Dissecting a Few of Hillary Clinton’s Most Recent Lies and Evaluating What They Tell Us About Her

by Scott Creighton

I was watching CNN’s town hall meeting with the candidates from the Democrat side of the Washington Consensus last night when Hillary Clinton was asked about rising insurance premiums by a woman from Ohio (that’s where the town hall meeting took place)

The questioner informed Hillary that she used to pay $400+ a month for insurance for herself and her family through a private company prior to the passage of ObamaCare and now, she is forced to pay over $1,100 for the same coverage. She wanted to know specifically what Hillary would do to tackle the rising costs of insurance.

Hillary answered her by telling her ObamaCare has done great things for the country, but yes, they have to do something about the costs. She focused on the pharmaceutical industry saying they had to get them to keep the costs down and that would bring down the prices of everything else. This is a ridiculous assumption. If the price of pharmaceuticals decreases, all that will happen is the insurance companies will generate more profits and find new reasons to justify jacking up the price of premiums for all their mandated customers.

Then Hillary went on to promote the federal ObamaCare exchange website, telling the woman she should do more research and saying she thought she could find less expensive coverage… if she took the time to look.

Hillary Clinton’s support for the fascist, mandated insurance program called “ObamaCare” is well documented. Also well documented now, is the utter disregard she has for working class women and mothers who are struggling to cope with the rising costs (and rising profit margins) of the insurance policies.

Hillary pledged to work when she gets in office to “work” to get the co-pays and deductibles down a bit and reign in the pharmaceutical companies but she never said a word about going after the main perpetrators in this fascist fiasco, the insurance companies themselves.

Hillary thought that was a good answer. The response from the crowd was less than enthusiastic.

You shouldn’t expect Hillary to do or say anything else on this subject. She’s been serving the interests of Big Insurance for decades.

Take for example a recent lie she told about Bernie Sanders regarding her own efforts back in ’93 to pass what she has called “HillaryCare”

This particular lie, along with another she told this past weekend, illuminates the kind of human being she really is and it exposes why it is that better informed voters usually support Bernie over Hillary.

At a stump speech in St. Louis this past Saturday, Hillary Clinton had this too say about Bernie Sanders’ effort to promote healthcare reform in this country:

“And I always get a little chuckle when I hear my opponent talking about doing it [health care reform]. Well, I don’t know where he was when I was trying to get health care in ’93 and ’94, standing up the insurance companies, standing up against the drug companies.” Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton knew exactly where Bernie Sanders was… he was sitting there working with her, trying to hammer out a reform package that could be passed in the House and Senate and still do some good for the American people. And we knows she knows where he was because the pictures and the videos prove it:

She didn’t forget that. She couldn’t have because even back then, Bernie was fighting for one thing while Hillary was fighting for something else entirely.

“In February, Sanders requested a meeting with Hillary, “to bring in two Harvard Medical School physicians who have written on the Canadian system,” according to the records of the administration’s task force. Those physicians were Stephanie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, leading advocates for single-payer health care.

They got their meeting at the White House that month, and the two doctors laid out the case for single-payer to the first lady.

“She said, ‘You make a convincing case, but is there any force on the face of the earth that could counter the hundreds of millions of the dollars the insurance industry would spend fighting that?’” recalled Himmelstein.

“And I said, “How about the president of the United States actually leading the American people?’

And she said, ‘Tell me something real.’ ” 

Sanders was undeterred by this dismissal of single-payer’s political viability.

In March, he was at it again, inviting the first lady up to Vermont as the state considered overhauling its own health care policies. In June, Clinton did go up to Vermont – to address a Democratic Governors Association meeting hosted by the state’s then-Gov. Howard Dean in the quaint village of Woodstock – and she brought Sanders and Sen. Pat Leahy with her.” Politico, 2015

People forget that back in ’92, Bernie Sanders founded the progressive caucus while the Clintons were heading up the neoliberal centrist Democratic Leadership Council, a collection of right-wing fake liberals who promoted every republican economic agenda they could get their hands on.

When Bill was elected that year, he immediately put his wife in charge of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform even thought she knew nothing about the subject.

