Connecting the dots on Hillary Clinton

[russ1945]

A couple of years after Obama took office I began to be concerned about the direction he was taking this country. I decided to look into his past and began connecting the dots with his past. It became very enlightening and it did not take long to see where he was coming from and where he was trying to take this country.

I have decided to do the same with Hillary Clinton but to do so before the next election comes up. Why? Well Obama's past was pretty much a mystery, not much known about him. With Hillary it is the exact opposite. There are so many questionable issues and events that some even escape most of our memories.

Here is something to start with, something that will refresh some memories. I will add more articles and you can feel free to add some yourself. Those of you who are Hillary defenders can try to defend her lol (best of luck with that).

 

[russ1945]

[h=1]The man who knew too much? The truth about the death of Hillary Clinton's close friend Vince Foster[/h]By SALLY BEDELL SMITH
Last updated at 00:23 15 January 2008

On a Monday night in July 1993, a 48-year-old lawyer called Vince Foster was found dead in a park near Washington DC.He had died from a gunshot wound to the mouth and his father's .38-calibre revolver, dating from 1913, was at his side.
It was the same method of suicide used by a Marine officer in the film A Few Good Men - which Foster was known recently to have watched.
In the movie, the officer had killed himself because he was distraught about testifying against his commanding officer.
In real life, Vince Foster was distraught at the prospect of being grilled about the shady affairs of Hillary Clinton.
A clear case of suicide, then. Or was it? As the months passed, wild rumours began to grow that a hitman had murdered him because he knew too much.
Tall and handsome, Vince Foster was one of Hillary's closest colleagues and best friends.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, they were partners in a law firm while Bill Clinton was governor of the state. And, naturally, when the Clintons moved to the White House, Vince Foster came, too.
It was unusual for Hillary to have such a close friendship with a man. Since her school days, she had operated most easily among women; and when it came to appointing her own staff at the White House, she chose 29 women and one man.
Her subordinates - who called her "The Big Girl" or later "Big Mama" and wore badges saying "Hillaryland" - had a starry-eyed devotion that was almost cult-like.
One of Hillary's friends said: "They were all afraid to say no to her."
She was a hard taskmaster and would call her staff at home after hours to make trifling requests.
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According to White House chronicler Bob Woodward, she "frequently reduced her personal travelling aide to tears" when the assistant failed to produce something Hillary needed.
She had a temper, but instead of "making nice" afterwards, as Bill did, Hillary withdrew in cool silence.
"One time, Hillary said: 'Mel, your problem is you just aren't mean enough,'" recalled her friend Mary Mel French.
"I couldn't work for her and keep our friendship. She is too dogmatic. She gets so into it that she ends up being mean. That is why she has to have such a young staff. They take it, and they bow and scrape."
According to one commentator, the reason Hillary surrounded herself with women was because she found men too complicated. Indeed, she once told former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who owed her appointment to Hillary's support: "We both know what a**holes men can be."
The one man who was definitely not an a**hole was Vince Foster. Hillary used to say he reminded her of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird - reserved, upright and dependable.
"People gravitated to Vince because he was a world-class listener," recalled a former Little Rock lawyer. "Women were drawn to him not just because he was smart and handsome, but because he seemed to keep secrets."
At the funeral for Hillary's father, who died during the Clintons' first term at the White House, it was on Foster's shoulder that the First Lady rested her slightly over-large head.
Inevitably, this intimate gesture added fuel to rumours that they were - or at least had been - romantically involved. After all, Bill Clinton had been seeking his pleasures elsewhere - so why not Hillary?
Aware of all the talk even before his arrival in Washington, Foster himself raised the subject in his first meeting with the man who would be his immediate boss, White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum.
There was no truth in the rumour, said Foster. And when his wife, Lisa, was asked about it later, she insisted: "I don't think Hillary would do it. I think, in a lot of ways, he felt sort of protective of her."
Hillary had long relied on Foster as a confidant, telling him before Bill's inauguration that, despite being an unelected spouse, she was going to "take command" and be "involved in this presidency" - a conversation he recorded in a journal. In turn, he idolised her.
Did that admiration make him cross a line that would normally have stopped him short? In the weeks before the inauguration, he had worked intensively with another Arkansas lawyer to expunge Bill and Hillary's financial records of a shady land deal - a scandal later known as the Whitewater affair.
Later, there were several official investigations into the Clintons' complex web of financial and real estate dealings, which culminated in criminal convictions for some of their associates, though Hillary and Bill were never prosecuted themselves.
Whitewater was later seen as symptomatic of the culture that existed in Arkansas during Bill's governorship, when the Clintons' connections helped them to enrich themselves.
For example, to augment her $110,000 salary, Hillary had earned large sums from seats on local corporate boards, including Wal-Mart.
One company chairman explained Hillary's presence on his board as "making sure he was in good grace with the people in power."
In that atmosphere, Bill and Hillary developed a sense of entitlement, borrowing from banks operated by political friends and accepting favours from individuals and corporations, such as the free use of private planes.
Was some of this weighing on Vince Foster's mind when he became both White House deputy counsel and attorney for both Bill and Hillary? What is certain is that he was unsettled by the First Lady's increasingly uncompromising demands.
