We have been discussing the rather fascinating role of wealth in American politics rather Hillary Clinton’s repeated flubs in claiming to be “dead broke” after leaving the White House and struggling like other Americans to cover tuition and mortgage costs (here and here and here). Despite the fact that most of our leading candidates are fantastically rich, they still feel the need to show voters that they feel their pain. With the Clintons, the new pitch feel flat with even usually favorable media outlets mocking Hillary over her statements. Now Bill Clinton has tried his hand at reviving the new narrative of a working couple done good. Bill Clinton has insisted that the claim of being broke is “factually true” since they had legal debts. However, everyone in Washington knows that these debts to Democratic law firms is funny money and that these firms would have closed shop rather than pursue the Clintons for payment. The debts, as is always the case, was quickly paid off by Clinton supporters, lobbyists, and others interested in helping the powerful couple. It was debt on paper alone and both Clintons were looking at massive windfalls after leaving the White House. It comes down to the meaning of “debt” to paraphrase a certain president. In the meantime, Joe Biden has tried his hand at the “poorer than thou” pitch.
Bill Clinton insisted that Hillary is “not out of touch” when she claimed that they were “dead broke” and later told the Guardian that voters “don’t see me as part of the problem” with income inequality in the United States “because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through the dint of hard work.”
Bill Clinton returned to the claim that it is “factually true” that his family was several million dollars in debt. However, he did not claim that any of these law firms had taken any action to force payment of the debt or address the obvious intention for supporters to pay off the debt. CNN documented that Clinton earned $106 million by making speeches from the end of his presidency through January 2013. Hillary Clinton has pulled in $200,000 a speech and was criticized for receiving $500,000 in one week from Goldman Sachs .
Bill Clinton dug the hole deeper with this rather dubious comment: “Everybody now assumes that what happened in the intervening years was automatic. I’m shocked that it’s happened. I’m shocked that people still want me to come give talks. And so I’m grateful.” The “shocked, shocked” claim was even less convincing than when uttered by Claude Rains. Everybody predicted Clinton would pull in massive bucks on the speaking trail and it was widely discussed before he left the White House. Moreover, he had already started to arrange for such work given the almost immediate speaking engagements.
It is becoming a snowballing disaster for the Clintons as they struggle to portray the image of “country done good.” I am not sure why wealth is so polarizing in American politics to the extent that these super rich candidates have to engage in such desperate re-invention. I do not believe that most people hold great animosity for the super rich while they harbor anger over any special deals or tax shelters. The Clintons have been famous for their army of speechwriters and political advisers shaping every word and gesture — as did candidates like Mitt Romney. However, the rollout of this new narrative has been a disaster. When Hillary later insisted that taking a quarter of a million dollars a speech was commendable thing as opposed to “getting connected with any one group or company,” it triggered analysis on recipts of half a million dollars from companies like Goldman Sachs and revived the scandal of over how a Tysons Food executive arranged for Hillary to invest $1000 to make $100,000 in roughly ten months. While most of us are cringing at the spin, the Clintons appear to see no alternative but to plow ahead on the narrative.
The new claim that Clinton was surprised that people would pay him so much for speeches entirely undermined the credibility of his defense. It played into the view of many voters that our leaders can no longer distinction spin from the truth or at least have little respect for voters to see the difference.
What I thought was equally fascinating was how, as Hillary was struggling with the “dead broke” narrative, Joe Biden (who also wants to be the next nominee), just coincidentally revealed that he does not even have a savings account and will have to live off his government pension. That claim was reviewed by the Pulitzer prize winning organization Politifact. Earlier, the nonpartisan Politifact found Hillary’s comments to be largely false and implausible. Biden fairly only slightly better with a finding that it is “half true” which may be a high for American politicians. The group noted that “Biden also holds four checking accounts, two of which he shares with his wife. In addition, he holds six life insurance policies with Mass Mutual. The Bidens reported an adjusted gross income of $407,099 last year, including his vice presidential salary of $230,700.” He will also receive a $5 million “transition budget” for moving expenses, security, and other incidentals upon leaving office.
Biden is still more credible on this subject as one of the least wealthiest members of the Senate when he represented Delaware. However, it is a narrative that will sit poorly with many citizens regardless of the party. Ironically, conservative figures like Clarence Thomas has a real and compelling story of growing up in poverty. In the end however there is a difference between powerful Americans claiming to be sympathetic with the poor and going even further to having been one of the working stiffs. Ironically, both Clintons have an admirable commitment to the poor and a demonstrated history of working on their behalf. They have street cred on the issue. That is what is so bizarre because this continued effort to claiming to have been dead broke has only alienated voters in an area where the Clintons should rightfully be given great credit.
And the campaign season has not even officially begun . . .
