July 10, 2016

"We’re resigned to the Clintons focusing on their viability and disregarding the consequences of their heedless actions on others."

"They’re always offering a Faustian deal. This year’s election bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short fingers on the nuclear button. The Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House with the benefit of low expectations."

The last few lines of Maureen Dowd's new column.

101 comments:

David Begley said...

Wow! What a straw man and false choice. Either vote for a woman who is an unindicted criminal or a prudent businessman who would never launch nukes unless the US was under direct attack.

If that's the best Maureen Dowd can do, then Hillary is sunk.

traditionalguy said...

Dowd totally gets the Clintons. She always has.

MikeR said...

"Either vote for a woman who is an unindicted criminal or a prudent businessman who would never launch nukes unless the US was under direct attack." Nah - either vote for a woman who is an unindicted criminal and a liberal, or for a kind-of conservative.
No problem for Dowd to decide that. The problem is convincing anyone who doesn't take the position of vote for any liberal over any conservative.

Anonymous said...

If she were still at the State Department, she could be getting fired for being, as the F.B.I. director told Congress, “extremely careless” with top-secret information. Instead, she’s on a glide path to a big promotion.

And for 40 unindicted enabling Minions get West Wing offices. They are not innocent here. Several of them could have reined Hill in on the dumbness. But it might have risked their jobs. Guess what, if you are in one of those positions, that IS your job. To keep your boss from being terminally stupid. They failed. They risked lives. I'd pull the clearances of every single one of them.

Lewis Wetzel said...

I am astonished by the people, on the left and the right, who think that if Trump loses to Hillary, we will have dodged a bullet.
Hillary is the bullet.
Trump wants to be able to sue people who tell lies about him.
Hillary wants to put people in jail if they tell the truth about her.

rhhardin said...

Klavan recommend this film as awful but taking the prize for the most gratuitous nude scene ever. IMDB then gives recommendations. It all resembles the Clintons to me.

A group of friends whose leisurely Mexican holiday takes a turn for the worse when they, along with a fellow tourist, embark on a remote archaeological dig in the jungle where something evil lives among the ruins.

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A caving expedition goes horribly wrong, as the explorers become trapped and ultimately pursued by a strange breed of predators.

Three skiers stranded on a chairlift are forced to make life-or-death choices which prove more perilous than staying put and freezing to death.

A young married couple becomes stranded at an isolated motel and finds hidden video cameras in their room. They realize that unless they escape, they'll be the next victims of a snuff film.

After kidnapping and brutally assaulting two young women, a gang unknowingly finds refuge at a vacation home belonging to the parents of one of the victims: a mother and father who devise an increasingly gruesome series of revenge tactics.

About the inhabitants of a small Iowa town suddenly plagued by insanity and then death after a mysterious toxin contaminates their water supply.

Refusing to believe her story about cave-dwelling monsters, the sole survivor of a spelunking exploration gone horribly wrong is forced to follow the authorities back into the caves where something awaits.

A suburban American family is being stalked by a group of psychotic people who live in the desert, far away from civilization.

A small town is taken over by an alien plague, turning residents into zombies and all forms of mutant monsters.

A group of young backpackers' vacation turns sour when a bus accident leaves them marooned in a remote Brazilian rural area that holds an ominous secret.

A group of five college graduates rent a cabin in the woods and begin to fall victim to a horrifying flesh-eating virus, which attracts the unwanted attention of the homicidal locals.

A brother and sister driving home through isolated countryside for spring break encounter a flesh-eating creature which is on the last day of its ritualistic eating spree.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Good column by Dowd. Unfortunately it won't have any effect. The Dems are locked into a suicide mission and can't see any way out.

Anonymous said...

Prof, you are the most astute legal and political scholar. But, the best lines of this superb, amazing, almost certainly a Pulitzer essay was about how the Clintons, the ultimate free-riders, liars, and white trash of America, contaminated Obama, Comey, and Lynch in just 11 days. Just 11 days!

God, how can this woman, who could be fired, punished, etc if she were an employee of any govt. agency, be promoted?

What does it say about the Democratic Party? Have they no one? What does it say about the Press? Can they inflate the Clintons for ever and ever? What does it say about GOP? How can they nominate Loser Trump when they could have easily dismantled the Clintons for ever and ever?

Sad!

sykes.1 said...

Hilary is utterly incompetent, corrupt and arrogant. More importantly she is an inveterate war-monger. If she becomes President, war with Russia and/or China is inevitable.

Wince said...

An incisive take by Dowd.

But I'm not sure, as viewed through the MSM lens, most people see Obama, Comey, Lynch et al. as having been "contaminated" by the episode.

Humperdink said...

So I go to the link to read Dowd's column and get to photo of Comey. That picture is hilarious. Reminded me of Alfred E. Neuman. It should have been captioned: "What, me worry?".

Martha said...

