Vincent J.
Curtis
14 Oct 2016
The great
German Chancellor of the 19th century Otto von Bismarck once said
that self-respecting people did not watch laws or sausages being made. In the course of her secret remarks below, an
intellectually impoverished Hillary Clinton had this saying in mind as she
tried to explain why it was morally justifiable for her to engage in two-faced
lying, or, in her more delicate phraseology, “have a public position and a
private position” on issues.
We again have
to thank WikiLeaks for this material. It
was extracted from an email from Tony Carrk to John Podesta, with the subject
line, “HRC Paid Speeches.” The email was
a summary of remarks that Carrk thought might prove embarrassing to Hillary
should they become public, and would therefore require a “policy scrub.”
*CLINTON SAYS YOU NEED TO HAVE A PRIVATE AND PUBLIC POSITION
ON POLICY*
*Clinton: “But If Everybody's Watching, You Know, All Of The
Back Room Discussions And The Deals, You Know, Then People Get A Little
Nervous, To Say The Least. So, You Need
Both A Public And A Private Position.”* CLINTON: You just have to sort of
figure out how to -- getting back to that word, "balance" -- how to balance the public and the private
efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today. That, I
think, has probably been true for all of our history, and if you saw the Spielberg movie, Lincoln, and how he was maneuvering
and working to get the 13th Amendment passed, and he called one of my favorite
predecessors, Secretary Seward, who had been the governor and senator from New
York, ran against Lincoln for president, and he told Seward, I need your help
to get this done. And Seward called some of his lobbyist friends who knew how
to make a deal, and they just kept going at it. I mean, politics is like sausage being made. It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up
where we need to be. But if everybody's watching, you know, all of the back
room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to
say the least. So, you need both a
public and a private position. And finally, I think -- I believe in
evidence-based decision making. I want to know what the facts are. I mean, it's
like when you guys go into some kind of a deal, you know, are you going to do
that development or not, are you going to do that renovation or not, you know,
you look at the numbers. You try to figure out what's going to work and what's
not going to work. [Clinton Speech For National Multi-Housing Council, 4/24/13]
I have retained
the typeset and point size from the original WikiLeaks posting. Notice that the speech was made in April,
2013, after she resigned as Secretary and was expected to run for president in
2016; and it was a paid speech.
The Clinton
campaign have sought to cast a cloud over the authenticity of these emails by,
first, saying that the Russians did the hacking for the purpose of helping
Donald Trump, and, second, by using subterfuge to neither affirm nor deny their
authenticity. However, Hillary made
reference to her quote regarding Lincoln at the second debate, so that affirms
that these remarks are ones she actually made.
The reference to Lincoln is what caused Donald Trump to observe that
Hillary was putting blame on Abraham Lincoln (“Honest Abe”) for her two-faced
lying.
Such a trick is
at one with her putting the blame on Colin Powell for her use of a private
email server while she was Secretary of State.
(Other emails revealed Hillary desperately wanting to know of Condi
Rice’s email practices.) If I am one,
then so is he: that is her justification for anything blameworthy.
What we have in
this small extract is Hillary’s moral
justification for being a two-faced liar: other people do it. Hillary is not denying that she is a
two-faced liar, she is justifying her being
a two-faced liar.
We also see
underlying her right to be a two-faced liar is that Hillary knows best, “it is
unsavory, but we usually end up where we need to be.” It is for the best that Hillary engage in
two-faced lying, because it gets us to where we need to be. In short, Hillary believes that honest debate
is for suckers, and that she knows best.
And the
audience listening to the debate are suckers.
Hillary’s debate opponent isn’t
the one being fooled, it is the people listening to Hillary who are supposed to
be fooled. The public at large are the
ones who need to be fooled in order for Hillary to bring them to the place they
need to be.
Lest anyone think that being a two-faced liar is something new, let me refer them to
William Safire’s 1996 piece in the New
York Times in which he went through all the public lies Hillary had told by
then, from the time when she was first lady of Arkansas. Safire was prompted to do the piece from the
Whitewater investigation. Out of that
research, Safire called her a “congenital liar,” and we have had twenty more
years of it since the article appeared.
The speech
extract confirms what was said in previous postings. The remarks appear to be given off-the-cuff
in a stream of consciousness fashion.
There are many clichés packed into run-on sentences. Hillary was paid a lot of money to deliver unprepared,
off-the-cuff remarks.
Winston
Churchill once remarked that in war truth is so precious it needs to be
protected with a bodyguard of lies.
Hillary obviously has absorbed this dictum. However, Hillary uses the methods of war to
win ordinary political victories in peacetime.
Is it any wonder why Hillary is so polarizing? She uses the most vicious methods,
justifiable only in wartime, to win in peacetime. For
Hillary, politics is war.
We can see the
results of that belief in this presidential campaign. And political divisions in America will only
get worse if Hillary gets the chance as president to employ her war-like
methods to win politically.
-30-
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