In case you haven't heard, Vanity Fair has come out with an article about post-presidency Bill that includes some less than flattering allegations. Clinton has already bashed the story in a prepared statement, calling it "a tawdry, anonymous quote-filled attack piece" that "repeats many past attacks on him, ignores much prior positive coverage, includes numerous errors, and ultimately breaks no new ground."
Author Todd Purdum (husband of former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers) writes a tedious, long-winded piece typical of the pseudo-intellectual, ultra-liberal, Vanity Fair rag, turning what should have been a four-page story into eight full pages of text. Purdum (who clearly used to be madly in love with Clinton) reaches the following conclusion early on in the piece:
To know Clinton is, sooner or later, to be exasperated by his indiscipline and disappointed by his shortcomings. But through it all, it has been easy enough to retain an enduring admiration—even affection—for a president whose sins against decorum and the dignity of his office seemed venial in contrast to the systemic indifference, incompetence, corruption, and constitutional predations of his successor’s administration. That is, easy enough until now.
The rest of the story explores the things Purdum learned that made him figure out that Clinton is a scumbag, albeit a lovable scumbag. Yes, it takes a Vanity Fair writer 16 years covering Clinton to finally discover what every person with eyes to see and ears to hear already knew.
Allow me to break down the known facts, allegations and suggestions in the article:
-- Clinton hangs around with a shady crowd including Ron Burkle, a California billionaire and bachelor whose "means of transport is the custom-converted Boeing 757 that Clinton
calls “Ron Air” and that Burkle’s own circle of young aides privately
refer to as “Air Fuck One.”
But among the not-so-small cadre of Clinton friends and former aides, concern about the company the boss keeps is persistent, palpable, and pained. No former president of the United States has ever traveled with such a fast crowd, and most 61-year-old American men of Clinton’s generation don’t, either. “I just think those guys are radioactive,” one former aide to Clinton who is still in occasional affectionate touch with him told me recently, referring to Burkle and (to a lesser extent) Bing. “I stay far away from them.”
-- Clinton receives a great deal of his income from some of these friends:
But Clinton’s business relationship with Burkle is far and away his largest source of income after books and speeches: $15.4 million between 2003 and 2007, according to the Clintons’ recently released tax returns..
Burkle is perhaps the single best example of the self-reinforcing network of rich... supporters Clinton has built since his White House years. For Clinton’s re-election campaign Burkle held regular fund-raisers...and has also raised millions of dollars for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. What has Clinton done in return? Burkle himself has said that Clinton has provided invaluable introductions and entrée to potential investors, including the Teamsters union.
Typical "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" stuff there, but he's also hanging out with sexual predators. Birds of a feather:
In 2002, Clinton flew to Africa with the New York investor Jeffrey Epstein on his private Boeing 727 on an anti-aids and economic-development mission... In 2006, Epstein was indicted on state charges of soliciting prostitution...and he later came under investigation by federal authorities amid allegations that he hired under-age girls for massages and more in a house stocked with sex toys and genitalia-shaped soaps. He remains the subject of at least four pending civil lawsuits from young women and is reportedly expected to accept a plea deal on a state charge that would give him 18 months in prison, followed by house arrest.
More disturbing is that Clinton has followed Jimmy Carter's lead on subverting American foreign policy abroad. Unlike Carter, who does these things out of genuine stupidity, Clinton at least makes a good profit selling out his country's national interests:
Even more troubling is Clinton’s relationship with the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra. This winter, a lengthy investigative report in The New York Times disclosed that, in 2005, Clinton flew to the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan on Giustra’s MD-87 jet for what was billed as a philanthropic three-country tour. The two men had dinner with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has held the country in a vise-like grip for nearly two decades. At their meeting, Clinton expressed support for Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors elections and promotes democracy. That position was sharply at odds with official American foreign policy and came in the face of stinging criticism of Kazakhstan’s record on human rights from many sources, including the junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Within two days, Giustra’s company signed preliminary agreements allowing it to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency. And months after that the Clinton Foundation received a $31.3 million donation from Giustra that remained secret until a Giustra representative acknowledged it late last year. (Giustra has separately pledged another $100 million to the foundation...)
“There’s no way in the world that President Clinton didn’t understand what was going on there, and no way in the world that he didn’t understand what his role was supposed to be in that visit: to lay the hands of the former president of the United States on the individual he was traveling with and thereby bring credibility to whatever reason that individual was there for,” says Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a Washington watchdog group that monitors money and politics. “To deny that is to, basically, take the position that you can fool all of the people all of the time.”
-- Clinton is as faithful as he was when he was in office. The author mentions the following names as probable mistresses: Eleanor Mondale (daughter of the former veep), Belinda Stronach (divorced billionaire auto-heiress), actress Gina Gershon and...
a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.
(F)our former Clinton aides told me that, about 18 months ago, one of the president’s former assistants, who still advises him on political matters, had heard so many complaints about such reports from Clinton supporters around the country that he felt compelled to try to conduct what one of these aides called an “intervention,” because, the aide believed, “Clinton was apparently seeing a lot of women on the road.” The would-be intercessor was rebuffed by people around Clinton... and another aide told me that the effort was not well received by either Bill or Hillary Clinton.
Clinton has become more angry and bitter since his bypass surgery in 2004.
“There’s an anger in him that I find surprising,” one senior aide, who has known and served both Clintons for years, told me this spring. “There seems to be an abiding anger in him, and not just the summer thunderstorms of old. He has been called into question repeatedly by top staff."
Purdum lists some quotes about his behavior during the campaign that I'll condense here:
Tom Daschle said Clinton’s behavior was “not keeping with the image of a former president.”
Robert Reich, called Clinton’s attacks on Obama “ill-tempered and ill-founded.”
Al Sharpton said that it was time for Clinton to just “shut up.”
Gennifer Flowers, who has endorsed Hillary, referred to him as an “idiot husband.”
James E. Clyburn called Clinton’s behavior “bizarre.”
There is little doubt that Clinton’s own intensity has fueled his wife’s. One senior aide told me bluntly that Bill’s anger “has not served her well. That side of him feeds the worst side of Hillary. He does stoke her up.”
The author concludes: "In the end, this is Clinton’s most grievous sin, his steady refusal to take grown-up responsibility for the consequences of his own actions."
Yeah, that and the selling out of American foreign policy interests for $31-$131 million. Too bad it always takes libs so long to see the first hint of what any rational person always knew.
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