Hillary! Is beyond reproach. She and her lackey were photographed carrying two large clearly marked UNITED STATES Postal Service containers into Chelsea's apartment yesterday filled with stuff for Chelsea and her kids.. They were marked:

Warning—NOT FOR PRIVATE USE
FOR MAIL ONLY

there was a maximum penalty for theft or misuse written on the side of the box I could not make out...
Penalty must be for the little people.


Lewis Wetzel said...

Those mailboxes could have been filled with severed human heads and the media response would have been the same.

Etienne said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tim in vermont said...

Dowd refuses to knuckle under to the Clinton sliming of the whole party. Good for her. If there were more Democrats like her, Trump would never have had a chance.

tim in vermont said...

The whole justification for Trump was that he was the only one who would lay a glove on Hillary.

rhhardin said...

The post office leaves the containers when there's lots of mail. You leave them by the curb empty and they get picked up.

Big Mike said...

@tim in vermont, Carly Fiorina was thrashing Hillary back in the day. Carly is the manager that Hillary could never be, and twenty times the woman.

Achilles said...

Big Mike said...
"@tim in vermont, Carly Fiorina was thrashing Hillary back in the day. Carly is the manager that Hillary could never be, and twenty times the woman."

I liked Carly, but she was for open borders and is a climate change flunky. Trump is more conservative and believable.

Sebastian said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sebastian said...

"Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short fingers on the nuclear button." The only thing Progs care about nuking is the Supreme Court.

Iniquities? What iniquities? Rape, sexual, harassment, fraud, obstruction of justice, violating FOIA and FRA, exposing secrets, lying and lying about lies: except for a few pearl-clutchers here and there, it means nothing to the run-of-the-mill Dem. They keep their eye on the prize, and nothing else matters.

They don't make Faustian bargains, for they have no souls to sacrifice.

But as an aside, the actual emails revealed so far have changed my view of HC in one respect: I always assumed she was a smart, calculating, lying bitch. I still think she is a calculating, lying bitch. But she comes across as utterly clueless, barely in the loop, half-witted, more, umm, stupid than Kerry.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Trump will not go after Hillary with any significance or force. Trump's fun was beating the hell out of the GOPe. So here we are - Hillary or Hillary's stalking horse.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

"In a mere 11 days, arrogant, selfish actions by the Clintons contaminated three of the purest brands in Washington — Barack Obama, James Comey and Loretta Lynch — and jeopardized the futures of Hillary’s most loyal aides."

LOL. Pure.

Maureen dislikes the Clintons, as anyone with a drop of moral fiber should, but she just won't pull the trigger on the entire corrupt enterprise that is her precious democrat party.

Achilles said...

AprilApple said...
"Trump will not go after Hillary with any significance or force. Trump's fun was beating the hell out of the GOPe. So here we are - Hillary or Hillary's stalking horse."

This is classic #nevertrump. It completely ignores reality bends the world to a paradigm to make them right about Trump. Trump has already called Hillary evil. He already called Bill a rapist. None of your deep bench cucks have even come close.

After the convention you jerks will have no more excuses. You will fight the left with the rest of us or be outed for the cowards you are.

Birkel said...

Insulting your way to electoral success is an odd strategy.

Bay Area Guy said...

Hillary is simply awful. We knew that for years - Dowd knows it, hopefully the American voter will recognize it too.

Lewis Wetzel said...

Running Trump against Hillary is one of those ideas that is so crazy it just might work.
The option was to allow the candidate to be chosen by the people who picked up the popular presidential vote winner in one of the last six elections.

Annie said...

What does it say about GOP? How can they nominate Loser Trump when they could have easily dismantled the Clintons for ever and ever?

The GOPe wanted Bush or Kasich. They'll take another clinton over Trump or, especially Cruz, who has shown he tries to do what he says. Can't have anyone pulling their snouts out of the trough or holding them to the Constitution.

gspencer said...

Sebastian at 09:19,

Well said,

sunsong said...

Dowd is right. Trump is too childish to be President and that leaves the Clintons...

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Well, it was her own fucking employer/newspaper that did all it could to set up this bargain, and ensure that no alternatives to that satanic duo were given any fair coverage. So maybe she could write about that in her next column.

Billions in free advertising/coverage Trump has gotten. And that horrible excuse for a newspaper of record was just as guilty of it as anyone.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Providing Americans with a choice between just Trump and the Clintons is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

rcocean said...

Trump is the peace candidate in this election. The idea that we want Hillary answering the call at 3 am is laughable.

bbkingfish said...

I have to admit, I thought it was crazy talk when I first heard that the Clintons were encouraging their good friend Donald Trump to run in the GOP primaries.

I was sure that not even the GOP electorate would be stupid enough to bite at this obvious bait. But, there you go.

I don't think they will be brazen enough to have Bill Clinton give one of the seconding speeches at Trump's nomination. But a week later, after his nomination is complete, The Donald may very well grace the podium in Philly to embrace Hillary for the visual benefit of the voting masses.

