So here’s Donald Trump, self-advertised lothario and erstwhile playboy of the western world, dissing Hillary Clinton as an “enabler” to husband Bill’s dalliances while she was lady in-waiting to his governorship and presidency. And here are the Clintons, the long-suffering Hillary and the master of the non-denial denial, Bill, refusing to be suckered in by declining to comment on what’s the first major opposition research bomb to be detonated. As a punctuation mark to Bill Clinton’s guilt trip, Trump later added the word “rape.” The pugnacious Trump is only beginning what the Clintons are no doubt prepared for and expect.
Trump, as well as the 16 Republican drop-outs and their research teams, have been coiled and ready to pounce on the paper trail the Clintons left from Arkansas to Washington, DC, with a late exit to Chappaqua, NY, where the disputed personal email server resides. Bernie Sanders, so far, has been reluctant to engage in the messy business that is usually left to the tabloids, an idiom Trump is thoroughly comfortable with. So even before Trump and Clinton confront each other directly as certified nominees, Trump is beginning the set-up as a parallel action to win Republican support by proving he is a worthy candidate capable of taking on and defeating Clinton. Many polls show them, at this early intersection, statistically dead even though occasionally exchanging up and down positions by fractions.
It’s important to note that with Trump the rules of politics are the rules of the marketplace. Every word or deed is approached as a deal or negotiation. Thus, he’s often heard referring to business associates or even business rivals as “killers,” as in, “he’s a killer.” By that affectionate reference he means a person is so tough he’ll cut your heart out at the negotiating table and when the deal’s done there’s not even a nickel left. That’s Trump, or at least who he has made a fortune pretending to be.
Trump is degrading Bill Clinton as the more vulnerable side of the political couple of once-and-future presidents. And he does so at the same time Hillary has said she’ll give her interloping husband busy work by putting him in charge of the economy. Bill, accepting with gee-whiz alacrity, said he’ll take the assignment to rural America, where help is needed the most, and the ticket gets him on the road and away from the White House and out of Hillary’s way. So the wonderment is, would Bill be working with Administration portfolio, or would this be a function of the Clinton Foundation. Or, would this be a front-door, back-door White House operation—Hillary’s at the front of the store receiving dignitaries and arguing human rights, and Bill’s working the back door hitting them up for contributions to the family foundation. (Bill Clinton’s record on the economy is mixed. He raised taxes, balanced the budget but repealed Glass-Steagall which deregulated the financial sector that eventually lead to the economic collapse of 2008. He also reappointed Alan Greenspan to the Federal Reserve, a champion of deregulation who pushed the sale of derivatives and swaps—policies that helped cause the housing bubble to expand and eventually burst.)
It’s happened before—in the Lincoln bedroom, in a Buddhist temple and with incidental chit-chat among the tinkling of White House coffee cups. It’s all there, on the record and part of the paper trail, all the peccadilloes and misadventures to be re-lived again by those who remember the eight years of turmoil and fresh news to new generations of American voters that Hillary Clinton must win over from Sanders. And as sure as the weather vane always points in the right direction, this is where Trump is heading—death by a thousand cuts.
Google is everybody’s rap sheet. No other administration has a more troubled history of fundraising. Begin with the Lincoln bedroom. It served as kind of a celebrity flop-house for high-roller friends of the Clintons who were willing to make sizeable campaign contributions to spend a night tumbling with history. It was reported at the time that more than 800 guests stayed overnight in the Lincoln bedroom and those sleep-overs netted $5.4 million in campaign contributions. This symbolic debasement of, perhaps, our greatest president caused quite a ruckus. It was paralleled by another mercantile undertaking, those White House “caffinations,” that were also intended to entertain and impress those with willing checkbooks.
Fundraising at a Buddhist temple is a kind of generic name for large sums of money that were raised by agents of China from foreign governments for the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign. Some money actually was raised in a Buddhist temple for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign for president. The financial activity prompted a Justice Department investigation as well as a Senate inquiry. One man Yah-Li Charlie Trie, who knew Bill Clinton from Little Rock, attempted to steer $450,000 into Clinton’s legal defense fund. John Juang was another who raised huge sums of money for the DNC, but much of the money was returned when the sources were identified.
Theirs was an era when any noun attached to the suffix “gate” connoted instant sleaze. Travelgate was the first major ethics controversy of the Clinton Administration. During the scandal, seven members of the White House travel office were fired and a travel firm with close ties to the Clintons was hired to replace them and transport White House officials from here to there.