In March 1993, he told a colleague that she had "snapped at him" - a rebuke that "hurt him deeply."
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It was clear that Foster was having difficulty being ordered around by the woman who had recently been his equal.
One of his first jobs in the White House was to try to make sense of the Clintons' false tax returns concerning the Whitewater land investment. A note in his hand-writing, found much later, warned that Whitewater was "a can of worms you shouldn't open."
Another "can of worms" that landed on his desk concerned the collapse of a bank called Madison Guaranty. To his consternation, allegations were being made that funds from the bank had been illegally diverted to Bill Clinton's campaign for governor in the mid-Eighties - and that Bill and Hillary had intervened with state regulators to help keep the bank solvent.
Foster was also fretting over the "excessive" sums Hillary was lavishing on redecoration of the White House.
In the end, though, it was the firing of seven staff - following pressure from the imperious First Lady - that "drove Vince batty," according to White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum.
Hillary had become convinced that the staff in the travel office that served the White House press corps were guilty of "financial mismanagement and waste." Foster was asked to help get rid of them.
In a meeting with him on May 13, 1993, Hillary asked him if he was "on top of" the travel office situation. He assured her that his team was working on it.
Afterwards, Foster noted that Hillary's mood was "general impatience ... general frustration."
Other White House aides later confirmed that she wanted her own "people" in the office, and that everyone felt "there would be hell to pay" if her wishes were defied.
On May 19, the travel office's seven employees were fired - and there was immediate uproar. Allegations of cronyism hit the headlines when it emerged that a distant cousin of Bill was to be put in charge of the office, while a friend of a friend was being promoted to take over some of the White House's air-charter business.
Worse still, none of the charges against the original travel office employees stood up, and their precipitous dismissals became a damaging test of Hillary's honesty.
She now insisted that the firings were not her fault. Others had misconstrued an "off-hand comment": she had meant only to suggest that the staff should "look into" questions about mismanagement.
Hillary also insisted she didn't know the "origin of the decision" to remove the employees, and that she "did not direct that any action be taken."
An official report issued seven years later concluded that her statements had been "factually false."
At the time, Vince Foster felt deeply responsible for the imbroglio and was worried that Congress might investigate. White House aide David Watkins remembers Foster saying to him "My God, what have we done?" and expressing concern that Hillary's role in the firings would come to light.
He urged Watkins to protect "the client" at all costs.
Foster knew that in shielding Hillary, he might have to mislead congressional investigators under oath - a grim prospect for a man who took pride in being a straight arrow.
By mid-July, he had lost more than a stone in weight and seemed unusually subdued. He twice told his wife that he felt under pressure and was thinking of returning to Arkansas.
Talking to a colleague about his dealings with Hillary, he said: "It's not the same." On one matter after another, he confided, she would bark "Fix it, Vince!" or "Handle it, Vince!" and leave him to pick up the pieces.
On July 16, Foster and his wife drove to an inn in Maryland for the weekend. At dinner that night, Foster cried when Lisa asked him "if he felt trapped." Three days later, he called his doctor, who gave him a prescription for the antidepressant Desyrel.
The following night, July 20, he was found dead.
Hillary burst into tears when she was told. But her behaviour, as well as that of staff and associates, in the days following Foster's death was to haunt the administration for years, raising questions about what the Clintons had to hide - about Whitewater, "Travelgate," the failed Arkansas bank and more besides.
The night after the tragedy, White House staff - including Hillary's Chief of Staff - searched Foster's office for a suicide note. Under the noses of the police and FBI, they took away a number of sensitive files.
Later, it was alleged but never proved that the Clintons had combed through these files during the five days before they were handed over.
Other key papers - records for Hillary's legal work on the failed Arkansas bank - appear to have gone missing, too. Although later the subject of a subpoena, the records were not retrieved for more than two years.
Whatever the truth behind all the activity that followed Foster's death, the appearance of concealment was enough to trigger five separate federal inquiries.
There were also three official investigations into Foster's death, all of which concluded that he had committed suicide.
After Foster's funeral in Arkansas, Hillary had difficulty getting out of bed for several days. Her friend's death had "ripped a hole" through her, according to Ann McCoy, a friend from Arkansas.
On the day she returned to her office, a torn-up note on yellow paper was found at the bottom of Foster's briefcase. It was a list of grievances and concerns about life in the White House that he had jotted down in the days before his death.
Nussbaum went to Hillary's office to tell her he'd "found something Vince wrote that may help explain why he did what he did."
Hillary "looked startled," Nussbaum recalled. She glanced at the note, said "I can't deal with this," and abruptly left the room.
The contents of Foster's note were tantalising. At one point, the man who knew so many of the First Couple's secrets had written: "The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff."
It was a comment that can be interpreted to mean that he believed the Clintons were blameless - or that he was worried about some unspecified information that could destroy Bill and Hillary's reputation.
At the very least, the note revealed just how hard working for Hillary had become.
"I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington," Foster had written. "Here, ruining people is considered sport."
• Extracted from For Love Of Politics: The Clintons In The White House by Sally Bedell Smith,