Source: USA Today
Who in their right mind can defend the IRS in this? Wait a minute, mind controlled cultists, that’s who. You just can’t make this stuff up. LOL!
Nick – Did you see all of the Democrats apologizing to the IRS Commissioner for having to be before their committee? Talk about drinking the koolaid
Darren, you are an honorable man.
You are right about the trail that will be found that will lead to the resolution of
the mystery of the relocated e-mail data that will never find its way off this
planet.
It is somewhere,
as are the names of the people who relocated it.
Jill,
I am not sure why that happened to you. It is possible that the server hung for some time and it got picked up later and posted to the blog. Sorry but I don’t think we here can find out why or correct it. The only suggestion I could make, is to try refreshing your browser such as on Internet Explorer for Windows hitting the [F5] button to reload the webpage and see if the comment appears.
ERIC says
“That’s because Saddam didn’t believe – or, due to his total commitment to WMD, didn’t want to believe – the US would actually invade Iraq. Saddam gambled that when he called our bluff, we would at most bomb again, which Saddam didn’t fear after absorbing the 1998 Op Desert Fox bombing.”.
And I’d bet good money that brother Eric would say he’s very well informed, and is a political moderate. He, like Bush, provides no evidence or reasoning for his claims/propaganda/conservative talking points?
Paul C. Schulte: “He would rather be attacked by the US and its allies than Iran.”
That’s because Saddam didn’t believe – or, due to his total commitment to WMD, didn’t want to believe – the US would actually invade Iraq. Saddam gambled that when he called our bluff, we would at most bomb again, which Saddam didn’t fear after absorbing the 1998 Op Desert Fox bombing.
While I credit Clinton for laying down rock-solid law, policy, and precedent for Op Iraqi Freedom, I fault Clinton for making the case for regime change that ‘Iraq has failed its last chance’ – and then not following through. Doing so emboldened and convinced Saddam that the US would never follow through.
Clinton’s ad hoc switch from disarmament to ‘containment’ after ODF was actually no containment at all. It amounted to maintaining the practices that were already shown to have failed by ODF. Saddam had shrugged off the bombing. He had cracked the sanctions. His propaganda, working with Russia, had won international opposition to the US-led enforcement of the ceasefire.
Before 9/11, Bush was no better than Clinton. The Duelfer Report shows Bush knew the ‘containment’ was broken but kept up Clinton’s public pretense it was working while scrambling futilely to stem the growing flood of Iraq’s illicit procurement and shore up the collapsing sanctions.
By 9/11, Saddam’s victory was in reach. Hans Blix states, and the Duelfer Report confirms, that Saddam only grudgingly cooperated at all with UNMOVIC – and never unconditionally, immediately, completely, etc, as mandated – when the force build-up passed the 50,000 mark. Even then, despite the evident use-it-or-lose-it condition of our force build-up, Saddam believed it was a bluff, and at worst, his advocates on the UNSC, chiefly Russia and to a lesser extent France, would limit our response to a face-saving bombing (which Saddam could leverage for propaganda).
We invaded Iraq in 2003 because the alternative UN enforcement method to war had failed. Hoping to revitalize the UN after 9/11 to police rogue actors like Saddam and WMD proscription, Bush tried to fix UN enforcement. Russia won out, instead.
Eric: “There’s no fraud. The Clinton and Bush administrations were correct: Saddam breached Iraq’s ceasefire obligations under the UNSC resolutions.”
Funny, for someone who went to law school you sure are clueless as to what constitutes fraud in the inducement.
Hint: Saddam’s failure to comply with UNSC resolutions could not and did not thrust the country into war.
Only in that solipsistic self-referential world you’ve created for yourself, i.e. your blog, does your defense of the Bush administration work.
” both Clintons have an admirable commitment to the poor and a demonstrated history of working on their behalf.”
Professor trying his hand at writing comedy
bill – when Hillary took on the case of the rapist of the 12 year old, she had been working for Legal Aid.
Here’s an example of Republican wrongdoing:
In the MS senate race, it looked like establishment incumbent Thad Cochran was going to lose to Tea Party backed McDaniel. So he took a page out of the Democrat playbook, and he appealed to Democrats to illegally vote in a Republican primary. They distributed flyers with libel like “The Tea Party is going to prevent blacks from voting. Make sure you vote for Cochran!”
Instead of taking the position that they were both part of the same party, he used false racial rhetoric to get Democrats to break the law. All because he felt he couldn’t win in a fair fight.
Even then he won by about 6,000 votes, I believe.
For shame.
Jill:
“We need every party loyalist to have a higher goal than support of party leaders.”
Amen, sister. The only reason why fraud, pork, and misconduct is so rife in politics is because we, the people, allow it to continue.
