Must We Ask a Rude Question About the Clintons? | Commentary Magazine:
"On the surface, it isn’t that hard to understand the Clinton Cash scandal that Democrats are trying very hard to ignore this week.
We have a former president making millions giving speeches and doing favors for wealthy foreign entities and nations that give massive sums to the Clinton family charity that subsidizes the lavish lifestyle of the former First Family.
He did this at the same time as his wife spent four years as secretary of state where she made decisions that influence the fortunes of those donors.
And all this was happening while said former first lady/secretary of state is planning to run for president herself at the next opportunity.
No one can deny that this smells to high heaven of impropriety, and the best Billy and Hillary’s court of admirers and apologists can say in their defense is that the evidence of a conflict of interest is circumstantial and that there is no smoking gun proving their guilt.
But there is another defense that Politico’s national editor Michael Hirsch hints at in a piece published yesterday: their marriage is so dysfunctional that any alleged coordination between the two is unlikely.
As Hirsh notes, to discuss the “impenetrable” Clinton marriage is a difficult task.
Upon their arrival on the national stage in the 1992 presidential campaign, Americans have on the one hand been deluged with far more information about the Clintons’ relationship than we wanted, as
he confessed to having “caused pain,” while never giving us any further explanations.
A few years later Bill plunged the nation into a degrading debate about
the definition of sex and whether it’s OK to commit perjury about acts of sexual harassment after his dalliance with an intern in the Oval Office.
Since then we’ve been asked at one and the same time to sympathize with Hillary as the long suffering wife while also being warned to keep our noses out of their private business.
Would that we could.
As Brit Hume recently noted on Fox,
one of the key questions about Hillary’s presidential prospects is whether the “American people want another four, eight years of the Clintons and their weird marriage.”
...Whether the Clintons are in any sense a romantic couple is none of our business.
But if they are still a working political partnership, then we are entitled to know a great deal about their personal interactions.
In particular, we deserve to learn about how large a role Bill played as an advisor to her when she was running U.S. foreign policy.
We’re also entitled to know more about her role in their charity’s insatiable campaign to raise enormous amounts of cash from individuals, companies, and countries.
In classic “pay for play” style, those donors thought they could do themselves quite a bit of good by giving to the Clintons rather than more established philanthropies that were not run by former and perhaps future presidents..."
