JAMES TARANTO ON THE CLINTON DRAMA
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578260001044674348.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
‘What Difference Does It Make?’
Mrs. Clinton finds herself in a familiar, if ironic, role.
Hillary Clinton is ending her tenure as secretary of state in fiery fashion. “You really get the sense that [Mrs.] Clinton barely managed to restrain herself from dropping an F-bomb there,” remarks New York magazine’s Dan Amira. He refers to an exchange between the secretary and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin at a Foreign Relations Committee hearing this morning.
Associated PressMrs. Clinton at the Senate this morning.
Johnson pressed her about the administration’s conflicting explanations for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the ambassador and three other Americans. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” said the secretary snappishly to the senator. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”
So it’s “our job to figure out what happened” but it doesn’t make a difference what happened? Huh? What would we do without rhetorical questions? We suppose we’d answer them, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin does:
The answer to her question is clear. An administration that sought, for political purposes, to give the American people the idea that al-Qaeda had been “decimated” and was effectively out of commission had a clear motive during a presidential campaign to mislead the public about Benghazi. The fact that questions are still unanswered about this crime and that Clinton and President Obama seem more interested in burying this story along with the four Americans that died is an outrage that won’t be forgotten.
Especially if she runs for president in 2016. As we watched this exchange, it occurred to us that Mrs. Clinton was back in a familiar role, and an ironic one for someone who is supposed to be a feminist icon. Once again, she was helping the most powerful man in the world dodge accountability for scandalous behavior.
Almost exactly 15 years ago, on Jan. 27, 1998, then-First Lady Clinton went on NBC’s “Today” show amid rumors that her husband had carried on a sexual affair with a lowly subordinate in the Oval Office: “The great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
How vast was the right-wing conspiracy really? With all due respect, what difference does it make? Mr. Clinton had in fact carried on the affair in the Oval Office and lied under oath about it in a sexual harassment lawsuit; he subsequently lied in a criminal investigation as well. As a result, history remembers Mrs. Clinton and Eliza McCardle Johnson (no relation to Ron, as far as we know) as the only women ever married to impeached presidents.
Then again, it’s not as if Mrs. Clinton hasn’t had any successes at Foggy Bottom. Why just yesterday, according to a press release, the department “launched its first Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports Initiative program of the year. . . . The Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports Initiative builds on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s vision of ‘smart power,’ which embraces the full range of diplomatic tools–in this case, sports–to empower women and girls and foster greater understanding.”
And a State Department blog brings this exciting news from Ruth Bennett, deputy information officer at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin:
Many Germans spent their dinner hour [Monday] night watching or listening to President Obama deliver his second inaugural address. We don’t yet have the numbers, but precedent would suggest it was a very large crowd. When then-Senator Obama delivered a speech in 2008 against the dramatic backdrop of Berlin’s golden Victory Column, he was himself the golden candidate–more than 200,000 admiring fans turned out to see him, and, after election, his German approval ratings hovered around 93 percent. By the June 2012 Pew Research poll, that approval level had “plummeted” . . . to 87 percent.
Bennett gives an account from inside the embassy, where Ambassador Philip Murphy held an “informal gathering”:
A few guests got into a lively discussion about what they liked about the Obama Administration–its policy focus on issues like women’s rights and the environment. One guest, a talk-show host, noted that focus on social issues resonated well with Germans, whose policy orientation was similarly inclined. Small good-natured debates about these sentiments broke out among the attendees. But then, suddenly, the President began speaking, and a rapt, happy silence fell over the crowded room.
We didn’t see Obama’s speech–it was on a lot earlier in the day where we live than in Berlin–but we wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be better in the original German.
Potemkin Prosperity
If Chief Justice John Roberts thought upholding ObamaCare would be sufficient to win him the approval of left-liberal critics in the press, an editorial in today’s New York Times ought to disabuse him of that notion. The Times uses the occasion of Roberts’s swearing-in of President Obama to a second term to launch a gratuitous attack on Roberts, whom it compares unfavorably with Obama:
The Obama and Roberts visions of America are very different. No disagreement is more fundamental than that about the connection between justice and prosperity.
To Mr. Obama, prosperity enables justice and vice versa. Persuasively [snort], he said in his address, “Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” . . . And commitments to justice, like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, he said, “do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
The Roberts court, on the other hand, with the chief justice in the majority, has regularly ruled as if justice and prosperity are unrelated or even antithetical. . . .
When the chief justice cast his critical vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act last June, he made clear that he did not favor the law, which is the most important commitment to justice and prosperity so far of the Obama administration.
The Times, it seems, expects judges not only to uphold laws it likes but to offer ideological endorsements as well.
Anyway, we suppose reasonable people may disagree on what constitutes “justice” and therefore on whether Obama’s redistributionist policies promote that goal. But if one accepts the premise that prosperity and justice are inextricably linked, then Obama cannot have delivered the latter since he has manifestly failed to deliver the former.
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, however, tries to argue that Obama hasn’t delivered enough “justice,” which is to say that the government isn’t spending enough. He does this by measuring government spending in a novel way–not as a straight dollar figure, or a ratio to gross domestic product, but as a ratio to what he calls “potential GDP.”
Seriously, Krugman claims Obama has been a skinflint because the potential GDP has been much higher than the actual GDP. Maybe that’s what the Times’s editors mean by “prosperity” too. But isn’t this the kind of accounting that got Enron in trouble?
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