The Clintons: Epic Greed, Power, Criminality and Degradation

The WikiLeaks documents’ dumps – they keep on a’coming, leaving Hillary Clinton in the polling dust and behind Donald Trump in a national ABC News/Washington Post likely voter look by a percentage point. So how far will she fall?

As National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson opined: At this point, it’s anybody’s guess.

“Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling.”

The latest scandal, tying Clinton to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner – because FBI director James Comey is going to take a look at up to 650,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop belonging to his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, who’s also Hillary’s long-time right-hand woman – could prove the death knell on the Democrats’ hopes for the White House.

But are the Clintons concerned – or sorry?

As National Review writes:

“Given the latest Weiner scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

“For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.”

On top of that, they’re richer than rich.

From National Review again:

“So the Clintons finally got their millions and what such millions can ensure for their separate lifestyles. They have at last beautiful gated estates, tasteful and secluded from hoi polloi, light years away from Arkansas and the Rose Law Firm. Progressive Chelsea married a multimillionaire hedge-fund operator whose father served five years in federal prison for bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Her parents’ profiteering can allow Chelsea to announce, perhaps even sincerely, that she is not interested in money.

“Why should she be, given her own reported $15 million net worth from maternal spin-off favors? She lives in a $10 million Manhattan residence, so her parents had no motivation to get more in order to ‘provide’ for their offspring. Instead, was bringing Chelsea down to Bill and Hillary’s level as a Foundation fixer a way to leave her a post mortem primer on how to get even richer?”

It’s a puzzler, then, what motivates the Clintons to commit acts of dishonesty in order to further their own fortunes. For instance, as National Review asked, why did Clinton feel it necessary to travel “to the Moroccan autocracy on the eve of announcing her presidential candida to leverage a $12 million speaking ‘fee’ from a cut-throat Moroccan mining company?”

And this, from the same news outlet:

“Why did multimillionaire Hillary charge UCLA, in the era of thousands of indebted students, $300,000 (rather than, say, $149,999.99) for a brief, platitudinous speech? Why did multimillionaire Bill need more than $17 million for being honorary “chancellor” of the financially for-profit but tottering Laureate University (whose spin-off associate organization was a recipient of State Department largesse)? Did he think the extra millions were worth the embarrassment of being the highest-paid and least-busy college executive in U.S. history?”

The only answer is that the Clintons do what they do not for the money – they certainly have enough of that. But rather, they do what they do out of pure lust and greed.

Here’s more, from National Review:

“Apparently, the good life did not drive the Clintons so much as the quest for the supposed best life. Even though they had finally ‘made it’ among the multimillionaire set, the Clintons always saw others (no doubt, deemed by them less deserving) with far, far more — whether Jeffery Epstein, with his ability to jet wherever and with whomever he pleased, or green half-a-billionaire Al Gore, who ran even more successful cons, such as rapidly selling a worthless cable TV station to beat impending capital-gains taxes, and selling it to none other than the anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, whose carbon-generated profits come from autocratic Qatar. (The media never audited Gore’s attempt to become a cable mogul, unlike their current concerns about a potential Trump media outlet). …

“The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.”

Add in their quest for power and their uncontrolled arrogance and pride, and the stage is set for the Clintons’ lives to be consumed by base pursuits. They can’t even hold claim to political principles, as their fellow leftists Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do.

“Hillary, like Bill,” National Review reported, “has no real political beliefs — though she doesn’t hesitate to pursue a mostly opportunistic progressive political agenda.”

That’s why Clinton’s politics and platforms on the campaign trail seem to waffle in the wind. Think of her views on trade, and fracking, and Wall Street — all subject to change, depending on the crowd she’s addressing or the donor she’s courting.

From National Review, once again:

“For the Clintons, power is the narcotic of being sought out, of being surrounded by retainers, of bringing enemies to heel and enticing sycophants with benefits. Liberalism and progressivism are mere social and cultural furniture, the “correct” politics of their background that one mouths and exploits to obtain and maintain political clout — and to get really, really rich without guilt or apology.”

And don’t expect the leopards to change their spots.

National Review concludes:

“To paraphrase Demosthenes’s warning of the impending arrival of the war-scarred and half-blind Philip II, the Clintons have devoted their lives, their health, their very bodies and souls to get where they are. And their visible scars prove it. They have long ago lost any sense of shame — Bill is hourly caricatured as a sexual predator, and the best that can be said of Hillary’s character is that the bankrupt Left shrugs, “She may be a crook, but she’s our crook.” In Dorian Gray fashion, their sins are now imprinted on their faces and visible in their tremors.

“They were and are capable of any and everything. And one wonders whether, in fleeting seconds here at the end of things, they still believe that it was all worth what they have become.”