Then Trump can throw the car keys to Preibus and the RNC (since they're not supporting Trump anyway), and leave them his private number at his fabulous Mar-a-Lago resort, where he like to golf early in the morning, leaving him pretty much free for the rest of the day and able to engage in consultation.

cubanbob said...

They’re always offering a Faustian deal. This year’s election bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short fingers on the nuclear button. The Clintons work hard but don’t play by the rules. Imagine them in the White House with the benefit of low expectations."

Speaking of the nuclear button, with the Clinton's the codes will be hacked by the Russians and the Chinese and surreptitiously changed thus providing an invalid authorization. I'll take my chances with Trump's fat fingers on the button than that of the criminal and traitor Clinton.

Cog said...

‘This year’s election bargain: Put up with our iniquities or get Trump’s short fingers on the nuclear button.'

Dowd’s prediction for this election is probably correct, that Clinton’s strategy will be to to convince voters that a crazy president Donald might launch a nuclear bomb in some kind of hissy fit. It's utter nonsense, of course, but--if you buy into it-- you have at least one good reason to vote for Hillary.

YoungHegelian said...

@bbkingfish,

The Donald may very well grace the podium in Philly to embrace Hillary for the visual benefit of the voting masses.

And will the Clintons then write Trump a check for the $50 million of his own money (no doubt quite a bit more by then) that he's spent on his own campaign?

There are some industries that the government can throw a lot of money at and make up those losses, but real estate isn't one of them. Combine that with Trump's megalomania, & I think your thesis starts to head into tin-foil hat territory.

Michael K said...

"your thesis starts to head into tin-foil hat territory."

Beyond tinfoil hat and into moby territory

Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/politics/donald-trump-president.html

"Would Donald Trump Quit if He Wins the Election? He Doesn’t Rule It Out."

TWW said...

So the Faustian deal is: "I'm going to push the button and it's going to be great" versus, "I can't find the dammed button. Didn't anyone bring a flashlight? How do I push it?"

cubanbob said...

TWW said...
So the Faustian deal is: "I'm going to push the button and it's going to be great" versus, "I can't find the dammed button. Didn't anyone bring a flashlight? How do I push it?"

7/10/16, 2:11 PM"

Trump isn't a boozer so that's in his favor as well.

Achilles said...

Birkel said...
"Insulting your way to electoral success is an odd strategy."

1. Nobody throws more insults than #nevertrumpers.

2. I am not insulting, I am shaming.

Writ Small said...

Lots of the Left are trashing Hillary over this: David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, Chris Cillizza and now Dowd to name a few. It's odd.

Do they feel Hillary's win is so assured they can afford to build some credibility by criticizing her?

It is almost like the Left is perpetually surprised by the energy on the Right and can't help but to ape it. Republican's are in an anti-establishment mood? Us too! Republicans have a contentious fight for the nomination? Let's go, Bernie. Conservative heavyweights are openly criticizing their nominee? We aren't hacks, either. Watch us slam Hillary.

Or maybe, they've had enough. The entire Democratic establishment had to publicly push the idea that perjury was no big deal when it became politically necessary to help Bill. Now the Clintons are asking that the Democratic faithful go out and say that mishandling classified info is A-OK so long as you didn't intend any security harm. Never mind all of the sanctimonious moralizing the Left did when they wanted to get Scooter Libby over the harm-free Plame leak.

In the blood heat of battle, it is easy to overlook the shortcomings of your chosen champion. Only when the fight has been won (or lost) and passions cool do people really reflect on the flaws of their representative. The problem for Democrats is that they have had years and years of dull indifference to reflect on who the Clintons really are and what they have had to do to keep the Hillary and Bill in power.

Carol said...

Carly is the manager that Hillary could never be, and twenty times the woman.

Oh puleeze...she wrecked that company and Compaq too. Just another worthless bean counter and she lasted what, five years before she was pushed out?

I swear, she gets points *just for being a girl* which is so special.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

No one one the right is any good - all much too imperfect. So we get corruptocart Hillary and fake loser Trump.

Darrell said...

President Trump.
Get used to it.

Sebastian said...

"The problem for Democrats is that they have had years and years of dull indifference to reflect on who the Clintons really are and what they have had to do to keep the Hillary and Bill in power" "Problem"? Sure, we get a few preening pearl-clutchers in the media tut-tutting over HRC, but the party of Ted Kennedy and Gerry Studds and Alcee Hastings has no qualms. They keep their eyes on the prize.

Progs need no Faustian bargain. Not only do they have no souls to sell, they need no stinking' devil to give them power. They'll grab it themselves.

YoungHegelian said...

If Hillary keeps on cranking out stuff like this, she's going to have a hard time holding on to any but the dedicated Democrats among white voters.

While there probably are a lot of white people who aren't happy about the recent shootings of the two black men by police officers, a much larger set of white people will see a public statement that spends most of its time blaming whites & especially the police one day after the murder of the Dallas police officers by a black guy with stated sympathies to BLM as just way wide of the mark. I mean, have the Democrats become the "All Black, all the Time" Party?

