We have been following the bizarre struggle of Hillary Clinton to claim that she and Bill were “dead broke” after leaving the White House. Independent reviewers like Politifact have shredded the claim and the Clintons have become the fodder for commentators and comedians over the controversy. The Clintons made over $12 million in the first year after leaving the White House and they have made over $100 million from speaking fees and different events. 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 . Yet, the Clintons have been doubling down on the claim like a bad gambler. Bill Clinton was brought out to vouch for Hillary that the statement is “factually true.” That resulted in a new round of mockery. We have discussed the controversy in terms of the interesting dynamic of American politics where exceptionally wealthy candidates struggle to identify with Americans struggling financially. The Clintons however will not accept that the pitch is simply not working. This week Hillary is again claiming to have been impoverished in a new interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel – a claim that even Germans find just as hard to swallow.
Hillary told the magazine that the couple was worried about not being able to afford college for their daughter and pay for a simple mortgage.The claim is based on legal debts that are common in Washington. It is well known in Washington 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.
However, Hillary told Der Spiegel: “Well, when we came out of the White House, we were deeply in debt because of all the legal bills that we owed because of the relentless persecution of my husband and myself, and he had to work unbelievably hard to pay off every single penny of every debt we owed. And we did.” When the magazine points out the fortune amassed by the Clintons from friends and lobbyists, Hillary responds “We are very grateful for where we are today. But if you were to go back and look at the amount of money that we owed, we couldn’t even get a mortgage on a house by ourselves. In our system he had to make double what he needed in order just to pay off the debt, and then to finance a house and continue to pay for our daughter’s education.”
The claim that they couple had “to work unbelievably hard” is not likely to sit well with many Americans holding two or three jobs to take food on the table. Being flown around in private jets and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a speech (or a million a speech for Bill Clinton) is not viewed by most people as working unbelievably hard. The common definition of hard work does not include speaking to adoring crowds and sycophantic lobbyists. I regularly give speeches around the county (for a tad less than $250,000 a pop!), but I would never claim to be working hard. My grandfather worked hard. He was a coal miner. That is hard work.
What is interesting is that the rest of the interview is quite impressive, showing Clinton’s intellect and knowledge. I remain fascinated by the desire to claim to have been a struggling couple after leaving the White House as a political necessity.
The problem is that the Clintons had accumulated so much debt because they purchased more than they could originally afford. How many homes did a couple of empty nesters need? And how big of a home did they need? What’s particularly galling is that they had lived rent free in the White House for 8 years and should have stashed away plenty of money. But liberal politicians are challenged when it comes to economics and financial matters.
The neocon war-whore will not get my vote. Not in the Democratic Party primary and not in any general election. I will never vote for a Republican, no matter which faction of the Property Party they claim to represent. You-Know-Her has more than earned my undying enmity, and I promise to put that antipathy into verse, if not music, two-and-a-half years hence, just as I did once before. Hopefully, it will have the same salutary result. So, here we go again with:
Buffaloed Girl
(Somewhat after the traditional song of a similar name)
Buffaloed girl, won’t you come out tonight?
Bask in your fright; hide in plain sight.
Buffaloed girl don’t you put up a fight;
Just dance to the right with the goons!
Buffaloed girl, don’t you burn any flags;
Marry some fags; count body bags.
Buffaloed girl, wrapped in riches not rags,
Just keep raking in those doubloons!
Buffaloed girl, send our troops to Iraq!
Then leave them there! Don’t bring them back!
Buffaloed girl, cover George Bush’s back,
And scrape up a few more platoons!
Buffaloed girl, just stay out of the fray.
Keep your mouth shut! Keep making hay!
Buffaloed girl, while the cat is away
Just keep playing mice with buffoons.
Buffaloed girl, don’t you hear the troops cry?
Wounded for wrongs; dead for a lie
Buffaloed girl, look in everyone’s eye
And then soil your own pantaloons
Buffaloed girl, under Lieberman’s wing
Saving his job, that’s the main thing
Buffaloed girl, you and Holy Joe sing
The duet of right-wing spittoons
Buffaloed girl, rail at video games
Focus group that; spout the right frames
Buffaloed girl, don’t you name any names
Just save children from their cartoons
Buffaloed girl, take a “listening” tour
If you don’t know; if you’re not sure
Buffaloed girl, voters like their fake “pure”
Like war debt that simply balloons
Buffaloed girl, when it counted you hid
Don’t try to lie. That’s what you did
Buffaloed girl, Dubya made you his kid
When you bought the crap that he croons
Buffaloed girl, your irrelevance mounts
Even in small, measured amounts
If “it” takes a village, by all your accounts
Then take “it” to Mars and its moons
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2006
randyjet wrote “he did a lot of damage to our economy with NAFTA”
Actually that was Bush the Elder. Clinton only signed it, though if I had been president, I would have refused to sign it (and maybe it would have become law anyway, I do not know).