Bob:
“There needs to be an independent prosecutor.” I agree. But that prosecutor will have a political affiliation. He cannot be a Democrat, because top Democrats have already been implicated.
As an example of conflict of interest, the person who the IRS’ internal investigation was Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney within the IRS’s Civil Rights Commission. Ms Bosserman had donated the maximum allowable amount to both President Obama and Democratic campaigns.
Hardly inspires confidence in an impartial investigation. I do not want to see the same thing happen in an IG investigation.
Paul C. Schulte,
Yep. Saddam was committed to WMD to counter Iran, Israel, us of course, and pick up his irrational pursuit of manifest destiny. Imagine Bush had kicked the can on Iraq and Saddam was in power with Obama as the chief enforcer of the Gulf War ceasefire.
To dispose of Bob,Esq’s fraud charge, you can stop at the UNMOVIC finding of “about 100 unresolved disarmament issues” since the cause of action for the 1991-2003 Iraq enforcement was whether Saddam was in compliance. But an all-time propaganda coup was spreading the falsehood that the Duelfer Report discredited the US case against Saddam when in fact it’s rife with Iraqi violations and makes clear the ‘containment’ was broken.
More Duelfer Report excerpts, just from Volume 1 (there are 3 volumes):
The WMD proscription for Iraq covered more areas than “militarily significant stocks”, of course. Under the terms of the UNSC resolutions, Iraq had an active WMD program. The Iraq Study Group found this clandestine active program, which was undetected before OIF:
The IIS, of course, handled the really notorious stuff like work with terrorists and Saddam’s in-house black ops with actions that used material amounts less than “militarily significant stocks”. For some reason, that kind of thing was a concern for us after Sept 11, 2001.
Darren,
There is a problem with this blog. Comments will not show up in the thread for some time after it shows that a comment has been made. My last comment to this effect and SMM’s on the SC thread will not show up. That has been at least 3 mins. in one case.
Darren Smith: “If that claim is true something is fundamentally broken in their security practices. Having that many users with open access to user files and diretories is a recipe for disaster and misuse.”
Sounds like the White House has something in common with fellow Top Secret entities Army Intelligence (Manning) and the NSA (Snowden).
Bob, Esq: “I’d like to add to your list a prosecution of members of the Bush administration for defrauding the country into war.”
I thought we disposed of this already. Okay, let’s try again. A fraud claim wouldn’t survive.
From legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/fraud:
“Fraud must be proved by showing that the defendant’s actions involved five separate elements: (1) a false statement of a material fact,(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.”
William S. Cohen (Secretary of Defense, 1997-2001), March 23, 2004:
“While some charge that the Bush Administration exaggerated or manipulated the available intelligence, the fact is that all responsible officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations and, I believe, most Members of Congress genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs.”
President Bush, Oct 7, 2002:
“Congress will also be sending a message to the dictator in Iraq: that his only chance — his only choice is full compliance, and the time remaining for that choice is limited.”
UNMOVIC, March 6, 2003:
“UNMOVIC evaluated and assessed this material as it has became available and, as a first step, produced an internal working document covering about 100 unresolved disarmament issues”.
Duelfer Report, Iraq Study Group, Sept 23, 2004:
“Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem. The only notable items stopped in this flow were some aluminum tubes, which became the center of debate over the existence of a nuclear enrichment effort in Iraq. Major items had no trouble getting across the border, including 380 liquid-fuel rocket engines. Indeed, Iraq was designing missile systems with the assumption that sanctioned material would be readily available.”
There’s no fraud. The Clinton and Bush administrations were correct: Saddam breached Iraq’s ceasefire obligations under the UNSC resolutions.
Eric – later intelligence has shown that Saddam was pushing the idea that he still had WMDs because he was afraid of being seen as weak to Iran and thus vulnerable to attack. He would rather be attacked by the US and its allies than Iran. (How sad is that).
Annie,
Re: your link to the White House e-mails at http://www.cnet.com/news/politicos-squabble-over-missing-white-house-e-mails/
This is another smoke screen and coverup by the government.
I am pressed for time and only have a few minutes so I have to be brief. I worked in the quality assurance section of the team that developed Exchange 5.0, 5.5 and for a time on Exchange 2000, which most likely was the base e-mail system the White House was using at the time as it wasn’t until September of 2003 when the next version was released.
Here are some comments of the article.
“White House has said it has since reduced the number of days’ worth of missing e-mails from 473 to 202 after discovering that those messages had been filed “in the wrong digital drawer” as part of a switch from the Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange e-mail system in 2002″
I find this hard to accept. Microsoft made a fundamental and core commitment to draw customers away from Lotus Notes. In fact I remember back around 1996 or 1997 when a tech review magazine ranked Lotus Notes first and Exchange Server second the Product Unit Manager (The Top manager of Exchange’s Development and release) was so outraged he took the Second Place Plaque given to Microsoft to a group wide meeting and smashed it to pieces in front of everyone; who laughted and cheered his retort of this insult.