That the Democrats are doing this full court press to charge up their most dependable constituency makes me think, as Van Jones of CNN has warned, that between Trump & low enthusiasm, getting the requisite 90+% of the black vote may not be a lock for the Democrats this year.

Limited Perspective said...

It does say something against the elite all hobnobbing with each other. I suppose getting a regular column at the NY Times is what thousands of college brown-nosers would be willing to get their noses smelly for. Perhaps the smell of turnip greens actually smells better on the nose for Ms Dowd.

Big Mike said...

@Carol, you really need to learn to do your own research and not rely on bulltwaddle pushed to you by people with suspect motivations.

HP was not "destroyed" by Carly -- in fact her successor, Silicon Valley legend Mark Hurd, implemented her strategy precisely. Subsequently the conventional wisdom has had it that she had the right strategy but lacked the managerial acumen to run the merged companies.

Bullshit.

What really happened, Carol, is that at the last minute Walter Hewlett, son of one of the founders and Chairman of the Board, decided to fight the Compaq acquisition. He lost the proxy fight and subsequently found himself obligated to resign from his daddy's corporation. Poor baby.

Carly Fiorina was CEO of HP for roughly 6 1/2 years (July 1999 to February 2005). This compares unfavorably to John Young, who was CEO of HP from 1978 to 1992, but comparable to her immediate predecessor Lewis Platt (November 1992 to July 1999) and longer than either of her immediate successors Mark Hurd (April 2005 to August 2010) or Leo Apotheker (September 2010 to September 2011).

Lewis Wetzel said...

Blogger YoungHegelian said...
If Hillary keeps on cranking out stuff like this, she's going to have a hard time holding on to any but the dedicated Democrats among white voters.


Given Hillary's campaign experience, I expect that the words and phrases that she uses are poll-driven. Her numbers are in the toilet with white men, and shaky with white women, especially considering Hillary is, herself, the whitest of white women. These are the two biggest demographics in the country. She has to make up that ground with minorities. I don't believe Hillary's internal polls show her with the unshakable lead she seems to have achieved in the public polls. She is not acting like a winner. By naked appeals to a militant, ant-white minority protest group she risks driving never-trumpers to the polls to vote against her.

Phil 314 said...

Shit sandwich or shit sandwich with cheese.

Bruce Hayden said...

@Terry - I think that any whites, or maybe even Asians, who seriously listen to what she said there are going to be driven off. Her response to the five executed Dallas cops was to essentially claim that the cops are racist in their dealings with blacks, which essentially implies that their murders were justified and the cops deserved to die. Which means that cops are going to be that much more hesitant to roust black hoodlums, and more blacks are going to die as a result. Which we are seeing in Chicago, Baltimore, etc.

Michael K said...

What really happened, Carol, is that at the last minute Walter Hewlett, son of one of the founders and Chairman of the Board, decided to fight the Compaq acquisition.

I have also heard this and that the "HP Way" was a featherbed.

I don't agree with ANY of them outsourcing coding to India and H1B visa holders, though.

Unknown said...

Clinton's voters know that she is a criminal. They don't care. The truth might be effectively used to push enough people from the middle over to Trump, but my sense is that the undecideds are a shrinking number as the American cultural split widens and hardens. Facts matter as little to most voters as laws do to Clinton or Zero. If he does pull enough votes, then you've got.... Trump. This causes me a bit of a similar sensation to what passengers going down in an airliner must feel. You know your inevitable fate well ahead of time.

TWW said...

Trump: "I'm going to push the button and it's going to be great."

or...

Clinton: "I can't see down here. Didn't someone bring a flashlight? Huma? Where's the button? Do you push it or pull it? I need a memo; send me an email."

narciso said...

yes, it seems to a truism that outsourcing is not a tool, but the only one, one problem with red queen, is her beliefs seem not to have changed from this period when she was at yale law

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/panthers2.htm

TA said...

Let's face it. The reason we have Trump and Hillary is that neither party could put up anyone who is worth shit.

glenn said...

People get the Government they deserve. Every time. And at 77 with no grandchildren pass the popcorn.

narciso said...

actually comey, reminded of richard benjamin's clueless briefer, major danby, in catch 22,
specially when he explained why that had to bomb a target that had no strategic value,

now carlos slim is in full squirrel mode, perhaps ignoring these ties,

http://gotnews.com/breaking-close-ties-blacklivesmatter-protest-organizers-controversial-mosque-dallaspoliceshootings/

Big Mike said...

@Michael K, agree about the H1B. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton is saying that the coal miners Barack Obama's "war on coal" put out of work can be retrained as programmers. On the other hand, she supports

My understanding of "The HP Way" was that it was all about achieving consensus before moving forward. But in the 21st century firms have to be agile and can't sit around doing consensus building. Carly wasn't the only CEO in this era who had to confront a once-vaunted corporate culture that had outlived its times. I'm much taken with Louis Gerstner's Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, which details his efforts to overturn an IBM culture that had ossified and become disfunctional. (Be sure to use the Althouse portal if you want to buy the book.)