 

[akphidelt]

I can definitely picture this in Russ' backyard, haha.

 

[russ1945]

January 26, 2013
Proof Hillary isn't fit to be president

By Larry Klayman

No one understands better than yours truly – except perhaps Vince Foster and scores of others (including material witnesses) who mysteriously died in and around the Clinton administration during the 1990s – the treachery of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Indeed, I fought her and her husband tooth and nail during these years and am the only lawyer ever to have obtained a court ruling that a sitting president committed a crime – a finding made by now Chief Judge Royce Lamberth in the famous Filegate case, which involved Bill and Hillary Clinton illegally obtaining FBI files on perceived adversaries to intimidate witnesses and blunt the 40-plus scandals that the Clintons found themselves engulfed in during those years.

My efforts to hold the Clintons to the rule of law infuriated them so much that President Clinton, at one point during his impeachment, lost his composure and control. After I also challenged the Clintons' illegal mortgage and purchase of a home in Chappaqua, N.Y., they attacked me personally at a White House press conference. (See the video on the homepage of Freedomwatchusa.org.) Many wondered at the time how I was able to survive the Clintons' wrath.

It became well-known during the Clinton years that while the president was a "certified" sleaze ball, the most evil partner of this Bonnie-and-Clyde duo was Hillary. She came to be seen as the "consigliore" of the couple, the one who had executed (pun intended) their dastardly plans and deeds. In this regard, although the moribund Republican establishment is conveniently willing to forget and forgive (since, after all, the Clintons are part of their elitist club in Washington, D.C.) – Republicans having failed miserably to convict Bill Clinton for high crimes and misdemeanors during the impeachment proceedings during the late 1990s – it's important to remind the nation and the world about who Hillary really is, particularly since she obviously is leaving her post in the Obama administration as secretary of state to likely prepare for a run at the presidency in 2016.

