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Hajja Romi
Robert Scheer's Columns
Married to the Clinton Mob
Posted on Aug 3, 2010
AP / Mary Altaffer
Former
President Bill Clinton greets well-wishers as he leaves Gigi’s
restaurant on Friday, the day before daughter Chelsea’s wedding, in
Rhinebeck, N.Y.
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By Robert Scheer
Out of respect for privacy, even
concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of
Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler
with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating
from Stanford.
Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of
his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in
Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year
federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.
Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge
fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days
and father Bill’s radical deregulation made it a lot easier for
financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the
Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children
will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read
Tina Brown’s paean to power, “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding,” in
the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.
It was then that I realized that the
revival of the Clinton legacy was on in earnest. Brown, a prominent Brit
import, is an expert on refurbishing tarnished royalty, as she
demonstrated with her gushing tribute to the Clinton wedding as “a happy
throwback to the carefree 1990s.” So carefree that no one of
importance, certainly not in the Clinton White House, took serious stock
of the collapse of hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management, a
harbinger of disasters to come.
In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown
stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In
the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of
debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember
all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I
the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and
the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial
bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.
This all reminds me of the pass given that
last attempt at American royalty, when the legacy of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy came to be whitewashed so that his reckless decisions to invade
Cuba and Vietnam were not to be mentioned. One can hear the “Happy Days
Are Here Again” Democratic theme song as Hillary Clinton comes to be
nominated after Obama has failed to solve the dire economic problems
that his predecessors—Bill Clinton as well as George W. Bush—left him.
But don’t dare tag Hillary with anything her husband brought about or
even for what Brown calls the “two grueling wars” which Obama inherited
and which Hillary voted for and now pushes as energetically as do the
top hawks in the Pentagon. “No sticky wars then,” Brown writes,
referring to the good old days of the reign of Bill. “Meanwhile,
Hillary, pummeled and reviled during the campaign year of Obama worship,
is now the popular member of Bam’s administration.” Hillary is never
responsible for past adversity but only steeled by it, as are the newest
family member and his mother:
“It clearly is an additional bond between
these families that Marc and his mother, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky,
know something about the Clinton world they are joining with. Marc had
to endure the press onslaughts when his congressman father Ed went to
jail for fraud.” His mother, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, lost her seat
in the U.S. House of Representatives after voting for Clinton’s first
budget, but Brown snatches victory from those defeats and personal
travails: “There is character in this new family of Chelsea’s and an
understanding of the harsh paybacks of public life.”
OK, so I have gone on too long about a
column by one preening society writer, but it is irritating that the
Clinton parents are getting off the hook while Obama, who is guilty of
relying too heavily on Clintonista alums for policy direction, is
somehow scorned. Without President Clinton turning the economy over to
Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, there would have been
no financial meltdown. Obama’s cardinal error was bringing Summers and
another Clinton acolyte, Timothy Geithner, back into power.
Apologists like Brown gloss over the fact
that it was precisely Bill Clinton’s scandal that brought Bush and the
Republicans to power. When Brown writes that “the Lewinsky stain, the
impeachment dramas, and the Starr witch hunt of the Clinton years seems
like a crazy dream,” does she seriously mean to absolve Papa Bill from
having brought such disarray into our politics? Can one forget that
without that stained dress, Al Gore would have won the Electoral College
as well as the popular vote?
Clinton nostalgia is dangerous nonsense,
and for Democrats to go down that road is to avoid serious assessment of
their own party’s role in the economic debacle that haunts the nation.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/married_to_the_clinton_mob_20100803/
NOTE: It is refreshing to realize that, as a Green, I don't have to twist my
conscience into a pretzel or perform any mental gymnastics to defend the likes
of Hilary and Bill, Inc., but it is still a good idea to read this sort of
stuff from time to time to understand the nonsense into which the Dims have
fallen. I guess it is preferable, though, to having to talk about why Bill
Clinton approved the use of depleted uranium in the former Yugoslavia, or what
Hilary is doing about Gaza or Lebanon right now. Or if, indeed, if Chelsea
will convert to Judaism and continue the family tradition of snookering
Palestinians.
Hajja Romi
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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