Donald Trump is Right, It is Time to Talk about Hillary Clinton

If only by the sheer weight of probability Donald Trump was eventually going to achieve some tangible good. Until now most sensible political observers have managed to be thankful for his presence – though be it grudgingly – only as a means to broaden the debate. This should end immediately. Trump’s indiscriminate trashing of political correctness and the boundaries of common decency has finally hit upon a very worthy cause – the moral character of Hillary Clinton.

A sense of tragedy has defined the almost seven years since Hillary Clinton last lost the Democratic nomination. Hanging-on throughout the Democratic Convention, long past the point of prudence, it was obvious that the allure of power was not something that she could easily cleanse from her system. Indeed she barely flinched as her defeat blended seamlessly into a second, and agonizingly long, campaign for President.

Throughout this period Clinton has achieve something remarkable: Above and beyond the weakness in the field around her, she has managed to maintain a genuine excitement, and public support for her candidacy, so much so that she is now cantering towards an almost uncontested primary victory – all this from someone who has consistently shown herself to be one of the most unpleasant characters in U.S. political history.

This is where a Donald Trump-like character is important. There are certain invisible lines that political debate tends not to cross. A candidate’s family, and more broadly their private life, are often treated as protected species by the media (due to fears of having their access to the campaign restricted and the possibility of a public backlash) and by other candidates (hoping to avoid having their own private affairs dredged out in a similar fashion). Patently, Trump has no such inhibitions.

In the case of Hillary Clinton this has taken-on a whole new dimension. The name Monica Lewinsky says it all. The sexual exploits of her Husband and former President, Bill Clinton, have been played out so publically and for so long that it is hard not to have some sympathy with Hillary. The periodic re-birthing of this issue never fails to leave a sour taste in the mouth (pardon the pun), and worse, the unmistakable feeling of comic laziness.

Yet despite this inescapable impression of low-hanging-fruit, the Clintons have always and deliberately blurred the lines between their professional and their private lives. This is such an unavoidable and pervasive aspect of the Clinton’s lives that to ask that people refrain from making judgments on Hillary’s private character is to, in effect, demand that they make absolutely no judgement at all on her potential Presidency.

So perhaps it is best to begin where Donald Trump led-off – with the issue of Bill Clinton’s other women. Trump stumbled onto this issue whilst trying to defend himself from Hillary Clinton’s accusation (conceivably accurate) of sexism. It should come as no surprise that Trump missed the ball on this one; sexism is just not the issue when it comes to Bill Clinton – it is harassment, intimidation, slander, assault and rape. Yes, that’s right, rape!

The Monica Lewinsky affair does not need much explaining. Bill Clinton having denied the affair, later retracted his claim after biological evidence was presented, and subsequently was to become the first sitting President since Andrew Johnson in 1868 to be impeached. Hillary’s response was to label Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” and a “stalker”.

It is perhaps forgivable for a spouse to behave in this way when faced with such allegations. However, this was far from a unique situation. Echoing the Lewinsky affair, Gennifer Flowers claimed to have slept with Bill Clinton only to be publically dismissed as a liar and a profiteer. Flowers – no doubt feeling slighted by this response – held a press conference in which she produced phone recordings that she had secretly compiled over the years, ostensibly proving her claim. Bill Clinton would later admit to the sexual relationship whilst being questioned under oath. Hillary’s reaction to this affair was to call Flowers “trailer trash”.

There is a pattern emerging here: Bill Clinton’s ‘best friend’ Dick Morris whilst on CNBC, claimed that “in the 1992 Clinton campaign, there was an entire operation funded with over $100,000 of campaign money, which included federal matching funds, to hire private detectives to go into the personal lives of women who were alleged to have had sex with Bill Clinton – to develop compromising material – blackmailing information, basically – to coerce them into signing affidavits saying they did not have sex with Bill Clinton”.

And it only gets worse: as distasteful as these two cases are, at least they were consensual. After Bill Clinton propositioned and exposed himself to Paula Jones he was eventually forced to settle allegations of sexual harassment out-of-court for $850,000 – yet only after being fined $90,000 for lying under oath in a federal court. The $850,000 was paid out of Hillary’s personal “blind trust”. Money that she made through insider trading on cattle futures – a crime she dismissed as being caused by hormones due to her pregnancy.

And this brings us to Kathleen Willey, the former White House aide who claims to have been sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton. Despite the legal case eventually collapsing, Bill Clinton was ruled to have "committed a criminal violation" of the Privacy Act by releasing discrediting information about Willey to the media. Kathleen Willey’s take on Hillary Clinton was blunt: “She enabled his behaviour. It's as simple as that. She looks the other way”.

Juanita Broaddrick had a slightly more personal experience with Hillary Clinton. Upon alleging that Bill Clinton had raped her, she was visited personally by the then First Lady. Not to seek answers, not to sympathise, but rather, according to Broaddrick, to try and threaten her into silence.

And yes, her claims are plausible if only circumstantial (occasionally such evidence says a lot). Broaddrick is now one of three women all claiming to be sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton, all connected to the former President by political association, all having made separate and reliable after-the-fact statements to friends and family, all with the same tell-tale signs of violence (torn clothes and severely bitten lips), and importantly, all these incidents were reported in complete ignorance of each other’s existence, let alone each other’s complaints.

