Brent Bozell: These Are My Concerns With Hillary Clinton
As head of two organizations with a combined social media reach of some 20 million along with another 1 million grassroots members, and after countless conversations and visits with leaders all over the country, I think I have a good sense of the mood of the conservative movement. It clearly fears another Clinton administration and most will agree with the proposition that after a third Obama term it will be impossible to return the toothpaste to the tube.
What drives that fear?
It could be economic issues. Obama has taken us where no nation in history has gone, racking a higher debt than all his predecessors combined, still climbing at a breath-taking speed—and with nothing to show for it. We’re stuck at the “new normal” of a 2% economy, the most anemic “recovery” in history. When one considers where we could be, it’s shocking that anyone would accept this. Taxes are at an all-time high, and if that’s not bad enough, throw in a regulatory secret police chocking entrepreneurialism at every opportunity. On all fronts, Hillary promises to double down: more wasteful spending, more unpayable debt, more ruinous regulation. This recklessness cannot be sustained.
But it’s not economic issues that most bother conservatives.
It could be foreign policy. Not since the height of the Cold War has America been so threatened, and not in its modern era have we been so weak. Our enemies are saber-rattling, if not on the march, everywhere. China, North Korea, Iran, Russia—they and a dozen smaller regimes have no fear of the US, especially after eight years of gutting the military and an Obama administration that had no idea what it was doing. During most of this time our foreign policy was directed by Secretary of State Clinton. Can America survive four more years (at least) of this disastrous foreign policy under President Clinton?
A good question—but that’s not it, either.
Social policy? Those unwilling to acknowledge that American culture has collapsed must concede we’re on the brink. We live in a country where the killing of the unborn is legal, and the demand that the taxpayers fund it—up until 2008 an unthinkable proposition— is now mandated. After eight years of racial agitation by this administration, our cities are on fire with race relations as bad as they were in the ’60s. The sanctity of marriage has evaporated. Religious leaders are now under assault, not just political but legal, for practicing their beliefs. God is dead—or at least they wish it to be so. Hillary? She promises more Planned Parenthood. More Black Lives Matters. More LGBT confrontation. More assaults on religious freedom. She wants the village to destroy the village.
But even that is not it.
It is the rule of law.
It’s probably fair to say that every new president brings a certain amount of political baggage to the Oval Office. Bill Clinton arrived with suitcases stuffed with political, ethical and legal scandals. Whitewater and its attendant cover-ups. Illegal fundraising. Womanizing, harassment, even the allegation—I believe it to be entirely true—of a bloody rape. In each case Hillary was involved or involved in the cover-up, including the creation of the “bimbo patrols” to destroy the lives of women whose lives had already been so badly damaged by her husband. For the next eight years at the White House the pattern continued—stealing FBI files, lying to the American people, illegal fundraising, renting the Lincoln bedroom, more womanizing, but this time a cocktail mixed with perjury—on and on it went, a total disdain for the law.
With Obama it got only worse. The IRS scandal is a hundred-fold more serious than Watergate, involving several branches of government directly involved in the cover-up. The VA scandals and the requisite lying about them. Solyndra and all the rest. Using Air Force one as a personal toy to go to luxuriously exotic places to play golf—hundreds of rounds—while the business of government is ignored, all funded by the American taxpayer. The optics could not be worse, but who cares.
At the epicenter of the worst scandals has been Hillary Rodham Clinton. Benghazi, its cover-up and the lying not just to the American people, but to the Congress under oath, the video story so thoroughly debunked with a refusal by this woman to apologize for lying to the families of the four dead men. What difference does it make? The private—which is to say, hidden—email servers, with not just the utter disregard for the law, and not just the utter disregard for the incredible consequences once these files were hacked by our enemies, which certainly they were, but the lies to the Congress and the Justice Department over and over, time and again, all documented, all irrefutable, and all dismissed as not illegal by the director of the FBI as America shook its head in disbelief.
And now pay-for-play, the Secretary of State using the most important branch of the federal government to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to her private foundation. It is the most stunning abuse of power ever exercised at that level of government, with the evidence emerging and the depth of the illegal activity deepening, pointing directly to the selling of access to the potential next president of the United States who, along with her husband, has pocketed over $100 million since leaving government. The response from the Clinton camp? More lies, more smoke-screens and this time for good measure, blaming it on Colin Powell.
There is every reason to believe that if elected president, Hillary Clinton will oversee the greatest disregard for the rule of law ever, and woe to that person who rises to question her. With the rule of law firmly discarded, America becomes an oligarchy ruled by a dictator. That is what worries conservatives most.
L. Brent Bozell III is president of ForAmerica.