Here is just a partial list of "Her Evilness'" crimes that came to light during the Clinton administration years:

1) Whitewater scandal – This was the fraudulent land scheme, masterminded by Hillary and key witness Jim McDougal (who also mysteriously died in prison), while Hillary was a partner of the Rose Law Firm – also the firm of Vince Foster and Webster Hubbell, who later moved to D.C. with the Clintons to infest the White House Counsel's office with their "legal expertise." Hubbell was later indicted, tried and convicted for tax fraud. Foster turned up dead in Fort Marcy Park, as he was a material witness for then independent counsel Ken Starr's Whitewater criminal investigation.

2) Travelgate – To feather the nest of her friends, Harry and Susan Thomases, both Hollywood "beautiful people," Hillary had the head of the White House Travel Office, Billy Dale, fired on trumped-up claims of tax irregularities and then put the Thomases in charge to personally reap the profits of this government travel business. Dale, who was my client, was ultimately cleared, but not after his life was virtually ruined.

3) Filegate – This patented Hillary scandal was first detected by the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which had been investigating the Clintons' Travelgate caper. What was learned is that more than 900 FBI files had been ordered up by a former bar bouncer, Craig Livingstone, whom Hillary had hired to work in the White House Counsel's Office, on the first lady's orders and without proper legal justification. I later filed a class-action suit against the Clintons and other accomplices. The case went on for almost a decade and resulted in the uncovering of yet another Clinton scandal, E-mailgate – where the Clintons had covered up and suppressed more than a million potentially incriminating emails that should have been produced to me, Ken Starr and Congress over a variety of the duo's crimes. It was also during this Filegate case that it was learned that President Clinton, on the advice of his top political adviser, James Carville, had illegally released Privacy Act protected information from White House files to smear Kathleen Willey, a woman who was a material witness in the impeachment proceedings, as she was also sexually harassed by the "philanderer in chief" while working for him in the White House. This was the basis of Judge Lamberth's ruling that President Clinton had committed a crime.

4) Chinagate – Not to be outdone by her prior scandals, Hillary then masterminded a scheme whereby the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign of 1996 took bribes from communist Chinese banks and their government to bankroll the president's and the Democratic Party's re-election efforts when it appeared, due to their low standing in the polls, that all the stops needed to be pulled out. It was the lawsuit that I brought against Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, where at Hillary's instruction, he literally sold seats on Department trade missions to China and elsewhere, which principally uncovered this. In late 1996 and early 1997, the scandal had burgeoned to such a level that joint congressional hearings were empaneled, ultimately to be shut down when Democrats uncovered illegal fundraising by some Republicans. The two parties, faced with mutual assured destruction, simply took an exit stage left. However, I soldiered on with my lawsuit. And, while I uncovered a lot about Bonnie and Clyde and their Chinese "friends," this scandal ultimately took back seat to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, since the media preferred sex to foreign espionage and graft. Hillary and Bill were ironically saved by Monica, who became the lightening rod drawing attention away to what at the time was perhaps the biggest scandal – Chinagate – in American history.

This week, during the congressional hearings concerning the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finally testified about her role in the breakdown of security at the consulate, which resulted in the deaths of our ambassador and three others. At several points during even the mild questioning about why she had not as secretary of state taken steps to beef up security despite warnings before the terrorist attack, Hillary lost control and bore her vicious fangs.



To me, and I hope the nation and the world, this shows again why she is not fit to be president. If she has a place to fill, the more fitting venue would be a prison cell, lest we not remember who she really is.

 

[russ1945]

akphidelt
RX Local

[h=2]This message is hidden because akphidelt is on your ignore list.[/h]

 

[vitterd]

Hahahahaha. Not again. The same old fool doing the same shit.