During a live press conference ABC journalist Sam Donaldson did the merciful thing and asked Bill Clinton, “can you not simply deny it, sir?” in reference to Broaddrick’s allegation. Bill refused to answer. A TV allegation of rape, from a reputable woman, against the president of the then United States and perhaps soon-to-be ‘First Man’, and he has still not yet denied it – however, all the while he is supported by Hillary.

And this is merely the single-button issue that Donald Trump is currently focussed upon as a crude form of self-defence. The moral case against Hillary Clinton goes much deeper. Far beyond her siege mentality when faced with her husband’s sexual predations, Hillary has shown herself – at all stages and in all areas of her career – to be a profoundly amoral human being.

There is a collective mood in the Republican Party that foreign policy will be a losing issue for them in the coming campaign (Marco Rubio offering their best hope to change this). That is, as a former-Secretary of State, as a uniquely hands-on former-First Lady, and through her capacity as Senator, Hillary Clinton has an unchallengeable authority on international affairs.

Yet this is the same person who – as First Lady – demanded that Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defence, Les Aspin, delay a humanitarian mission to Bosnia out of fear that it might distract from her then forthcoming health care package. She would later use the much-resented mission to openly lie about being shot at by snipers – one can only assume in order to try and build up some political credentials.

Following on with this trend of casual dishonesty, and clearly trying to endear herself to the New Zealand public during a trip to the country, she told an audience that she had been named in honour of New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary after his conquest of Everest… clearly unaware that this had occurred six years after her birth.

She stood by as her husband and President, equipped and trained the Indonesian army – in violation of a congressional ban – all the way up until they resumed their genocide in East-Timor in 1999; and while he launched three separate cruise missile strikes against targets in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan (destroying a pharmaceutical factory that was the main source of pesticides and medicines for a desperately poor country). All three attacks neatly coincided with painful moments in Bill’s struggle to avoid impeachment.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, showing a tremendously incurious attitude toward terrorism – now infamously– told a Senate hearing into the deaths of American citizens at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi: “we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk who decided they'd go kill Americans… what difference at this point does it make?”

And if this might be dismissed as a slip of the tongue, her acceptance of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation – thereby breaking an explicit promise to the Obama administration – can only be seen as a callous disregard for government processes and issues relating to conflicts of interest. We can only imagine what the Saudi Arabian and Omani governments were hoping to achieve by funnelling millions of dollars (now acknowledged) into the Clinton family’s private charity whilst she was Secretary of State.

This sings a similar tune to the Clintons previous habit for auctioning-off overnight stays in the White House to wealthy donors under Bill’s Presidency. Access to these details were first denied to the public on privacy grounds, then on national security grounds, then under freedom of information legislation, and then only after all avenues to avoid scrutiny were exhausted was the practice finally confirmed to be true.

Despite some half-hearted attempts to scape-goat these failing solely onto Bill, Hillary Clinton was, and still is, inexorably tied to her husband’s Presidency. Hillary was so intricately involved in both the operations and the policy decisions that she was often described in the media and in her own political circles as being the “Second Candidate” or “Co-President”. Thousands of archives from this period have since been made public verifying this close relationship.

In short, these eight years in American politics saw: the death of any reasonable health care reform (after the Clintons could not get the insurance companies to sign-on to the very same package that they had allowed them to write); the removal of funding for children living under the poverty-line (something not even the Republican Party had dared to propose, nor any federal government for the past 60 years); the now infamous repeal of key financial protections in the Glass-Steagall Act (setting the stage for the 2008 financial crisis); a dramatic increase in military spending (well beyond the Reagan and Bush administrations); the introduction of the disgraceful, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy (despite making an election promise to allow gay and lesbians to serve openly in the military); a ratcheting-up of the war on drugs (far beyond anything that was imagined by Nixon); a sharp increase in income distribution; and finally the enactment of the mandatory sentencing provision known as ‘three strikes’ (flooding U.S. prisons with inmates by automatically sentencing anyone convicted of a third felony to a life sentence).

Yet, standing as a singular destructive antithesis to any ideas of universal karma, Hillary, somehow, has managed to shake herself free from much of this history. It seems that the worst character flaws, the most vacuous of consciences and the most corrupt moral decision-making can all be overcome by a healthy dose of success, status, and ruthlessness.

It has become quite fashionable of late – be it from the left or from the right – to publicly denigrate Barack Obama and his Presidential record. However, for all that he is criticised for, he has one significant, yet often forgotten, political achievement –he saved the Democratic Party from Hillary Clinton. This time around – at least on the Democratic side – there is no such saving grace, she is all but guaranteed to receive her Party’s nomination.
At least now – and only thanks to the spiteful personality of Donald Trump – the conversation is slowly beginning to shift focus. The moral character of Hillary Clinton is now being openly discussed. And maybe, just maybe, America and the world can be saved from a second Clinton Presidency.

By:Jed Lea-Henry 1