Clinton’s shattered glass

Clinton’s shattered glass 

  The Charlotte Observer

By:

LeRoy Goldman 5-07-2015

It’s in the nature of crises that they frequently travel upon cat’s paws. Their destructive force is magnified many times over by their unexpected arrival.

Thus, the world was in disbelief as the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. After 70 years of totalitarian rule, the Soviet Empire was imploding. Countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, such as Poland and Ukraine, gained independence. Economics had much to do with the astonishingly swift collapse of the Soviet Union. By the mid-’80s about 70 percent of Soviet industrial output was devoted to the military in an increasingly costly and unachievable effort to match defense spending in the United States. That effort cratered their economy.

Here’s the takeaway: If, just prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a senior American official had predicted it, he would have been described as delusional.

In mid-September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. With assets in excess of $600 billion it was the largest bankruptcy in American history. Lehman’s vulnerability grew out of its enormous portfolio of subprime, risky mortgages.

Although Washington and Wall Street did not comprehend what was happening, the dam had burst. America and the world were plunged into an ever-deepening financial crisis that obliterated more than $14 trillion of assets held by Americans.

The contagion of the burst housing bubble quickly spread to multiple Wall Street banks. The president and Congress bailed them out. They, unlike most Americans and most small businesses, were deemed to be too big to fail.

When the dust settled it was clear that the worst financial disruption since the Great Depression had been caused by greed, lack of transparency, failures by federal regulators and credit rating agencies, excessive borrowing, and conflicts of interest.

Here’s the takeaway: If, in the summer of 2008, someone had warned that the good times were about to stop rolling, his warning would have been dismissed as delusional.

Is Hillary implosion next?

Having missed the fall of the Soviet Union and the world financial crisis makes me wonder if we’re now missing the implosion of Hillary Clinton.

While we don’t know precisely when she decided to seek the presidency, we do know that the die was cast by the time Bill Clinton ran in 1992. He told voters they could, “Buy One, Get One Free” by electing him and his wife. And we know he (they) meant it. Shortly after taking office, he appointed Hillary to head the administration’s effort to enact comprehensive health-care reform. Her effort produced a bill so dense no one could understand it. In 1994 Democratic Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, knowing Hillarycare couldn’t pass, refused to bring it up for a vote.

We also know that Clinton’s election to the Senate in 2000 was a thinly veiled, high-profile way of preparing for her 2008 quest for the presidency. We know that she and her campaign snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2008. And we know her willingness to serve as Secretary of State in the Obama administration was intended to burnish her foreign policy credentials for the 2016 election.

Now it appears she has the Democratic nomination locked up. She and Bill have sucked all of the oxygen and most of the money out of the Democratic Party.

But danger lurks. Hillary can’t conceal her fatal flaws: arrogance, a sense of entitlement, secrecy, and, most importantly, the mounting belief she’s not trustworthy.

The Clinton Foundation has become an albatross. She can’t escape the perception that enormous contributions to the foundation were an attempt by foreign powers to curry favor with her as Secretary of State. Her unilateral scrubbing of her “serve-her” puts Rose Mary Woods’ “accidental” erasure of the Nixon tapes to shame.

Her husband’s pivotal role in collecting millions while orchestrating Russian acquisition of a major chunk of America’s uranium supply while she was Secretary of State doesn’t pass the smell test.

And now all of this and more is under investigation by the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and Reuters. They may not discover the “smoking quid pro quo.” But that’s not necessary.

The Clintons have overplayed their hand. When the gas comes out of Hillary’s balloon, she will go from front-runner to grandmother in a heartbeat.

Hillary Clinton is obsessed with shattering glass. But the shards will be in her bedroom where she looks in her mirror each morning and asks, “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

Go ahead, say it – delusional

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