Incendiary headline? Got your attention? How many Kossacks have already flagged me again???
So don’t listen to me. Listen to 2008 Barney Frank:
“People say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have any effect on me. Well if that were the case, we’d be the only human beings in the history of the world who on a regular basis took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure that it had no effect on our behavior.”
I teased out how corruption works for the Clintons in terms of speaking fees in two prior entries here, a brief piece about Clinton, the Panama Papers scandal, and Deutsche Bank, and another going into the Clintons’ pattern of corruption.
The Guardian’s Trevor Trimm is, without teasing out a few of the connections, saying the same thing a whole lot of people have been saying, and Bernie Sanders has been hammering on in his speeches since he began his campaign.
And again, I’m not saying Hillary Clinton’s speeches during her brief period of civilian life after she quit as SoS and before she became an ANNOUNCED candidate for the presidency were illegal. Of course they weren’t.
But do not for a moment conflate illegal with unethical. And you know, you KNOW, if this was Cruz or Kasich taking this kind of money for speeches right before announcing for the White House, Hillary Clinton and all of her supporters and the entire Democratic Party establishment would be screaming about it from the rooftops and Blue Nation Review would be cranking out five stories a day decrying it.
It may seem like I’m picking on Hillary Clinton here, but in reality I am not. As I said, she did not break the law taking money for speeches. No, I’m picking on every last one of you who flagged my last post, and who are likely to flag this one, and who will immediately start making excuses for Hillary Clinton (but…. but…. everyone’s corrupt. The Republicans do it! That’s what’s she’s worth as a speaker! She has a right to make a living! You’re just hating because you’re jealous of her success!) because, as Trevor Timm points out, you are turning a blind eye to corruption.