Bill Clinton is back on the campaign trail, stumping for Democratic Presidential candidates in Iowa.
Looks like he’s back up to a few of his other tricks too.
Commenting on the Bush tax-cut package, Clinton told a campaign crowd “I never had a nickel until I left the White House.”
Same Bill Clinton. Same pack of lies.
All you have to do is look at the last financial disclosure statement Clinton filed before leaving the White House on January 20, 2001. It shows Bubba left 1600 Pennsylvania a rich man, with a net worth somwhere between $1 million and $5 million (financial disclosures are not precise. They only require a range of values).
During his last year in office, Clinton and his wife accepted $191,027 in gifts and Hillary signed an $8 million book deal while still First Lady. Plus the 200 grand a year that Clinton made as President ain’t exactly small change, especially when he didn’t pay rent for eight years and lived on others people’s money (namely, the taxpayers).
In other words, Clinton lied – another bald-faced, “who gives a damn” lie from the man who once stood in front of the American people and claimed “I did not have sex with that woman – Ms. Lewinsky” when he was getting more nooky than a drunken frat boy on Spring Break.
Maybe he just can’t help it. Maybe a lifetime of lying has left Bill Clinton so morally bankrupt that he has lost the ability to separate truth from fiction, fantasy from reality, outright lies from even a modicum of truth.
Such prevarications run in the family. Hillary’s fantasy tome, Living History, belonged in the novels section of bookstores. Her attempt to reinvent history in real time left even the most jaded of Democrats laughing and wondering how she could keep a straight face during her many promotional tours.
But the Clintons have never had much use for truth or cared that their jobs were supposed to be about public service. Politics, to both, has always been about cashing in, about taking advantage of opportunities, about living large off the public dole.
Since leaving office, Clinton rakes in $9.5 million a year in speaking fees while living off a huge federal pension and traveling with taxpayer-funded Secret Service agents who are treated more like servants than professionals protecting an ex-President.
And even though Hillary is now a U.S. Senator who claims to be making it on her own, she insists on keeping her Secret Service detail as well. Agents from both details frequently request reassignment and complain about being treated shabbily by the Clintons.
In October 2001, Senator Clinton, angry over having to wait in line at a security check point at Westchester Airport in New York, ordered the Secret Service Agent driving her limo to drive past the officers checking cars. The car struck a police officer, injuring his shoulder.
During promotional tours for her book, Secret Service agents closed book stores before each of her appearances to conduct security sweeps and then set up screening checkpoints for customers entering the stores. Store employees complained Senator Clinton ordered them around like servants.
Bookstore managers complained the security procedures cost them business and money and many stores cancelled such appearances after word got around about the Senator’s haughty attitude.
“I’d had Pulitzer-prize winning authors here and none demanded such special treatment and deference,” complained the manager of one New York area Barnes & Noble. “I won’t have her here again.”
Perhaps what Bill Clinton should have told those campaign crowds in Iowa was that he left the White House without a nickel “of his own.”
After all, money stolen is not money earned and that stolen money was not really his or his wife’s.
They didn’t earn it or deserve it, but they took it anyway.
Which is what thieves usually do.
