Following a smattering of debates and a couple of primaries and caucuses, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton is having a much tougher time with avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, her sole remaining opponent for her party’s nomination.
She and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have blamed her poor performances on a number of things – sexism, the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” more sexism – but what is more likely having the biggest effect on the viability of her candidacy has nothing to do with anyone or anything other than Clinton herself, for throughout her career in public service (and long before), she has been her own worst enemy.
No one can or likely will tell you how to vote, and that’s how it should be. But we in the media have a responsibility to properly vet all candidates running for any public office, but especially the presidency, since it is the highest office in our country and arguably the most influential leadership position in the world.
As for Clinton, despite the lofty rhetoric she tries to use on the campaign trail or the insults she and her husband sling at political opponents, her record speaks for itself. As more voters – particularly younger voters who were either not yet born or were too young to notice when she was first lady – learn more about her checkered past, we suspect it will continue to impact her negatively at the polls.
Recalling Hillary’s scandals
Now, to recall some of those incidents, and some recent scandals as well as the implications they contain:
- Hillarycare: Decades before the country was saddled with the public policy disaster that is Obamacare, Hillary Clinton was attempting to take over one-seventh of the U.S. economy via its healthcare system. She assembled a gaggle of representatives from government, the health and insurance industries and academics, and then proceeded to conduct all discussions in secret (a trait that would come to be known as one of her defining characteristics). And she did this despite the obvious potential for conflicts of interest. This goes to integrity.
- Filegate: Hundreds of FBI files on officials from previous Republican administrations were given to a Hillary Clinton’s favorite, Craig Livingstone, head of White House security. These were handed over improperly, as it wasn’t clear at the time that Livingstone even had the proper security clearances to view such materials.
- Vince Foster: A longtime friend and onetime colleague at the same Rose Law Firm, Vince Foster, who became deputy White House counsel, went to a park across the Potomac River from the White House and shot himself in 1993, shortly after Bill Clinton took office. In a rush, files were quickly removed from his office before investigators were able to seal it off. Resulting in more Hillary secrecy.
- Whitewater: “In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bill and Hillary Clinton were associates of Jim and Susan McDougal in the Whitewater Development Corp., an Arkansas real estate investment firm that went under when McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan was closed by federal regulators for illegal accounting,” the Washington Examiner reported. “Taxpayers lost $73 million due to Guaranty. The Clintons lost an estimated $67,000 on their investment, but McDougal helped pay off Bill Clinton’s campaign debts, and Hillary Clinton’s law firm received an unknown sum in fees for representing a Guaranty project that also failed.”
Hillary’s more recent scandals
There are more from that era; read them here. More recently:
- Benghazi: As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was responsible for the safety of overseas diplomatic personnel, as well as the security of U.S. diplomatic missions. After the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked on an anniversary of 9/11. She and President Obama and their aides put out a false narrative that the attack was related to an obscure anti-Muslim video produced in California. Only after congressional scrutiny did she and Obama say that the attack was launched by militants tied to al Qaeda. Killed in the attack was Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other personnel; months before he was killed, Stevens had requested additional security personnel at his compound because of rising concerns over militants, but Clinton turned him down. Obama, in the middle of a reelection campaign, was touting how diminished al Qaeda had become under his leadership, and some believe Stevens’ request was turned down because adding security personnel at a time when Obama was claiming al Qaeda was on the run, would have run counter to the narrative. Obama, with Clinton’s help, chose politics over the lives of American diplomatic personnel.
- Email server: The use of an unsecured private email server by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state has the potential to be the biggest national security violation in the history of the nation – that is, if Obama does the right thing and allows justice to be done. We shall see. In the meantime, read a summary of it, and the risks she posed to the nation, here.
MarketWatch lists a much more comprehensive, if not a bit more sympathetic, list of Clinton’s scandals and accusations here.
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