Big Mike said...

Oops. Didn't finish my thought. On the other hand Hillary supports the Silicon Valley gazillionaires who are demanding ever more H1B visa -- and abusing the people they bring in via those visas -- rather than pay a fair wage to American software engineers.

Michael K said...

Big Mike, another good IBM book is "Blue Magic," the story of the IBM PC.

Sadly, the guy who authored that miracle was killed shortly after the PC was introduced. He and his wife were going on a reward vacation when their plane was caught in Clear Air Turbulence at Dallas FW airport. Good book.

Another good one is "Fumbling the Future," the story of Xerox PARC.

exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...

So here we are - Hillary or Hillary's stalking horse.

7/10/16, 9:20 AM

Again, while I am no great fan of Trump's, the theory that he is a stalking horse makes no damn sense. He ran against her so he would not only lose but be smeared constantly as a racist and anti-Semite? There's already been one (admittedly pretty half-assed) assassination attempt against him - would it surprise anybody if there were more? Trump does not strike me as the sacrificial lamb sort.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

The art of the deal. Bill and Donny made a deal. Once the Clintons are back in power, Trump will be golden.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

The internet has let me down.

I just typed into a search engine: "I'm trying to watch the USA women's Olympic gymnastics qualifications on TV, but I can't fucking stand it anymore, why the hell is that announcer guy such a flaming homo?"

And the internet's response left me with nothing but pure, unadulterated disappointment.

narciso said...

because we can't have nice things, I've found with espn and other state run media, it's best to keep the sound down, it's not like they have a clue about what they are talking about,

Sammy Finkelman said...

Google is not HAL.

First get the announcer's name.

Then get a biography of him.

women's Olympic gymnastics qualifications TV announcer

Live on NBC.

And you can follow the leads.

Sammy Finkelman said...

traditionalguy said...

Dowd totally gets the Clintons. She always has.

No, she doesn't - She gets them only partly, and that's only because I wrote her a detailed letter, with citations, in 1996.

She got the part about Bill Clinton growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, not Hope.

wildswan said...

Hillary Clinton as Josephine McCarthy:
I have in my pocket the names of three hundred State Department employees and supervisors

who were just as careless as I was - but - was I careless? They know who they are. Ask them if I was careless - starting with my ultimate boss, who is standing here next to me. Mr. President - did you allow me to be extremely careless with national security.

Why no, Hillary I don't think it's an issue at all.

narciso said...

dowd can barely get a cappuccino, she's incapable of nothing more that gotham truisms,

FullMoon said...

YoungHegelian said... [hush]​[hide comment]

If Hillary keeps on cranking out stuff like this, she's going to have a hard time holding on to any but the dedicated Democrats among white voters.

While there probably are a lot of white people who aren't happy about the recent shootings of the two black men by police officers, a much larger set of white people will see a public statement that spends most of its time blaming whites & especially the police one day after the murder of the Dallas police officers by a black guy with stated sympathies to BLM as just way wide of the mark. I mean, have the Democrats become the "All Black, all the Time" Party?


If Hillary wins, she will continue the divisive legacy of Obama. Trump will not cater to the violent BLM and other protesters who shut down freeways and destroy property. He might call out the media for encouraging these demonstrations. He might encourage local governments to actually sentence protesters to some jail time. a few months in jail takes the fun out of it for the average person.

JAORE said...

Dowd is still being paid to write?

Is America a great country or what?

Paul said...

Now imagine Hillary's corrupt little finger on the nuclear button. The same finger that was asleep when the 3 AM Benghazi call came.

eric said...

Blogger TWW said...
Trump: "I'm going to push the button and it's going to be great."

or...

Clinton: "I can't see down here. Didn't someone bring a flashlight? Huma? Where's the button? Do you push it or pull it? I need a memo; send me an email."


For some reason, in my boredom, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Hillary's Email over the last few days. They are over at Wikileaks if anyone is interested and as bored as I have been.

Without a doubt, the thing Hillary writes the most is, "Pls Print". I'd say at least 75% and approaching 90% of the Emails I have read that were written by Hillary have just those words.

For some reason, her aids send her article after article about world events and her response is pls print. What the hell they are printing out these articles for I have no idea.

Gotta be a way to make an advertisement about that. I mean, that's the sum of her career at state, "Pls print". She would be the "Pls print" President.

YoungHegelian said...

@Eric,

For some reason, in my boredom, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Hillary's Email over the last few days.

I read through dozens at random & you know what I thought: the awful secret that her coterie wants squashed is that she was a do-nothing, figurehead at State. It makes sense doesn't it? Obama & Hillary despised each other, but to keep peace within the Democratic Party he let her claim the experience of SoS, but he didn't let her actually set any policy.

This has happened before. Under Pres. Clinton, Janet Reno was a figurehead at Justice. It was Clintonista Webster Hubbell who really ran the show. So, if my conspiracy theory is true, who pulled the levers at State? Was there even anyone at State, or were the levers pulled directly from the WH?

eric said...