Filegate is another of the era’s handy neologisms, whose origin is Watergate, to conjure up imagery of crisis. In the filegate dustup, hundreds of FBI background files from previous Republican administrations were turned over to Craig Livingstone, a Hillary favorite who was in charge of White House Security.
Vince Foster, as every student of the era knows, was the deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in 1993. Foster had been a Little Rock law partner of Hillary’s. Upon news of Foster’s death, files were removed from his office. Jim and Susan McDougal were among other Little Rock associates and friends of the Clinton’s who came to a bitter end. The McDougals were involved in the Whitewater development firm, a questionable land deal in the Ozarks, as partners of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both McDougals ended up in prison, Jim for fraud, and Susan for refusing to testify as to whether Bill Clinton lied.
And Pardongate involved a series of last-minute pardons as Bill Clinton was departing the White House, notably that of Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, was reported to have contributed $1 million to the Democratic National Committee and to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park. At a Congressional hearing into whether the curious symmetry of events represented a quid pro quo, Denise Rich pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
But perhaps the most memorable event of the Clinton years was Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying, or, in his lawyerly mind, shaving the question to a super-fine edge, about having a sexual encounter with a young intern in the Oval Office. Her name, memorably, was Monica Lewinsky. And the raging debate at the time was, would you believe, just what, and whose definition, constitutes sex. And Bill Clinton’s answer was a highly technical exercise in mental reservation, and by some measures accurately clinical but nonetheless untrue—“I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” The special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, often likened to Inspector Javert, in Les Miserables, for his single-minded, obsessive pursuit, concluded otherwise. Bill Clinton became the third sitting president to be impeached.
So Trump is likely just getting started and has a long available and proven public list to work from. To be fair, though, the Clintons probably have a similarly thick and tawdry a dossier on Trump. These are the days of Citizens United and Super PACs, the invisible hands that do the dirty work of character assassination and in-your-face campaigning that is often lethal and untraceable. The proxy candidates for 2016 are Trump’s tweets and Clinton’s Super PACs.
So here’s Donald Trump, self-advertised lothario and erstwhile playboy of the western world, dissing Hillary Clinton as an “enabler” to husband Bill’s dalliances while she was lady in-waiting to his governorship and presidency. And here are the Clintons, the long-suffering Hillary and the master of the non-denial denial, Bill, refusing to be suckered in by declining to comment on what’s the first major opposition research bomb to be detonated. As a punctuation mark to Bill Clinton’s guilt trip, Trump later added the word “rape.” The pugnacious Trump is only beginning what the Clintons are no doubt prepared for and expect.
Trump, as well as the 16 Republican drop-outs and their research teams, have been coiled and ready to pounce on the paper trail the Clintons left from Arkansas to Washington, DC, with a late exit to Chappaqua, NY, where the disputed personal email server resides. Bernie Sanders, so far, has been reluctant to engage in the messy business that is usually left to the tabloids, an idiom Trump is thoroughly comfortable with. So even before Trump and Clinton confront each other directly as certified nominees, Trump is beginning the set-up as a parallel action to win Republican support by proving he is a worthy candidate capable of taking on and defeating Clinton. Many polls show them, at this early intersection, statistically dead even though occasionally exchanging up and down positions by fractions.
It’s important to note that with Trump the rules of politics are the rules of the marketplace. Every word or deed is approached as a deal or negotiation. Thus, he’s often heard referring to business associates or even business rivals as “killers,” as in, “he’s a killer.” By that affectionate reference he means a person is so tough he’ll cut your heart out at the negotiating table and when the deal’s done there’s not even a nickel left. That’s Trump, or at least who he has made a fortune pretending to be.
Trump is degrading Bill Clinton as the more vulnerable side of the political couple of once-and-future presidents. And he does so at the same time Hillary has said she’ll give her interloping husband busy work by putting him in charge of the economy. Bill, accepting with gee-whiz alacrity, said he’ll take the assignment to rural America, where help is needed the most, and the ticket gets him on the road and away from the White House and out of Hillary’s way. So the wonderment is, would Bill be working with Administration portfolio, or would this be a function of the Clinton Foundation. Or, would this be a front-door, back-door White House operation—Hillary’s at the front of the store receiving dignitaries and arguing human rights, and Bill’s working the back door hitting them up for contributions to the family foundation. (Bill Clinton’s record on the economy is mixed. He raised taxes, balanced the budget but repealed Glass-Steagall which deregulated the financial sector that eventually lead to the economic collapse of 2008. He also reappointed Alan Greenspan to the Federal Reserve, a champion of deregulation who pushed the sale of derivatives and swaps—policies that helped cause the housing bubble to expand and eventually burst.)
