Clinton Declares for Iron Throne

Written by Jed Babbin

She’s as charming as a bulldozer at full throttle. It’s hard to explain why she’s not the second coming of Richard Nixon or a female version of Vito Corleone. But here she is, again, running for the presidency, again.

We’re told her nomination is inevitable. But as former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley said, a candidate is inevitable until she’s not. She’s one of the most qualified people ever to run for president so she doesn’t need to be vetted, her pals in the media tell us.

She’s all about a “new beginning” she says, which will be kind of tough for her to pull off. She’ll have to run against Obama’s record which she played large part in creating. There was, once upon a time, a mayor of New York – Robert Wagner – who once ran against his own record on a “reform” ticket so it’s not impossible for her to do the same. She was one of the principal architects of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy, so she’ll have to run against the record she created while claiming her supposed foreign policy expertise, which we’ll get back to in a minute.

She tried running for president eight years ago and got swamped by a young political phenomenon named Obama whose principal advantage was that he had no record. Now, she’s reportedly borrowing from his campaign methods, especially in the use of social media to try to win the race. She apparently learned nothing, though, from his remark in one primary debate in which he sneered at her when she joked about her own likeability, telling her “You’re likeable enough.”

Her campaign slogan – according to The Onion – will be “I deserve this.” That, like all comedy, is funny because it’s based on an element of truth. Her sense of entitlement is palpable. She will run on her record of achievements which forces us to examine just what they are, and what they aren’t.

The biggest accomplishment she can claim is the kind of political skill that aided her husband in his twice-successful pursuit of the presidency. She and he both assured us that we’d get a two-for-one deal – two powerful, brilliant and skilled politicians – for the price of one vote. She is, campaign flacks assure us, the smartest woman in the world.

Her track record began with Bill’s campaign in which he pitched healthcare reform. And he wasted no time. In January 1993, soon after his inauguration, he appointed her the head of his new healthcare task force. It met in secret and kept the names of its members secret, in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. FACA is a government-in-the-sunshine law that requires public meetings and records. Quickly, lawsuits forced disclosures. Slowly, the bill resulting from the task force’s work died a natural death in congress.

As First Lady, she visited Israel and Palestine to begin building her foreign policy credentials. When visiting the wife of old-line Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, she listened while Mrs. Arafat – in Arabic – accused Israelis of poisoning Palestinian women and children. Upon which remark, Hillary kissed Mrs. Arafat. Her foreign policy expertise didn’t ensure that an aide was there to translate, so she was left smiling and later disavowed Mrs. Arafat’s remark.

In 1995, she visited China to argue forcefully for women’s rights in a UN conference on women. Proving her feminist ideology redundantly, her formal introduction to diplomacy had no effect whatever on Chinese government practices.

She served as the junior US Senator from New York from 2001-2009. Her most memorable accomplishment was…

Her most memorable accomplishment was in 2007, shortly after the left-wing radical group MoveOn.org ran a full page ad in the New York Times about Gen. David Petraeus, then commander of US forces in Iraq. The ad’s headline read, “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” and its text was equally outrageous.

Facing Petraeus in a senate hearing on the Iraq war shortly after the ad ran, she called him a liar, saying his report required “a willing suspension of disbelief,” a blunt accusation that Petraeus was lying to congress and the American people. She later told Obama that she only supported Bush’s Iraq troop surge for political purposes.
When Obama appointed her secretary of state, we were told again that she had so much skill and expertise in foreign policy that no vetting was required. Her confirmation hearing was a formality.

Her memoir of her term at the State Department is one of those books that some people buy but almost no one reads. (I read it to relieve you of the burden.) It an attempt to be Winston Churchill but she winds up as Woody Allen. Churchill once said that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it. Her book, as we expected, spins the record of her term as secretary of state in a way calculated to demonstrate her success. She gauges that success by comedian Woody Allen’s standard: he said that eighty percent of success is just showing up.

By that measure, her foreign policy achievements surpass those of Henry Kissinger. Her book claims she logged about one million miles in pursuit of American diplomacy. She showed up almost everywhere and talked to pretty much every world leader. But for all the people and places she went, the memoir is bereft of any evidence that anyone was persuaded by her ideas. For example, her memoir says that the only time Vladimir Putin reacted to her arguments was when she asked him about Russia’s efforts to save Siberian tigers.

Chuck Schumer, her former Senate co-conspirator has said she was the “most opaque” person you could ever meet. She is controlling, overwhelmingly ambitious and has yet to say why she should be president. She demonstrated that with her decision to keep her emails as secretary of state on her own system, making them impenetrable to reporters, government archivists and historians.

Above all, she lies often and reflexively. Questioned by a reporter about the millions of dollars she’s been paid for speeches, she claimed that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. The Clinton Foundation may have been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in contributions from foreign governments while she was secretary of state. We don’t know – and if she has her way will never know – what quid pro quo they obtained in foreign policy in exchange for the flood of money the foundation received.

Her video announcement for her campaign was mercifully short and devoid of details on why anyone would vote for her. It was reminiscent of the television interview with Teddy Kennedy back in 1979 when he was running for president. When a reporter asked him why he wanted to be president, his only response was a blank stare.

She will work with the slavish intensity of a Stakhanovite to win the presidency because she believes she’s earned the power and prestige, not because she has a good reason for people to vote for her. That’s Mrs. Senator-Secretary and – for a time, perhaps two presidential terms – we are stuck with her.

This article was originally posted at EpicTimes.com