Clinton’s claim to immortal infamy lies in:
– allowing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to merge Citicorp and Travelers Insurance into Citigroup even though that was a direct violation of Glass-Steagall. ‘Nobody on this planet represents more vividly the scam of the banking industry,’ said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, referring to Rubin. Rubin went to work for Citigroup after setting the stage for the 2008 crash.
– his repeal of Glass-Steagall via the Financial Services Modernization Act which directly led to Too Big To Fail banks.
– his Commodity Futures Modernization Act which brought back bucket shops and created Wall Street casinos which heavily sold derivatives.
Gingrich was Clinton’s partner in crime for all of the above and they both deserve to be tarred, feathered, and set afire as a result.
Larry Summers and Timmy Geithner were Rubin’s partners in crime in Clinton’s reign of terror (along with Greenspan) and Obama brought both of them into his administration.
nick, Warren is not running.
SWM, Then why aren’t you embracing this golden opportunity for Warren??
In other words:
Gullible’s Travails
Bawl and Pillory,
Partners in Pity:
Two-for-the-price-of-one
Penis and titty
Each worth a half-a-loaf;
Crocodiles crying
Tears for poor Israel,
Our soldiers dying
Our taxes fund The Wall
Stealing the water
Our foreign legion fights:
Sheep to the slaughter
What of this don’t you get?
What part of “bumpkin”?
Yahoos scare Houyhnhmnms stiff
Heads like a pumpkin
Wide-staring glassy eyes
Bullwinkle grinning
Pointing at “something there”
Sycophants spinning
Brobdingnag ain’t the place
We should be going
Lilliput neither,
With her knickers showing
Poppy’s adopted son
Nouveau corruption
Monica’s pizza man
Bimbo eruption
Reckless abandonment
Liberals cheated
Kiss up and cave-in to
Those we defeated
Piss on her palace, though,
That ought to do it
Turn out the night-light, kids,
Then just say “screw it.”
Only two families;
Name recognition:
Monarchy! Monarchy!
Spark the ignition
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2007
Looking forward to a repeat of the 2008 Democratic Party primary two-and-a-half years from now. Nothing wrong with nominating and electing a woman President in 2016. Just not You-Know-Her — or, more accurately, You-Know-Them. So let us hear it again for:
An Ersatz Commander in Knickers
Before a mirror now she stands
Saluting with her two right hands
“Commanding” like some jaded Joan of Arc
A warfare welfare mother slick
Another monkey on a stick
She gladly held the match that lit the spark
She clearly failed to look and see
The dwarf dyslexic chimpanzee
Who made baboons of her and Bubba Bill
Attacking those upon the left
Who saw through Dubya’s lack of heft
She now sounds less a leader than a shill
In thrall to medals on the chest
Not nearly brightest nor the best
She signed off on a jingoistic jaunt
No judgment did she bring to bear
Emitting only heated air
Her bad decisions have returned to haunt
And now with knickers in a bunch
She lives to rue the fateful hunch
She followed on her first blind date with war
It seemed like such a little thing:
A rapt submission to a fling
That’s left her used again like Dubya’s whore
Yet unrepentant at the ease
With which war caused her brain to freeze
Our You-Know-Her wants us to make her queen
She’s got this urge to have a go,
She’d like us all to truly know,
In spite of all that we have heard and seen
She now says she would like to fight
And not just pander to the right
She says the middle finger them she’ll give
But calculating cons and pros
She tallies up the “yea”s and “no”s
And then displays a pinky as her shiv
It simply doesn’t seem to work
This “centrist” mush served by a jerk
Who likes the times that buy men’s souls just fine
For having sold her own soul cheap
She now can utter not a peep
When voters choose someone more genuine
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2007
I agree SWM, it appears she does have the woman’s vote and even righty women like Squeeky have indicated they would vote for her, go figure. I too wish she weren’t quite such a moderate.
I love how the right wing nuts hate Kennedy, but have no problem with the Bush family dynasty. We will more than likely have Jeb Bush occupy the White House next, but that is OK by the Kennedy haters. W Bush only got to the top because of his father. I can think of nothing he ever did on his own that made him qualified for the office, and he proved that he was incompetent.
nick, Yep. Clinton has the women’s vote. Not much you can do about that. She will do well with moderate republican women that don’t support the “Hobby Lobby” decision. I, myself, would prefer that she was less moderate.
This is getting tiresome and is simply gratuitous Clinton bashing. I am not a big fan of Bill, and think he did a lot of damage to our economy with NAFTA, Bosnia, etc..I wrote a column that was published in our local newspaper blasting his stupidity in Kosovo..
