As an ardent supporter of Hillary Clinton I’m forced, well okay, maybe not forced, but motivated to defend her from accusations of money laundering, shilling for Wall Street, murdering innocent women and children and pushing through deplorable trade agreements that she wasn’t even in Congress to vote for. And those are just a few of the evil things she’s accused daily of perpetrating. Strangely enough, the issue that Bernie supporters keep harping on that bothers me the most is her refusal to release the transcripts from her three paid speeches at private events for Goldman Sachs.
I think the reason for that is that it represents better than anything else, the double standard she has always been held to as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. As a first lady, she was forced to release thousands of papers during an 8 year investigation into Whitewater, a real estate deal in which she and her husband lost over $40,000. What public official is subjected to an 8 year investigation for losing money in a small time real estate deal?
Then not only did she have to release thousands of documents for the terrible tragedy in Benghazi, she also had to testify for 11 hours at a committee hearing that they didn’t even try to conceal was a Republican witch hunt. Four lives were lost in Benghazi, which is four too many, but it doesn’t even come close to the American lives lost on foreign soil and at home during embassy, barracks, ship attacks and 9/11 when Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II were president. Strangely enough no one in Congress tried to hold the previous adminstations’ Secretaries of State personally responsible for any of those attacks.
As a result of the Benghazi investigations, we now have the FBI investigation into the use of a private server by Mrs. Clinton to send emails, something the two preceding Secretaries of State did as well. I’d like to take this moment to once again say that contrary to all the vitriolic accusations coming from the GOP and Bernie supporters, Mrs. Clinton, herself, is not being investigated by the FBI, the practice of using private servers is. As far as I know, the FBI hasn’t even asked to interview her. At any rate, once again Mrs. Clinton was asked to release thousands of pages of emails, which she did. I believe so far the biggest revelation to be found in them is that Hillary didn’t know what gefilte fish was.
Which brings me to the Goldman Sachs transcripts. First of all, Bernie’s smug claim that he’s happy to reveal his transcripts from paid speeches because it’s 0, makes me want to smack him upside the head. Of course it’s 0, he’s been an elected official of one sort of another for the past 3 decades, and is precluded by law from giving speeches or anything else for money, just as Hillary was. When she spoke at Goldman Sachs events she was no longer a Senator or Secretary of State, she was a private citizen with no votes or influence to peddle.
Secondly, by asking her to release the transcripts of those speeches, she is being asked to prove she’s not guilty. No one is specifically accusing her of anything but giving speeches, however she is being asked to produce the transcripts from those speeches just in case she said something bad. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work in this country, but apparently it is if your name is Hillary Clinton.
Also, let’s be frank here. In this day and age of IPhones and hidden cameras, does anybody really think that if Hillary had in her speeches coached the event guests on the best places to hide their money in the Cayman Islands, how to better screw their employees or buy more influence in Washington, we wouldn’t have seen it by now? Even if the worst thing she did was pander to them, we’d know it. So the argument is, if they’re harmless why won’t she release them?
It’s probably the political thing to do, but I can understand why Hillary’s drawing a line in the sand over this latest double standard requirement that is only applicable to her. I must say, I admire her restraint in the way she’s handled the request, saying she’ll do it when everyone else does. If it were me I’d flip everyone the bird and tell them to “bite me”.
Well, it looks like the Sanders supporters have partially gotten what they wanted but I believe it falls under the “be careful what you wish for” category. Yesterday a video of one of the controversial speeches surfaced on the internet and it turns out that the evil subject she was addressing is the need to encourage women entrepreneurs here at home and globally. She did congratulate Goldman Sachs on what a great job they do providing opportunities for women in their company, but that was pretty much the extent of her wading into the dark side.
Which brings me to the reason that the Goldman Sachs manufactured transcripts brouhaha really bothers me. It has revealed that Mrs. Clinton received $225,000 per speech, which is quite a bit lower than a man with similar qualifications as a former First Lady of Arkansas, former First Lady of the Nation, former Senator and former Secretary of State would be paid for a speech. Heck, Jerry Seinfeld gets more per speech and he’s only a comedian, a great comedian, but a comedian nonetheless. It seems there’s no area where Mrs. Clinton isn’t held to a double standard.