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| Rat got your tongue? |
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| ...Cornered! (via Orkin) |
Peggy Noonan Tells the Tail:
"On May 19, 1993, less than four months into the administration, the seven men who had long worked in the White House travel office were suddenly and brutally fired. The seven nonpartisan government workers, who helped arrange presidential trips, served at the pleasure of the president. But each new president had kept them on because they were good at their jobs.
A veteran civil servant named Billy Dale had worked in the office 30 years and headed it the last 10. He and his colleagues were ordered to clear out their desks and were escorted from the White House, which quickly announced they were the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.
They were in shock. So were members of the press, who knew Mr. Dale and his colleagues as honest and professional. A firestorm ensued.
Under criticism the White House changed its story. They said that they were just trying to cut unneeded staff and save money. Then they said they were trying to impose a competitive bidding process. They tried a new explanation—the travel office shake-up was connected to Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review. (Almost immediately Mr. Gore said that was not true.) The White House then said it was connected to a campaign pledge to cut the White House staff by 25%. Finally they claimed the workers hadn’t been fired at all but placed on indefinite “administrative leave.”
Why so many stories? Because the real one wasn’t pretty.
It emerged in contemporaneous notes of a high White House staffer that the travel-office workers were removed because Mrs. Clinton wanted to give their jobs—their “slots,” as she put it, according to the notes of director of administration David Watkins—to political operatives who’d worked for Mr. Clinton’s campaign. And she wanted to give the travel office business itself to loyalists. There was a travel company based in Arkansas with long ties to the Clintons. There was a charter travel company founded by Harry Thomason, a longtime friend and fundraiser, which had provided services in the 1992 campaign. If the travel office were privatized and put to bid, he could get the business.
On top of that, a staffer named Catherine Cornelius, said to be the new president’s cousin, also wanted to run the travel office. In his book “Blood Sport,” the reporter James B. Stewart described her as “dazzled by her proximity to power, full of a sense of her own importance.” Soon rumors from her office, and others, were floating through the White House: The travel office staff were disloyal crooks.
The White House pressed the FBI to investigate, FBI agents balked—on what evidence?—but ultimately there was an investigation, and an audit.
All along Mrs. Clinton publicly insisted she had no knowledge of the firings. Then it became barely any knowledge, then barely any involvement. When the story blew up she said under oath that she had “no role in the decision to terminate the employees.” She did not “direct that any action be taken by anyone.” In a deposition she denied having had a role in the firings, and said she was unable to remember conversations with various staffers with any specificity.
A General Accounting Office report found she did play a role. But three years later a memo written by David Watkins to the White House chief of staff, recounting the history of the firings, suddenly surfaced. (“Suddenly surfaced” is a phrase one reads a lot in Clinton scandal stories.) It showed Mrs. Clinton herself directed them. “There would be hell to pay,” he wrote, if staffers did not conform “to the first lady’s wishes.”
Billy Dale was indicted on charges including embezzlement. The trial lasted almost two weeks. Mr. Dale, it emerged, could have kept better books. The jury acquitted him in less than two hours. In the end he retired, as did his assistant. The five others were given new government jobs.
So—that was the Clintons’ first big Washington scandal. It showed what has now become the Clinton Scandal Ritual: lie, deny, revise, claim not to remember specifics, stall for time. When it passes, call the story “old news” full of questions that have already been answered. “As I’ve repeatedly said...”
More scandals would follow. They all showed poor judgment on the part of the president, and usually Mrs. Clinton. They all included a startling willingness—and ability—to dissemble.
People watched and got a poor impression.".......
I watched--and got the urge to vomit.
"Dissemble" is the word polite people like Ms. Noonan use for "bald-faced liar". Me, I just use the word "Clinton".
In those days, I thought I was a moderate Southern Democrat. I voted for Jimmeh Cotta in '76. And in '92, I voted for the Bill and Hill Package Deal and AlGore, before he went Full-Dirt Worship--never go full dirt-worship.
By 1994, I was a Billy Dale Republican. With some help from Mr. Buckley.
It was Hillary's completely gratuitous persecution of Mr. Dale that catalyzed my thinking.
Imagine if you can Mr. Dale's predicament. You are completely innocent. Yet your mere existence makes the First Lady of the United States look bad. So she commands the FBI to trump up charges against you with an aim to burying you under a federal prison.
The worst part: she could have simply fired you in the beginning as was her right, but her twisted bungling to avoid responsibility kept escalating the situation. Having served your country and the public honorably since Jack Kennedy was in office, you now sit wondering if you should take a plea deal or fight for your freedom against the full might of a rigged Federal Government arrayed against you--and spearheaded by the president's own wife, Crooked Hillary Clinton.
I had never seen anything so arrogant and imperious, so Empress-like in my life.
It was pure Third World-ish Dragon Lady-tyranny, and it gave me a visceral distaste for bullies and dictators that has remained with me to this day.
I said to myself "If that's what a Democrat is, I'm not one." And I haven't cast a vote for so much as a Democrat dog-catcher since then. By the way, it took the jury mere moments to acquit.
Hillary Clinton is evil. Not irredeemably, but thus far remarkably and reliably so.
Noonan: "The point is it didn’t start the past few years, it started almost a quarter-century ago. You have to wonder, what are the chances it will change?"
Oh, it will change--by getting worse. It already has. The only thing you really have to wonder is if we are suicidal enough to give her the power she so desperately worships. Never go full-power worship. Or ca$h-, either.
“You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook.”
--Pres. Harry S. Truman, an honorable Democrat--remember them? Gone.
By the way, Noonan--and Mr. Trump--get one thing wrong; it didn't begin a quarter-century ago. It began over forty years ago, when honorable Democrats summarily fired Miss Rodham from the Watergate Committee in 1974 for--wait for it--hiding public documents, legal malpractice, lying when caught and naked presidential ambitions (Ted Kennedy's then)!
The Leg-Humping Press has tried to bury that story of her first foray into national politics, a lie by omission, courtesy of your MemoryHole Media.
Just look at where and what that lie has gotten us; a lifetime of lies.
From the Liar of our Lifetime.
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