One of the strategies that they used was to make the migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Server as robust and painless as possible. Customers usually resist change because of the worry of things going south during the migration and the new system being broken or data being lost.
Moreover, since the White House adopting Exchange over Lotus would be a great PR and sales victory for Microsoft and conversely a total disaster for the company if the migration failed and the press found out about it the company would have spared no expense to keep the White House’s system admins happy. In fact, I wouldn’t doubt they would have flown a team of developers over to Washington to fix the problem if that was required especially given if that many e-mails would have been lost and the White House asked for help.
But one can never be certain tech guys would have made a mistake in the migration. And everyone in the industry worth their salt knows that you always keep complete backupsof the previous system’s database in the event the migration gets fuxored. If it does, it can be rebuilt and nothing is lost.
“When pressed by Davis, Payton also said she felt “very comfortable” that they would be able to reconstruct any remaining lost documents from “disaster recovery backup tapes,” although she said that process would be time-consuming and could cost at least $15 million.”
It would be consuming perhaps but not more than a few weeks provided the data structures were intact and nothing was intentionally deleted, unless they had to do it manually which is very hard to believe as it could be automated no matter how different the structure is. Fifteen million dollars. That is wildly exaggerated I believe and sounds to me more like she is trying to disuade the oversight due to pumping up the cost factor to make this option unsavory.
“According to the committee, the archive system is an “ad hoc” process called “journaling,” in which a White House staffer or contractor manually copies e-mails and saves them on various White House servers. Democrats cast more than a little suspicion on that practice. They cited testimony outside the hearing from a former White House technology worker who said, at least during some points in 2005, those files and directories were available to all 3,000 employees under the umbrella of the executive office of the president.”
If that claim is true something is fundamentally broken in their security practices. Having that many users with open access to user files and diretories is a recipe for disaster and misuse. It sounds like they wanted to maintain some legacy proprietary archiving system that wouldn’t merge with Exchange Server and that necessitated them having to copy that over manually. While doing so is rather, for lack of better words, stupid I can see how some system administrators would do this.
There is a measure of possibility that some fault could lie with the system administrators getting lazy and claiming they cannot do something because the end users aren’t savvy enough to know outherwise and push back. This is an endemic problem in many areas especially with local government agencies who have a tendancy to patchwork their systems.
Another possibility is that someone could have taken advantage of cracks in the system to hide or destroy certain records with little knowledge of the system administrators, especially if the system was wide open for compromise to begin with. If that is done, it can be more difficult to reconstruct things if proper archiving and data backup would have been maintained.
Reliance on this ad-hoc system as described could have been attractive to some because they saw the ability to go in there and swipe out records before the manual copy process was instigated and those doing the copying might not be aware of it. The best way to avoid this is to use standard system tools and tightly control access by both software settings and procedures.
Again much of this is speculation on my part but the situation of the disappearance of emails from the White House as you mention is greatly dubious and I would suspect strongly something is corrupt.
It is important to recognize that this was most likely not a certain person or event that caused this system to fail so greatly. I think there were multiple contributors.
My post is missing on this thread. Retrieval help please.
Paul: “Did Jodi Arias testify on her own behalf?”
Yes. She faced questions on direct, then cross by the prosecution, then hundreds of questions from the jury under Arizona law for two rounds each.
It was without a doubt the most compelling and unique criminal trial I’d ever seen.
I avoided it. I got sucked into the OJ and Zimmerman trials, could not do another one. 🙂
Darren,
There are many here who share your suspicions.
I don’t understand why this topic doesn’t appear on J.T.’s radar.
http://www.cnet.com/news/politicos-squabble-over-missing-white-house-e-mails/
What about these emails?
As far as the missing e-mails go, someone at the IRS deleted them. There is no way that could have happened otherwise given the integrety of data protection on the most rudimentary level.
I’ll bet that only certain emails from certain individuals “disappeared” and everyone else on that server was fine.
And the the IRS officials claiming it would take many months as they had to sift through them to present them to Congress is COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY BS. Retrieving all the emails of one individual user over a given period of time takes only a few minutes and everyone in the system administration word knows this. The data retention requirements would have been in place would have been such that the user cannot completely destroy these records is beyond credibility given the regulations, especially of an agency of this size.
My take on this is that this entire mess is going to involve high ranking political officials in government and they are behind the scenes trying to obstruct or delay the process. In fact, the justice department should have been opening up a criminal investigation because at the very least it involves felony destruction of public records. But, we aren’t going to see that happen given Eric Holder’s relationship with the White House.