Blogger YoungHegelian said...
@Eric,

For some reason, in my boredom, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Hillary's Email over the last few days.

I read through dozens at random & you know what I thought: the awful secret that her coterie wants squashed is that she was a do-nothing, figurehead at State. It makes sense doesn't it? Obama & Hillary despised each other, but to keep peace within the Democratic Party he let her claim the experience of SoS, but he didn't let her actually set any policy.

This has happened before. Under Pres. Clinton, Janet Reno was a figurehead at Justice. It was Clintonista Webster Hubbell who really ran the show. So, if my conspiracy theory is true, who pulled the levers at State? Was there even anyone at State, or were the levers pulled directly from the WH?


Barring any treasure trove of hidden Emails somewhere, I have to agree with you.

She is either lazy, or ignorant, or just doesn't care. Whatever it is, it seems like she just sorta traveled around, smiled a lot, read a lot of newspaper and magazine articles praising her, and spent our nations money on her international jaunts.

Otherwise, she just isn't the evil mastermind some of us thought she was. She's more like Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake.

Unknown said...

@ JAORE

I'm no fan of Dowd, but we're paying Hillary to do what? Dowd writes coherent articles, Hillary and Bill are a mud puddle, every one close to them is stained. Hillary couldn't pass the DC Bar Exam. She couldn't work anywhere right now except as POTUS, Don't you find that a little disturbing?

narciso said...

she was getting wrong information 'stovepiped' to her from sid vicious, through drumheller and murray, who in turned relied on their sources in european intelligences, along with the foundation, this formulated wrong policy, practically everywhere,

Bruce Hayden said...

I don't see her as lazy. Obama is lazy. Flying a million miles in four years and visiting all those countries was a lot of work. What I see is a not very bright woman who is paranoid as all heck by now, working diligently to overcome the fact that she isn't all that smart and is completely charisma impaired. She apparently hasn't done anything in her life well except in whom she married, and how she controlled him and his sex drive. I think it likely that she was a good part of why he won the Presidency. I almost wonder now if she has some sort of mild dementia, or maybe a little sinility, and should have just ridden out her second Senate term and then retired to help with her grandkids after losing to Obama in 2008. What we most see, it seems, is the coterie around her telling her what to do, what to say, etc. they aren't quite handlers, but also not quite minions. Something in between. She mostly pays them (either from campaign cash or via the crime family foundation slush fund). And they protect her fiercely.

I remain unconvinced that she was just along for the ride as Sec of State. Her fingerprints, and those of her close associates (notably Darth Blumenthal) seem to be all over the fiasco in Lybia, and her closest aide (Huma) has strong family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whom we pushed into power there. And a lot of the donations to the crime family slush fund seem to have involved official favors of one type or another. Still, I would not be surprised if Obama and his people were the ones really driving foreign relations in many cases. It just has too much of a feel of anti-colonialism, which can really be coming from one place. Still, it is weird that they pushed for regime change in Lybia, Egypt, and Syria, but seemed to resist it strongly when it was a real possibility in Iran. It may be because that country had already gone through its anti-colonial regime change under Carter, and had some quasi-democratic legitimacy.

Getting back to Hillary - she seems to me to be the type of woman I hated in high school - who weren't that smart, worked hard, brown nosed the teachers, and got As as a result. And then got out in the real world, where they discovered that they were worked hard, but were frequently bypassed. The type of women who sue because they don't make as much money as the guys do, because going through the motions isn't as valuable as accmplishing things. But along with that, I suspect that she was always a bit of a cheater. Probably why she failed the DC bar exam (cheating is hard there) (How the heck do you fail that exam? It was one of the easiest in the country. I could have easily been admitted there on my Multistate scores alone). Her feeling of entitlement seemingly behind much of her corruption could easily be because all her hard, but dull, work didn't pay off as she thought it should.

Bruce Hayden said...

Not sure though who Janet Reno really reported to. And remember - Webster Hubbel was one of Hillary's partners at the Rose Law Firm (Vince Foster was the othe). Both Hubbel and Foster both apparently billed for work for failed Madison Federal. Hillary though was billing partner there, and one of the three was apparently at most of the corporate meetings where they planned the transactions behind the pyramid scheme. Of course, with Web Hubble effectively running the DoJ, the criminal investigation into the lawyers facilitating the scam went nowhere. Which is to say to me that I suspect that he owed more loyalty to Hillary than to Bill.

Janet Reno never came out as a lesbian, and there was no real evidence that I know of in that direction, scepter that she never married or seemed to date. But there were several high level lesbians in the Clinton Administration. Some were apparently buddies of Hillary's from her college years. I remember wondering at the time if, attending a woman's college, she had been a LUG (Lesbian Until Graduation). My guess is that Bill and Hillary shared picking the Cabinet. He got the important news, outside Justice (which she knew she needed to protect herself from her various transgressions) and she got a lot of the lesser posts.

tim in vermont said...