Let me me clue you in Russ.....when you only use right wing fringe websites for your info.....the dots are only gonna connect one way.

You are such a sheep.

 

[russ1945]

So just for starters we have Travelgate, White Watergate, Vince Foster "Suicidegate", Filegate, Chinagate, Beghazigate, Clinton Foundationgate, and the Emailgate to deal with. That is a lot to deal with much less to ignore as die hard lib's do. Time after time Hillary has scratched the chalkboard and denied it. If the Dem's can come up with someone else power to them and if whoever that is wins the election power to them. But Hillary is not fit for the job and her past cannot be ignored. Unlike Obama whose past was pretty obscure Hillary's is there for all to see. How many "gates" does it take to open the door to the reality of what Hillary is and for that matter what she is not. Unless of course you agree with her philosophy of "What difference does it make." In this case it makes a big difference.

 

[vitterd]

Attack.....this thread is soooooo Alinsky

 

[akphidelt]

Attack.....this thread is soooooo Alinsky

Hahahaha!! Poor Russ. Him and Dave would have been cool to know in the 1800s.

 

[russ1945]

vitterd
RX Local

[h=2]This message is hidden because vitterd is on your ignore list.[/h]

 

[ScottL]

Hahahaha!! Poor Russ. Him and Dave would have been cool to know in the 1800s.

All the dots might not connect. I'm sure many allegations leveled at Hillary are BS. Yet still she is as scandal-ridden and dirty as your mouth is full of jizz, Cocksucker.

 

[russ1945]

All three inquiries into the Whitewater land deal yielded insufficient evidence to charge the Clintons with criminal conduct. However, several of their associates were convicted as a result the investigations.

This is a pattern with the Clintons - everyone is guilty but them.

 

[akphidelt]

All the dots might not connect. I'm sure many allegations leveled at Hillary are BS. Yet still she is as scandal-ridden and dirty as your mouth is full of jizz, Cocksucker.

I'm not a huge Hillary fan. I wish we had other options. But regardless, Russ' dot connecting is hilarious. But as a conspiracy theorist, I can see why you'd consider Russ legit! Haha

 

[ScottL]

I'm not a huge Hillary fan. I wish we had other options. But regardless, Russ' dot connecting is hilarious. But as a conspiracy theorist, I can see why you'd consider Russ legit! Haha

ONE conspiracy, Cocksucker. Meanwhile how much money have you lost betting on the crooked Warriors and Hawks while you try poking fun at me? Haha

 

[akphidelt]

ONE conspiracy, Cocksucker. Meanwhile how much money have you lost betting on the crooked Warriors and Hawks while you try poking fun at me? Haha

Lmao!! You're a funny dude. Warriors and Hawks are crooked now. Probably missed a free throw or something, lmao!!

 

[vitterd]

All the dots might not connect. I'm sure many allegations leveled at Hillary are BS. Yet still she is as scandal-ridden and dirty as your mouth is full of jizz, Cocksucker.

You gotta find this old coot Russ amusingly stupid though.

Think how mental someone has to be to post that he has me on ignore while he's been responding to all my posts. Think how funny it is that he ask for responses on his threads from liberals but then claims to have the only liberals here on ignore.

Even though don't say it....I know this makes you shake your head and chuckle.

 

[MantisToboggan]

ONE conspiracy, Cocksucker. Meanwhile how much money have you lost betting on the crooked Warriors and Hawks while you try poking fun at me? Haha

Honest question, don't mean this in a rude or sarcastic way at all, you think they fix playoff games?

 

[russ1945]

OPINION
[h=1]Return of the Clinton Scandals[/h]By RICH LOWRY
March 04, 2015


The grim forced march to a Hillary Clinton coronation just got a little grimmer. The Hillary email scandal — on top of the revelation of continuing foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state — is a nice reminder for Democrats about what they are signing up for.
The Clinton Restoration will require routinely defending the indefensible. It will require recalibrating all legal and ethical standards to suit the personal and financial interests of the Clintons. It will require a willingness to use these phrases with a shameless abandon: “old news,” “everybody does it” and “not technically illegal.”
Usually the advantage of having been around national politics forever is that there are no surprises lurking in the background. But what should be the most vetted couple in the world always needs just a little more vetting.

