communications.
Frankly, Clinton was lucky, yet again, to escape indictment in what was clearly a very close prosecutorial call.
But Clinton had one more parting gift for America. Her presidential campaign helped finance a completely bogus dossier that corrupted what had begun as a necessary and well-focused investigation into Russian activity in U.S. elections. She then spent years spreading the canard that she actually had won the election — thus, in both ways, illegitimately undermining the public’s faith in the election system while nastily roiling politics for the next two years.
By now, Clinton is among the most despised politicians alive. Surely, the Democrats can find somebody better than this corrupt retread, just as Republicans should jettison their own corrupt retread, Trump. The public deserves a real choice, not an endless and scandalous echo.