There is a note on Bernie from back then when the administration was trying to figure out how to get their fascist, insurance industry centered bill passed in congress. This is what it said about Bernie Sanders:

“As a relatively junior member without the support of major party backing, Sanders is not much of a factor legislatively. He is a cosponsor of Congressman McDermott’s single-payer bill and given his reputation for independence and his somewhat combative style may be one of the more difficult Members to get on board the Administration’s proposal.” Clinton administration note on Bernie Sanders from 1993

And if that’s not enough to show you Hillary knew EXACTLY where Bernie Sanders stood regarding health care reform back in ’93, consider this:

“By October, Sanders’ next invitation for the Clintons to come to Vermont was not in a note to the White House, but in a hostile letter to the editor in The New York Times. “You report Oct. 25 that President Clinton believes the economy has turned the corner, on the path of a steady recovery. To get a better perspective on this view I urge the President to visit Vermont, where in the last year a Digital plant has closed, St. Johnsbury Trucking has closed, Johnson Controls is planning a shutdown, I.B.M. and G.E. have slashed hundreds of well-paying jobs, and workers from several companies are negotiating give-back contracts,” wrote Sanders. “I would hope that a President as intelligent as Mr. Clinton does not repeat the absurd economic dogma of Reaganomics.” Politico, 2015

Not only was Sanders actually the father of the real progressive caucus back in those days, but he was actively trying to bring the centrist neoliberal Clinton machine to the left by pushing for single payer health care and exposing Bill Clinton for repeating the “absurd economic dogma of Reaganomics” way back when.

When you compare this to what Hillary told that woman about her concerns regarding ObamaCare, you realize these people never “CHANGE”

If you think Hillary would forget something like that, you are more naive than I could have imagined because what she said is just a flat out lie, a lie that she knows most under-educated potential voters out there will never see exposed, because, quite frankly, they don’t have time to research it or the where-with-all to visit the kinds of websites that will expose it.

So the decision to leave the lie in her speech was made by a simple cost-benefit analysis.

And speaking of Reaganomics (the neoliberal Washington Consensus that I recently wrote about regarding Ted Cruz channeling the words of Bill Clinton just recently) Hillary got busted for yet another lie the other day, that one in support of the mythology of the sainted Reagan White House.

Hillary was talking during the aired memorial for Nancy Reagan, a woman who told America to “Just Say No” to addiction, tantamount to saying “Just Say No” to mental illness. Of course, that was her “contribution” to the new War on Drugs while her husband’s CIA was bring crack cocaine into California by the ton to support the Contras (Reagan’s version of our current “freedom fighters”, the Kurds)

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about H.I.V./AIDS back in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it. And, you know, that too is something that I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this, too.’” Hillary Clinton

This horrific lie of historical revisionism was born of Hillary’s desire to pander to the billionaire class who created and support the neoliberal Washington Consensus.

When Nancy passed away, it was literally a suck-up fest from the sycophantic servants of free-market ideology both in the MSM and the world of politics as well. They couldn’t heap enough praise on the woman and her husband publicly. It was as if the great Queen Mother herself had passed away… or Maggie Thatcher.

So desperate where they all to garner attention for themselves dropping to their knees to worship at the alter of the Milton Friedman economic icons, they scrambled over one another to fabricate one lie after the next, always trying to one-up the previous talking head or corrupt neoliberal politician.

In Hillary’s case, she reached for the stars with hers. Unfortunately for her, there is such a thing as the internet.

“And not only did the Reagans refuse to speak about AIDS or push for any research (until much later), Reagan’s White House was actually laughing at this horrendous disease: here’s how Reagan Press Secretary Larry Speakes responded to questions about the AIDS epidemic in 1982—

Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases?

MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS?

Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it?

MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.)

Q: No, I don’t.

MR. SPEAKES: You didn’t answer my question.

Q: Well, I just wondered, does the President—

MR. SPEAKES: How do you know? (Laughter.)

Q: In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?

MR. SPEAKES: No, I don’t know anything about it, Lester.

Q: Does the President, does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic, Larry?

MR. SPEAKES: I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s been any—

Q: Nobody knows?

MR. SPEAKES: There has been no personal experience here, Lester.

Q: No, I mean, I thought you were keeping—

MR. SPEAKES: I checked thoroughly with Dr. Ruge this morning and he’s had no—(laughter)—no patients suffering from AIDS or whatever it is.

Clinton either has absolutely ZERO idea about the struggle for gay rights, and has been blind to LGBT America’s pain for decades, or she is flat-out lying about an administration and a person that she knows did absolutely nothing.” Daily KOS

Hillary has since apologized several times for making this “mistake”

But as you can see, her “mistakes” often follow a predictable path: service to the neoliberal, free market ideology of her former DLC and other centrist projects.

Hillary Clinton is a flat-out liar. She has to be because she’s trying to run as a progressive liberal when in fact, she’s right-wing centrist backed by Big Banking and Big Business for a reason.

Her recent lies are problematic for her because she’s already trusted less in terms of honesty than any other candidate running for the office with the one exception, Donald Trump. (Cruz is probably close)

And her lies are even more problematic when you consider what they expose about her.

Hillary Clinton will do and say anything in service of and pursuit of power. And that’s about all you need too know about her.

It’s truly unfortunate that more don’t understand this about the Clintons and Hillary specifically.

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