Dowd is right that the Clintons use the same techniques that gangs use to ensure loyalty. Gangs force new members to commit a crime like murder. The Clintons get their supporters to defend rape and perjury, to sell out their own values on war and money in politics. After that, their supporters become bullet-proof loyal. Even Sunsong is falling in line.

Look at Unknown and Shiloh for proof of this.

tim in vermont said...

BUt how anybody could say that a man who illegally fired an inspector general who was investigating one of his supporters right off the bat has a "pure" brand, I don't know.

I guess "pure" people get a multi-million dollar "earmark" for their wife's employer and she gets her salary doubled all the time.

tim in vermont said...

I like to think that Comey choked on the fact that she was giving classified information to Sandy Berger, whom he had prosecuted for mishandling classified info, but I doubt it. He probably just rolled his eyes and said "That's our Hillary," gave out a hearty chuckle, and set to work figuring out how to minimize the damage.

tim in vermont said...

Damage to the Clinton brand, I meant, not damage to the country, the interests of which are secondary to the needs and wants of the Clintons.

Etienne said...

Michael K said......when their plane was caught in Clear Air Turbulence at Dallas FW airport.

I think it was a micro-burst. They were trying to land in a thunderstorm (generally low success rate) and it collapsed right on top of them. The plane stopped flying and hit the interstate before destroying itself on airport property.

It did change the way pilots were trained. In the old days, pilots were told to stay away from the "stick-shaker." If you got one, then you should lower the nose. But in a micro-burst you want to pull the nose up until you get a stick-shaker (stall warning), which means you might just survive, and keep it in stick-shaker until you are out of it. Then too, many airlines now have micro-burst detection on the cockpit weather radar.

Best bet is to respect thunderstorms. We had a very recent flight try to land here from Houston. He orbited for 30 minutes waiting for the thunderstorm to move. Finally he decided to go to Dallas. They fueled-up and returned for a safe landing later.

That's the smart way.

mikee said...

Maureen Dowd, who is noticed beyond Manhattan a few times every election cycle, does as well as a blind squirrel, finding an interesting nut every once in a great while.

I, for one, prefer to note the actions of the other squirrels out there whose record of successful nut hunts are much more impressive.

MadisonMan said...

I think it was a micro-burst.

The Dallas Microburst of 1985 is very famous in meteorology, as it lead to a ton of research on how they're formed, and I believe it led to microburst-detecting radars in the noses of airplanes.

One of NOAA's Gold Medal Winners this year developed a Microburst Detection Algorithm (link)

Deja Voodoo said...

Hillary answering the call at 3 am

JAORE said...

I'm no fan of Dowd, but we're paying Hillary to do what? Dowd writes coherent articles, Hillary and Bill are a mud puddle, every one close to them is stained. Hillary couldn't pass the DC Bar Exam. She couldn't work anywhere right now except as POTUS, Don't you find that a little disturbing?

I have been misread, or I was unclear (NOT a first for me).

No, I do not find the fact that we may be saying Madam President when referring to Hillary "a little disturbing". I find it horrifying and a bright, flaming mile marker on the highway to the death of respect for the rule of law.

(Don't ask what I think of Trump as the other viable candidate.)

When I bothered to read Dowd I found her to be biased, elitist, bitter (especially about men not recognizing her value) and a bit unhinged. Approximately 10 percent of what she wrote struck me as holding enough value to consume. Too poor a batting average to continue.

JAORE said...

"For some reason, her aids send her article after article about world events and her response is pls print. What the hell they are printing out these articles for I have no idea."

The first time I read a headline about the upcoming "paperless" office I should have invested in paper manufacturing. Heavily.

I think this is an age thing. In my old office LOTS of people printed out any important e-mails to highlight and read at a later date. Since it was "free" to distribute e-mails widely we burned up the printers. I trust/hope today's office workers know the power of (e.g.) the search function and keep most records digital.

Brando said...

It's a sad state of affairs that even with the bar so low for ethics, competence and character, neither party can nominate anyone who meets that bar.

If Hillary gets elected, it will be by default, but what a travesty that the Dems basically handed her their nomination and the GOP simply decided to spike itself this year. It's not a good sign for our political system that this is what we've produced.

tim in vermont said...

MoDo refused to be dragged into bashing Bill's sexual assault victims, and defending his behavior as so many other Democrats and "feminists" were. You have to respect her for that. I think that is probably the argument that keeps her her job and the NY Times. They all know they did it, they are all guilty of it but her.

Jeff said...

@Big Mike,

You're wrong. The Compaq acquisition was one of the all-time stupidest business decisions ever. Carly grossly overpaid for what was, in essence, a business that made and sold IBM PC clones, something everybody with a garage in Taiwan could and did do. The margins in the PC clone business were razor-thin by then, and it was clearly a commodity business. If you valued the business using even overly optimistic projected earnings, Compaq was worth maybe a third of what HP paid for it.