It’s happened before—in the Lincoln bedroom, in a Buddhist temple and with incidental chit-chat among the tinkling of White House coffee cups. It’s all there, on the record and part of the paper trail, all the peccadilloes and misadventures to be re-lived again by those who remember the eight years of turmoil and fresh news to new generations of American voters that Hillary Clinton must win over from Sanders. And as sure as the weather vane always points in the right direction, this is where Trump is heading—death by a thousand cuts.
Google is everybody’s rap sheet. No other administration has a more troubled history of fundraising. Begin with the Lincoln bedroom. It served as kind of a celebrity flop-house for high-roller friends of the Clintons who were willing to make sizeable campaign contributions to spend a night tumbling with history. It was reported at the time that more than 800 guests stayed overnight in the Lincoln bedroom and those sleep-overs netted $5.4 million in campaign contributions. This symbolic debasement of, perhaps, our greatest president caused quite a ruckus. It was paralleled by another mercantile undertaking, those White House “caffinations,” that were also intended to entertain and impress those with willing checkbooks.
Fundraising at a Buddhist temple is a kind of generic name for large sums of money that were raised by agents of China from foreign governments for the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign. Some money actually was raised in a Buddhist temple for Al Gore’s 2000 campaign for president. The financial activity prompted a Justice Department investigation as well as a Senate inquiry. One man Yah-Li Charlie Trie, who knew Bill Clinton from Little Rock, attempted to steer $450,000 into Clinton’s legal defense fund. John Juang was another who raised huge sums of money for the DNC, but much of the money was returned when the sources were identified.
Theirs was an era when any noun attached to the suffix “gate” connoted instant sleaze. Travelgate was the first major ethics controversy of the Clinton Administration. During the scandal, seven members of the White House travel office were fired and a travel firm with close ties to the Clintons was hired to replace them and transport White House officials from here to there.
Filegate is another of the era’s handy neologisms, whose origin is Watergate, to conjure up imagery of crisis. In the filegate dustup, hundreds of FBI background files from previous Republican administrations were turned over to Craig Livingstone, a Hillary favorite who was in charge of White House Security.
Vince Foster, as every student of the era knows, was the deputy White House counsel who committed suicide in 1993. Foster had been a Little Rock law partner of Hillary’s. Upon news of Foster’s death, files were removed from his office. Jim and Susan McDougal were among other Little Rock associates and friends of the Clinton’s who came to a bitter end. The McDougals were involved in the Whitewater development firm, a questionable land deal in the Ozarks, as partners of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both McDougals ended up in prison, Jim for fraud, and Susan for refusing to testify as to whether Bill Clinton lied.
And Pardongate involved a series of last-minute pardons as Bill Clinton was departing the White House, notably that of Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, was reported to have contributed $1 million to the Democratic National Committee and to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park. At a Congressional hearing into whether the curious symmetry of events represented a quid pro quo, Denise Rich pleaded the Fifth Amendment.
But perhaps the most memorable event of the Clinton years was Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying, or, in his lawyerly mind, shaving the question to a super-fine edge, about having a sexual encounter with a young intern in the Oval Office. Her name, memorably, was Monica Lewinsky. And the raging debate at the time was, would you believe, just what, and whose definition, constitutes sex. And Bill Clinton’s answer was a highly technical exercise in mental reservation, and by some measures accurately clinical but nonetheless untrue—“I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” The special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, often likened to Inspector Javert, in Les Miserables, for his single-minded, obsessive pursuit, concluded otherwise. Bill Clinton became the third sitting president to be impeached.
So Trump is likely just getting started and has a long available and proven public list to work from. To be fair, though, the Clintons probably have a similarly thick and tawdry a dossier on Trump. These are the days of Citizens United and Super PACs, the invisible hands that do the dirty work of character assassination and in-your-face campaigning that is often lethal and untraceable. The proxy candidates for 2016 are Trump’s tweets and Clinton’s Super PACs.
