Tea at Trianon: On the West Porch with Hillary

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

On the West Porch with Hillary

From the Library of Law and Liberty:

I’m far from the first reviewer of What Happened to take due note of the thoroughly inauthentic, self-pitying, and self-serving tone that pervades its every page. One blog commenter made a list of over 40 different people and entities that Clinton blames for her defeat. At the top: the Electoral College (“gave disproportionate power to less populated states,” “profoundly undemocratic”), the Russians (“we’ve got to get to the bottom of what really happened”), former FBI director James Comey (“I felt I’d been shivved”), primaries rival Bernie Sanders (“routinely portrayed me as a corrupt corporatist”), the 62,984,825 people who voted for her GOP opponent (still mostly “deplorable”—see page 413), and, of course, Satan McDevil himself (“My skin crawled” when Trump stood behind her during the second campaign debate).

There’s an entire chapter titled “Those Damn Emails.” That would be the classified ones on her hack-vulnerable home server that she’d used for State Department business while serving as President Obama’s Secretary of State, also the ones that turned up on the laptop of her top aide Huma Abedin’s sex-felonious husband just before the election (the final “shiv” from Comey), and the 30,000 that she deleted from her server in 2014 contrary to State Department orders on grounds that they were “personal.”

The email chapter provokes Clinton to list yet another villain in the perfidy of her electoral defeat: the press, with Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza’s 50 e-mail-related stories about her as the most egregious crime: “Coverage of my emails crowded out virtually everything else my campaign said or did.”

The Russians and their supposed pro-Trump election-skewing merit their own super-long chapter of 50 pages (“If all this sounds unbelievable, I know how you feel”)—even though not much substantive has turned up either before or after Clinton finished writing her book in July. Even the liberal press has mostly lost interest in the Russian connection, preferring to focus on newer alleged Trump depravities: insulting take-a-knee NFL players, calling North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man” at the United Nations, whatever.

(And speaking of shivs, Clinton pokes a teensy but catty one into Green Party rival Jill Stein, who she says “wouldn’t be worth mentioning” if Stein with her tens of thousands of votes hadn’t pulled the victory rug out from under the Democratic candidate’s feet in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.)

Not surprisingly, even some on the Left have characterized What Happened as a “soaringly, malignantly useless” waste of Clinton’s reported $20 million advance for writing it. In the words of the Huffington Post’s Sam Kriss: “Everything she writes feels metallic in the mouth.” (Read more.)

And what about Hillary's Russian connection? From Frontpage Mag:

Hillary is demanding to know the truth about Trump and Russia. The truth is that every accusation about Russian ties that Hillary and her associates have hurled at President Trump is really true of the Clintons. In ’14, Hillary Clinton made headlines by comparing Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Hitler. But if the Russian strongman really was ‘Hitler’, what did that make stooges like Hillary, Bill and Barack Obama?

Five years earlier, Hillary had been posing with a ‘Reset Button” with one of Putin’s henchmen. But Hillary was bringing a lot more to the meeting than a mislabeled button pilfered from a swimming pool. The ‘Reset’ had the same pattern as other Clinton scandal: a shadowy foreign financial pal with an agenda, the Clinton Foundation being used to launder money and a government cover-up. Officially, the ‘Reset’ was pushing Obama’s nuclear arms reduction plan and a joint effort to address Iran’s nuclear program. But the nuclear materials that truly interested Hillary Clinton weren’t in Russian missiles or in Iranian reactors, but in the ground in Kazakhstan. By the time Hillary showed off the ‘Reset Button’, the Clintons had been enjoying a long relationship with Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining mogul. Giustra had moved tens of millions into Clintonworld and Bill built up his profile in Kazakhstan. But by ’09, the Clintons had a lot more to trade on than a Senate seat and ex-presidential prestige. When Secretary of State Clinton unveiled the ‘Reset’, the unspoken truths outnumbered the spoken platitudes. Some of the unspoken truths were obvious. Hillary Clinton and Obama would break with Bush’s criticisms of human rights in Russia. From now on, they would have nothing to say about it. The man who allegedly agreed to that dirty deal was Michael McFaul who is currently bashing President Trump for being “soft” on Putin.

But the bigger unspoken truth was that Giustra’s company had been bought by Uranium One. And the Russians were sniffing around Kazakhstan. Either the Russians would get Uranium One. Or they would expose the dubious ways that Uranium One had gotten its Kazakhstan mining rights. But if Rosatom, a Russian government corporation, bought into Uranium One, it would need approval from State because such a deal would provide Russia with control over more than 20% of America’s Uranium supply.

Good thing, Uranium One and Putin had a friend in Hillary Clinton. And not just Hillary. Uranium One and Rosatom didn’t just need the State Department. They also needed the Justice Department to turn a blind eye. And they got that too from Attorney General Eric Holder. (Read more.)