New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was a regular scold of the Clintons during the Year of Our Intern (1998) and actually won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The Pulitzer juries almost never gave out an award for exposing Clinton scandals, but maybe something about Monicagate pushed them over the edge.
Dowd is still causing fist-shaking at Clinton headquarters with a Sunday column that impolitely accused Hillary of “sucking the teat” of Wall Street. The Times headline was “Hillary Battles Bernie Sanders, Chick Magnet.”
Lyndon Johnson said that the two things that make politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy. With Hillary, there are three things: sex, money and the need for secrecy.
She was in on sliming her husband’s ex-girlfriends who told the truth about liaisons. She has long been driven by a fear of being “dead broke,” as she put it — and a conviction that she deserved the life and perks she would have had if she had gone into the private sector. That led her to do her suspiciously lucrative commodity trades while Bill was Arkansas attorney general and to make Wall Street speeches on the cusp of her 2016 campaign, even though she and Bill had already made more than $139 million between 2007 and 2014.
The Nixonian obsession with secrecy by the woman who was once an idealistic lawyer on the Watergate committee staff — on Whitewater, health care and her State Department emails — caused her to unnecessarily damage herself and leave Democrats perennially spooked.
While she was giving three speeches to Goldman Sachs for $675,000, her party was changing. As the economy slowly healed, Democrats were seething with anger over the big banks that never got punished for wrecking the economy and the reckless billionaires who are still living large. A tone-deaf Hillary was there sucking at the teat and that rubs people the wrong way.
That is one way to keep your name on the Enemies List! But she wasn’t done. She laid into Hillary’s cavalier answers to CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the six-figure speaking fees, something most liberal journalists bit their lower lip on:
When Anderson Cooper asked why Hillary had taken the obscene Goldman Sachs windfall, she gave a stupefyingly bad answer to a predictable question. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, throwing up her hands and shrugging. “That’s what they offered.” She was reluctant to release the texts of her “Don’t worry, I’m one of you” speeches.
As with the Chappaqua email server, Hillary is not sorry she did it. She’s only sorry people are making a fuss about it.
Typical of the Clintons, she tried to drag in others to excuse her own ethically lax behavior, noting that “every secretary of state that I know has done that.” After the Monica scandal broke, Clinton aides cited Thomas Jefferson, F.D.R. and J.F.K. to justify Bill’s Oval Office cavorting.
But the other secretaries of state were not running for office, Cooper pointed out.
“To be honest I wasn’t — I wasn’t committed to running,” Hillary said.
It’s that sort of disingenuous answer that has spurred so many Democrats to turn to the straight-shooting, Wall Street-bashing Sanders.
Dowd is only saying what many people shifting to Sanders are thinking. But the "mainstream" press won't take Hillary Clinton on directly. Instead, anchors like Lester Holt "wince" when she's called dishonest.