The Clintons come from the Frank Underwood school of politics. What unites Bill’s roguish charm and Hillary’s relentless determination is an eye for the main chance, with adherence to the rules optional.
Hillary Clinton’s self-serving email arrangement is not the worst example, but it is textbook. Pretty much anyone in government knew that if you used your private account for official business, you had to copy your government account for record-keeping purposes. But Hillary didn’t even have a government account.
For this to have been an innocent oversight, we’d have to believe that Hillary — intimately familiar with the workings of government since at least 1979 when Bill became governor of Arkansas, and with the federal government since at least 1993 — didn’t know how government email worked.
And that she happened to set up her own private email account with a server in her own house, registered under a pseudonym, in a fit of technological absentmindedness.
As The Associated Press notes, homemade servers are inferior to professional facilities that “provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.”
All of these were mere details compared to the one overwhelming advantage of her own server that clearly trumped every other consideration: “impressive control over limiting access to her message archives,” in the words of the AP.
Impressive, indeed. The New York Times relates all the information requests that have been stymied. Congressional investigators seeking documents related to Benghazi in 2012 didn’t get emails from her account until last month. A reporter from Gawker couldn’t get correspondence between Clinton and former White House aide Sidney Blumenthal.
Requests from The Associated Press have gone unanswered. Same with those of the conservative groups Citizens United and America Rising.
The surest way in Washington to have a Freedom of Information Act request go unanswered was to make one of the self-described most transparent person in American public life.
Recently, Clinton turned over to the State Department 55,000 pages of emails, but it is her flunkies who decided what the department did or did not get. This is transparency Clinton-style.
The defense from Clinton world has been that everyone conducts official business on private email, so what’s the big deal? But her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, and her successor, John Kerry, both managed to use government accounts. Colin Powell used a personal account — which was wrong, too, although it was prior to National Archives Regulations in 2009 clarifying rules for preservation of private emails when used for official business.
Hillary Clinton clearly trampled all over those rules. The legal debate is now whether she merely violated the spirit of the law or actually broke it, the perpetual question with the Clintons that goes back decades.
The couple has always been blessed with dutiful retainers, and whatever these loyal minions lack in persuasiveness, they make up in absurdly technical legal distinctions and bulldog obtuseness. All Democrats should get ready to embrace their inner David Brock, the Clinton vassal who has been out front in the email flap.
He is the “Better Call Saul” of Clinton scandal defense, although without the sleazy charm of Saul Goodman, née James McGill. On “Morning Joe” — to the obvious shock and befuddlement of everyone else on the program — Brock called on The New York Times to correct its story breaking the news of the private email account, though without pointing to what any reasonable person would consider an error.
The Times story was judicious, saying only that Clinton “may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.” Brock countered by repeating a talking point about how Clinton hadn’t been implicated by any “independent legal authority,” which must be the updated version of Al Gore’s “no controlling legal authority” line from the fundraising scandal of the 1990s.
If Democrats have liked what they’ve seen from Hillary the past couple of weeks, they should relish the prospect of the next two years, when any revelation can put them back in old-school Clinton scandal-defense mode at any moment. But this is the future they are choosing, apparently without even bothering to consider an alternative with less baggage or higher standards.

