By Jay D. Homnick on 2.22.08 @ 12:07AM
Imagining the end to a career distinguished by its corruption.
We caution ourselves against succumbing to glee until the last
spadeful of dirt has been smoothed over the coffin of Hillary
Clinton's candidacy. So long as the recrudescence of her brand of
plague may yet be an eventuality, the clarions of liberation may
not be trumpeted with abandon.
Even if she is eclipsed, as the prevailing trend portends, she
will not depart the scene without leaving it strewn with carcasses
and other noxious detritus. Still, the pedestal she perched upon
for a year has been upended, and the mathematics, if not the
civics, have tipped to her detriment. If she is indeed being
dispatched, let us add a brief soundtrack, with a few lyrics to
remind ourselves of her sordid legacy.
There are horror stories without limit; she has slashed a
hubristic swath through the heartland lo these four decades. Many
are widely known and have been amply covered. Herewith, some of my
all-time favorites among her less-publicized hits.
She burst onto the scene in 1969 when she blindsided a black
Senator, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, a moderate Republican from
the old school. Brook was invited to deliver a commencement address
at Wellesley College and Hillary followed him to the podium to
deliver the "student commencement," first of its kind at the
school. She used the occasion to belittle Senator Brooke as
offering only empathy, but no activism, to aid the antiwar
movement. This is known in the Jewish tradition as "gaining honor
from the humiliation of another" and deemed the lowest rung of
character.
A few years later she was lawyering for the Congressional
committee working to draw up articles of impeachment against
Richard Milhous Nixon. She wrote some briefs that were stupefying
illiberal. One of her arguments maintained that nowhere in the
Constitution was the right to an attorney afforded to a President
in an impeachment proceeding. Yes, she wanted a sitting President
to answer a charge of high crimes and misdemeanors without the
ability to retain counsel! Amazingly, no prominent member of the
media reminded the nation of this when her spouse was the one
facing the charges.
In another Watergate filing, she broached the idea that the
President, not being a textbook defendant, was not vested with the
presumption of innocence!!! Note the pattern of weaving legal
technicalities, narrowly read, into instruments of oppression.
Off she flew to save the benighted State of Arkansas from its
dismal rating as #49 among the United States in educational
achievement. After Bill ramrodded her into running the show and
shoehorned her agenda through the legislature, her reforms made a
difference: the state moved to #50.
One classic Hillary story concerns the writing of her tome,
It Takes a Village. When it came out during their White
House years, it was accompanied by a press release describing how
Hillary had been working late nights and scribbling longhand in
spiral notebooks. Among journalists based in Washington, it was an
open secret that the entire work had been penned by Barbara
Feinman, a research assistant working for Bob Woodward. Hillary did
not acknowledge her contribution in any way.
Selling the pardons in her husband's last days in office was the
capstone of her career in corruption. One small town in New York,
for instance, had been pleading to have four locals pardoned. The
men had been guilty of some white-collar chicanery, but people felt
bad for their children left fatherless at young ages. Bill freed
the four and an 80% Republican town became an 80% Hillary town
overnight.
Well, all this brings me back to a different night in 1969, when
the New York Mets won the National League pennant. I was just 11
years old but I burst out of the stands onto the field with
thousands of crazed fans. We had been chasing the Chicago Cubs,
managed by Leo Durocher, and had finally overtaken them down the
stretch. On the field, we all chanted in unison: "Goodbye, Leo, we
hate to see you... go!" I am no devotee of Obama, but if he seals
the deal, I will be the first guy out there offering Hillary (a
fallen Cubs fan anyway) that selfsame chant, as we replay 1969,
only in reverse.
topics:
Education, Books, Constitution, Law, NATO
