Adapted from RET’s opening remarks delivered at our annual Robert L. Bartley Gala, which was held on March 1, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill.
History — American history — is forever playing tricks on the historian, to say nothing of the man in the street. In 2008 Americans elected as president a junior senator from Illinois with a background in community organization and golf. They thought he could become a second Abraham Lincoln, though the Prophet Obama has proved that he was not quite up to the challenges that faced old Abe. Nor was the American electorate the only body befooled by the Prophet Obama. He hoodwinked the entire Nobel Prize Committee, which rather amusingly conferred upon him, after just ten months in office, the Nobel Prize… for what…the Nobel Prize for Nothingness? Or was it the Noble Prize for Giddiness? Or what? Whatever that idiotic prize was meant to signify I think it is now safe to say that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history. Warren Harding is redeemed! So is Jimmy Carter! Yet history rolls on, and it is now 2016.
Along comes Hillary the Inevitable. Her lingering presence in the presidential race reminds me of that 10th century English king, Ethelred the Unready. Yet Ethelred was Unready only once. Hillary has been Hillary the Inevitable twice, in 2008 and now in 2016. She lost the first race for the presidential nomination to the aforementioned community organizer. In 2016 she is being threatened by a Community Disorganizer, a socialist, also a 74-year-old hippie known, to American Spectator readers as Crazy Bernie, the bicycle rider. More likely she will lose to a Republican. At any rate Hillary has been of special interest to The American Spectator for some 25 magical years.The FBI has only pursued her for a few months.
Yet I am told by my confidantes — sometimes known as sources — that the Bureau has taken from her personal server what crime investigators call the corpus delicti. And the Bureau is scrutinizing the corpus delicti with the same sense of professional discretion that it once reserved for bugged conversations of the Gambino Family or perhaps of the Ku Klux Klan. Now we all know the fate of organized crime and the Klan.
It is my educated guess that Hillary’s personal server will prove to be for her what Monica’s blue dress proved to be for Bill. Hillary’s server and Monica’s little blue dress provide the most advanced scientifically verifiable proof that Bill and Hillary are liars. They lie when they do not have to lie and tell a whopper when a little white lie would be perfectly satisfactory.
In 1994 The American Spectator turned up Paula Corbin Jones without whom the Democrats might still be calling Bill Clinton the Virgin President. Now it is up to the FBI to do a similar job with Hillary and her aides.
Yet The American Spectator has also played a more positive role in Hillary’s life. We have served her as Cupid once served the ancients. We introduced her to more than Paula Corbin Jones and the Arkansas State Troopers. We introduced Hillary to David Brock and oh how she changed his life. Back in the 1990s he was a ferocious attack dog for the whole Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. I know. I personally served him raw meet in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon. But then something happened — you will forgive me I am a romantic — for me it was something beautiful that took place.
At the time David was engaged in writing a book on Hillary with two young researchers who also worked for the Spectator,as did David. Those two researchers are still around and they have related to me something that I had suspected, but only now with their help can I report it as fact. David’s book would be called The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. These innocent young researchers beheld a change coming over David as he proceeded to report his findings. As David worked, a strange warmth came over him. He was transformed. His prose toward Hillary softened. He stopped eating raw meat. He inclined toward vegetarianism.
David suddenly noticed things about Hillary that he had never anticipated. Call it multifaceted, but his understanding of her became what we in Washington call “nuanced.” Sure she was a liar, but there was more to her than mere mendacity. She was innately, stupendously, colossally dishonest. The majority of Americans now recognize Hillary’s profound untrustworthiness, but for David back in 1996 this was a kind of epiphany. Of a sudden, he recognized her as utterly corrupt. As an enabler for ithyphallic Bill, as a harasser of Bill’s victims — she even used private investigators. And boy was she venal.
David found her irresistible. He came to love her. She was his kind of gal. As he continued writing her biography David Brock fell head over heels in love with Hillary. Who would have imagined an attack dog could become a pussycat?
As we all know he left the employment of this magazine and began his enduring relationship with the Clintons. It has lasted to this very day. Nothing quite like it has ever happened in American political history. It is as though Alger Hiss went on to become a life-long apologist for the American Legion. David and Hillary were made for each other. Both David and Hillary were mercenary to the utmost. As David told one of our researchers as he left The American Spectator’s employment “It’s just business.”
What Hillary had done with cattle futures and so much more David did with politics. Sure he made a good living on the right. But on the left he made millions. He is now an accredited member of Crazy Bernie’s fabulous one-percent class of oligarchs — just like Hillary. David came to be in charge of Media Matters, which according to the Los Angeles Times has a $22 million budget. He sits on boards of still more million-dollar Democratic organizations. Now he vies with Sidney Blumenthal to be not an attack dog but Hillary’s lap dog.
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the famed French philosopher, travelled to America in 2005 following Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th century route. Somehow he came upon David. With a French philosopher’s pungency Lévy appraised David “one of zee most objectively loathsome [people] zhat I haf met” in America. Bernard-Henri Lévy should have met Hillary.
Yet as I say, David’s researchers are with us today. In fact, they are here this evening. They have a plan for this election cycle.
Donald Trump has raised the issue of Bill Clinton’s abuse of women and of Hillary as an enabler. This is precisely the picture that our researchers and David painted of the Clintons in the 1990s and they reported much more. We have their work in our archives.
We published a preview of David’s 1990s portrait of the Clintons a few weeks back, and David’s Media Matters was curiously silent. It did not object. Let us see how long Media Matters can remain silent as we publish installment after installment of David Brock’s original portrayal of the grasping, lying, corrupt Clintons? At The American Spectator we believe that the Clintons have not changed to this day.