Everyone understood that the PC clone business had low margins, but Compaq was moving into what it thought were higher-end servers running Unix. But what they seemed not to notice was that the real growth in Unix was PC clones running Linux. You could pay $20K for a Compaq Unix server, or you could pay $4K for two Linux servers. The Compaq server might be slightly more capable than one of the Linux boxes taken alone, but not as capable as two Linux boxes together. And it was clear even back then that Linux was the future of Unix, and that all the innovation in Unix was coming from the Linux coders.

There is no way to spin the HP/Compaq merger as anything other than stupid. Carly did it because like many managers in tech back then, she didn't understand much about the tech she was managing. But she was too arrogant to recognize her limitations. She still is.

mockturtle said...

Dowd is right that the Clintons use the same techniques that gangs use to ensure loyalty. Gangs force new members to commit a crime like murder. The Clintons get their supporters to defend rape and perjury, to sell out their own values on war and money in politics. After that, their supporters become bullet-proof loyal. Even Sunsong is falling in line.

Reminds me of the early scene in Training Day where Denzel Washington finally convinces his new trainee, Ethan Hawke, the smoke weed on their patrol. After considerable protest, Hawke finally succombs, after which Denzel threatens to bust him if he resists participation in his scams.

mockturtle said...

Damn, that was a great movie!

tim in vermont said...

There is no way to spin the HP/Compaq merger as anything other than stupid. Carly did it because like many managers in tech back then, she didn't understand much about the tech she was managing. But she was too arrogant to recognize her limitations. She still is.

Yet still HP leads the server market and servers are what keeps HP relevant. Not scientific test equipment, and certainly not their pre-Compaq computer tech. So was it Carly that decided to buy EDS? No, that was Mark Hurd.

The old HP was a soft company that was in no position to compete with the Asian Tigers who were just coming into the world market.

Sammy Finkelman said...

eric said...7/10/16, 11:07 PM

For some reason, in my boredom, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Hillary's Email over the last few days. They are over at Wikileaks if anyone is interested and as bored as I have been.

Do you have a direct link? Are they easy to read there? I know Wikileaks has a lot of classified State Department files up to February 2010 that were put on the military's secret-but-not-Top-Secret system and stolen by Bradley Manning because the computers he used were equppped with CD-ROM drives that were read-write and he pretended to be listenting to music while copying it. Later, people in the State Department were ordered never to refer to anything at Wikipeaks, and never to read it, because although they were accessible to anyone in the world outside of Iran and China maybe, who knew how to use the Internet and had good software, they were still classified secret. Let's not say that Hillary Clinton didn'tsafegiard classified information. I remember she also said this was very bad for diplomacy./

Without a doubt, the thing Hillary writes the most is, "Pls Print". I'd say at least 75% and approaching 90% of the Emails I have read that were written by Hillary have just those words.

Plus the link. I knew that already, although not that the the percentage was so high. I wouldn't have thought it was over 2/3 of them.

For some reason, her aids send her article after article about world events and her response is pls print. What the hell they are printing out these articles for I have no idea.

She didn't like to read things online, obviously. The articles were probably not sent by her aides, but by other non-government correspondents whose e-mails were deleted as "private" You didn't realize that? Some may have come from Sidney Blumenthal but he was probably not the only supplier. And she might have encountered a few links herself.

She never read articles on line - she always forwarded them and asked her aides to print them.

YoungHegelian said...7/10/16, 11:35 PM

the awful secret that her coterie wants squashed is that she was a do-nothing, figurehead at State.

Or she didn't want to leave a trace of what she did, so there's not going to be any instructions in her e-mails. I think she also didn't want to make waves.

This has happened before. Under Pres. Clinton, Janet Reno was a figurehead at Justice. It was Clintonista Webster Hubbell who really ran the show.

Maybe at the time of the Waco fire, but she was there 8 years. Instructions may have been communicated to her in any numer of ways, completely in secret, and probably not in conformity wth any organizational chart.

So, if my conspiracy theory is true, who pulled the levers at State? Was there even anyone at State, or were the levers pulled directly from the WH?

On important thigs, probabky from the White House and Hillary Clinton didn't want to exercise any power (except maybe to corruptly help a few people get what they wanted.)





Sammy Finkelman said...

Dowd is right that the Clintons use the same techniques that gangs use to ensure loyalty. Gangs force new members to commit a crime like murder

That's to guarantee they are not police informants. The Clintons don't have to worry about anybody joining them as part of an FBI sting, and much less serious crimes are sufficient, preferably even thinbgs aht are on the cusp. Then they need the Clintons to pay for their lawyers.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Of course, when someone does become an accomplice to murder, like political consultant Ed Rollins I believe, they can be induced to do some very self-destructive things, like he did after the 1993New Jersey Gubernatorial election.

Sammy Finkelman said...

Regarding Inspector Generals:

Hillary Clinton made sure the State Department didn't have an Inspector General all the time she was there.

The State Department went the longest time without an Inspector General of all the agencies that had Inspector Generals ever since they started having Inspector Generals in or about 1979.