Even Prof Turley has admitted the FACT that on paper they were indeed broke. Now if you wish to use future earnings as a means of resolving things in bankruptcy court, I suggest you change the laws. The same is true in divorce courts where things like future overtime earnings are excluded from determining child support payments. Think that would be fair or we need to change the laws? In fact, Skillings went to prison for using future earnings as a mark for ENRON’s balance sheet. Think that was unfair? In the airline industry, United counted its frequent flier program as a liability and used that excuse to destroy the pensions for its employees. Yet American and others used the same kind of program as an ASSET, in their bankruptcy filings and I think it was Delta sold off its program for millions of dollars. The Clintons did NOT claim that they were POOR. THAT would be an outrageous statement, not a factual one.
I quite agree that giving speeches is not hard work, but then I hope that Prof Turley will join me and others in denouncing CEOs and the rich for their lifestyles. The tax rate needs to go back to the old rate of 93% on the upper income brackets as it was under Eisenhower with an exception for authors and artists who get a big paycheck once every two to five years when they publish a book or sell a work. I suggest we discuss more substantial matters than this fluff.
SWM, Right on cue!
Isaac: Are you including the 2000+ civilians Bill killed off in Serbia to distract attention from his getting fellated (is that a word?) in the White House by a twenty-something gal? Or the hundreds of millions of dollars in damage done? Or, actions allowing the Chinese to reverse engineer our stealth technology, which cost us billions and decades to develop?
Oops! You mean there were no mass graves? Sure there were, right next to the Iraqi WOD!
I have to say that I never doubted Bush II thought he was acting in the best interests of the US. In hindsight, in Iraq he was not. But Bill & Hillary Clinton are a different story. I truly don’t think either have any fundamental beliefs beyond their own personal aggrandizement. As adult political figures, I see no evidence of any religious, philosophical, political, whatever, beliefs. They act only out of convenience to themselves, and I find that quite threatening in a politician.
Clinton also performed well in head-to-head matchups with many Republican candidates. In one-on-one matchups, voters preferred her to Christie, Paul, Huckabee, Bush and Ryan by anywhere from 7 to 9 percentage points. Clinton maintains a clear advantage among women, who gave her at least a 16-point edge in each of those matchups.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/poll-hillary-clinton-leads-democrats-rand-paul-leads-gop-quinnipiac-108645.html#ixzz36yUp7f8U
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/poll-hillary-clinton-leads-democrats-rand-paul-leads-gop-quinnipiac-108645.html “Democrats, on the other hand, still have a clear front-runner in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who received 58 percent of the vote in a potential Democratic primary. Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in a distant second with 11 percent of the vote, Vice President Joe Biden received 9 percent and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo got 4 percent. Warren has said repeatedly that she isn’t running for president, though she has received considerable support from some in the liberal wing of the party.
The Clinton’s ought to heed Von Clausewitz: “Never reinforce defeat”.
When she surrounds herself w/ sycophants who are always buying and taking your BS, this is the result. She is a control freak and DAMMIT, YOU WILL BELIEVE ME!! See, the Queen has always polled best when she was playing the victim. She has slipped 12 points in the last month. It has been a disastrous book tour. Time for Warren to jump in while the Queen is on the ropes.
Regarding Warspite, if you want to see a President that inherited all the marbles, and then proceeded to dig a hole we are still getting out of, murder hundreds of thousands of innocents, and shame America beyond belief; think back a few years to the regime of the three stooges and the little painter. On the one hand you have Bill Clinton, despite all his faults, intelligent, active, and playing a large part still in determining the present and next Presidents and on the other you have a dolt hiding out in Crawford painting portraits of all the big shots he got to meet.
You have to put things in context. Clinton was a so so president that happened along at the right time. He was better than average and the country is better off for him. He has, however, that one main ingredient that all politicians have, ego and lies like a rug to protect it. Hillary is no different. She opened her mouth when she should have avoided comparing herself to the average American. Mutt Romney did the same thing when he used his giving his son $10,000,000 to invest, ‘to get started’ as an example of responsibility cuz if the son did not succeed he would get not more, tough guy. Egos are necessary but the nature of the beast is that the representative gets distanced from the voter. Hillary Clinton is no different than any other politician in this way. Unfortunately she should have kept her mouth shut and Bill’s method of explaining things certainly does not help.
These people are the greatest threat to the American Republic since Joseph Kennedy schemed to have sequential terms for his sons. And if anyone wants to pull out John & John Quincy Adams, go ahead. Two lousy one term presidents whose standings in history are based on actions outside of the Presidency.
In fact John Adams, falsely lauded by a certain famous historian, implemented the most fascist, anti democratic action by the Executive Branch in the history of the U.S. Even surpassing interning Japanese Americans, the Exclusion Acts (although actions by Congress), post WWI Palmer raids, you name it. (at least an outrage in US History such as the Dred Scot decision had two dissents)
You know, now that I think about it, maybe the Clintons & Adams do have some similarities!
She means, of course, that she actually had to _do_ something to have money. Doing something is hard for a princess.