Where There’s Smoke

The wrothful Gersh Kuntzman has more than two things to say about Hillary Clinton’s latest p.r. push:

I voted for Clinton on Nov. 8 and thought she’d be a good president.

But she lost. And she still wants us to feel bad about that. And, worse, she’s still blaming everyone else.

On Tuesday at the Women for Women conference, she reminded us again what a flawed candidate she was last year — and what a flawed person she has always been….

She … said she would discuss the mistakes she made during the campaign — then declined to mention even one. Instead, she fell back on the usual suspects: The Russians and FBI Director James Comey, who indeed meddled in the election at the last minute.

“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your President,” she said.

Boo hoo.

Sorry, Simon & Schuster may want Hillary Clinton to write the history, but I’m not about to let her re-write it. No one deserves more blame for the election debacle than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Let us count the ways:

1. She was, indeed, untrustworthy: Remember her fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony? Remember how long it took for her to tell the truth? Remember how that reminded every voter in America that Hillary Clinton’s first instinct is to lie? Just like she did when she claimed she had taken sniper fire during a First Lady trip to Bosnia. Just as she did when she said she never sent classified documents over her private email server.

Beyond that, she was too close to the Clinton Foundation, and didn’t have a good answer when the Associated Press reported that donors to the Foundation got an open channel to then-Secretary of State Clinton.

2. She ran a very poor campaign….

[W]hen she called half the country the “basket of deplorables,” it was pretty much over. As Mitt Romney learned four years earlier when he said 47% of the country was “freeloaders,” you’re not the smartest guy in the room if you make a gaffe as dumb as that.

3. She set up a private email server: It’s basic. The only reason to set up a private email server — and delete some of the emails on it — is because you want to hide something from the public. Clinton never provided a good answer to the simple question, “Why would you do that?”

4. Those Goldman-Sachs speeches. You can’t be a prostitute on Wall Street and then go to church on Main Street….

I don’t understand why a publishing firm would give Hillary Clinton millions of dollars to not even admit her mistakes. (Full disclosure: I have three far-more-interesting books that Simon and Schuster can have for a fraction of Clinton’s advance, including “Bad Seeds” (an unpublished novel), “Hitler Would Have Double-Parked” (an unpublished novel) and “Publish My Unpublished Novel” (an unpublished novel). So I don’t see why we can’t make a deal.)

She got what she deserved: She lost.

Now she needs to shut up and go home. [“Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Be Writing a Book — She Should Be Drafting a Long Apology to America,” New York Daily News, May 2, 2017]

And as he makes clear elsewhere in the piece, he hates Trump.

Kuntzman omits a great deal. He could have mentioned Madame Rodham Clinton’s

internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a firm was well known for its support of radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members)

conduct as a defense attorney in a child-rape case

mysteriously prescient ability to trade cattle futures

participation in the fraudulent Whitewater land-flipping scheme

involvement in trumped-up, politically based firing of White House travel-office employees (“Travelgate“)

involvement in the illegal procuring of background-check files on persons who had been White House employees during previous GOP administrations (“Filegate“)

enabling of Bill’s sexual predation, and attempt to deflect blame from him by concocting a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” when the real problem was the truth about Bill

appropriation of gifts that had been made to the White House, not to her personally

solicitation of gifts while running for the Senate

dereliction of duty regarding the protection of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

It is a depressing commentary on the state of politics in America that such a venal, mendacious, corrupt, destructively ambitious person could have risen as far as Hillary Rodham Clinton rose. I often give thanks to the Framers for inserting the Electoral College between the voters and the presidency.