 

[russ1945]

• OPINION
• COLUMNISTS
• GLOBAL VIEW

[h=1]Hillary and the Liberal Way of Lying[/h][h=2]How the Clintons pioneered the methods by which Obama sold his Iran deal.[/h]

ENLARGE
A video-grab of Hillary Clinton announcing her run for president. PHOTO: HO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES





By BRET STEPHENS

April 13, 2015 7:33 p.m. ET1840 COMMENTS

Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.
What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?
It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper—lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?
It doesn’t matter. Now Mrs. Clinton is running for president, and only a simpleton would fail to appreciate that the higher mendacity is a recommendation for the highest office. In the right hands, the thinking goes, lying can be a positive good—as political moisturizer and diplomatic lubricant.
[h=4]***[/h]What the Clintons pioneered—the brazen lie, coyly delivered and knowingly accepted—has become something more than the M.O. of one power couple. It has become the liberal way of lying.
Consider this column’s favorite subject: the Iran deal. An honest president might sell the current deal roughly as follows.
“My fellow Americans, the deal we have negotiated will not, I am afraid, prevent Iran from getting a bomb, should its leaders decide to build one. And eventually they will. Fatwa or no fatwa, everything we know about their nuclear program tells us it is geared toward building a bomb. And frankly, if you lived in a neighborhood like theirs—70 million Shiites surrounded by hundreds of millions of Sunnis—you’d want a bomb, too.
“Yes, we could, in theory, stop Iran from getting the bomb. Sanctions won’t do it. Extreme privation didn’t stop Maoist China or Bhutto’s Pakistan or Kim’s North Korea from building a bomb. It won’t stop Iran, either.
“Airstrikes? They would set Iran back by a few years. But even in a best-case scenario, the Iranians would be back at it before long, and they’d keep trying until they got a bomb or we got regime change.
“Fellow Americans, how many of you want to raise your hands for more Mideast regime change?
“So here’s the deal with my deal: It never was about cutting off Iran’s pathways to a bomb. Let’s just say that was an aspiration. It’s about managing, and maybe slowing, the process by which they get one.
“I know that’s not what you thought I’ve been saying these past few years—all that stuff about all options being on the table and me not bluffing and no deal being better than a bad deal. I said this for political expedience, or as a way of palliating restive Saudis and Israelis. You feed the dogs their bone.
“But if you’d been listening attentively, you would have heard the qualifier ‘on my watch’ added to my promises that Iran would not get the bomb. And what happens after I leave office? Hopefully, the Supreme Leader will be replaced by a new leader cut from better cloth. Hopefully, too, this marathon diplomacy will open new patterns of U.S.-Iranian cooperation. But if neither thing happens we’d be no worse off than we are today.
“That’s why getting a deal, any deal, is more important than the deal’s particulars when it comes to sanctions relief, inspections protocols and so on. The details only matter insofar as they make the political medicine go down. What counts is that we’re sitting at the table together, speaking.”
[h=4]***[/h]A speech along these lines would have the virtues of intellectual integrity and political honesty. It would improve the quality, and perhaps the tenor, of our foreign-policy discussions. The argument might well lose—the U.S. tool kit of coercion is not so bare, the benefit of diplomacy isn’t so great, the threat of a nuclear Iran isn’t so manageable and Americans aren’t that eager to roll over for the ayatollah. But at least we would have a worthwhile debate.
Question for Mrs. Clinton: Does she think the U.S. should gently midwife Iran’s nuclear birth or violently abort it? If she wants to be president, our former top diplomat could honor us with a detailed answer.
In the meantime, let’s simply note what the liberal way of lying has achieved. We are on the cusp of reaching the most consequential foreign-policy decision of our generation. We have a deal whose basic terms neither side can agree on. We have a president whose goals aren’t what he said they were, and whose motives he has kept veiled from the public.
Maybe the ayatollah will give him his deal, and those with the secret knowledge will cheer. As for the rest of us: Haven’t we learned that we’re too stupid to know what’s for our own good?

 

[The Guesser]

Wonder if Russ will take the time to connect the dots on Perter Schweizer, Robert Mercer, Ted Cruz, and Sarah Palin? I suspect he'll take as much time doing that as he has in connecting dots on the Koch Brothers. The selective dot connecting never stops with him.
The fool doesn't realize that whenever someone of his ilk mentions Vince Foster, Whitewater, etc, that's another undecided vote going Hillary's way because of the crazies. He doesn't get it and he never will.