National Review’s blog, The Corner, will publish just about anything, as long as it smears the Obama Administration. Earlier in the week, Roger Kimball called President Obama the new Neville Chamberlain, in an argument centered entirely on four words Obama used in his inauguration address. Today, Lisa Schiffren writes that the Benghazi hearings are karmic justice for Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Watergate hearings:
Hillary Rodham famously began her career after Yale Law School, working on Capitol Hill, as a young staff attorney on Watergate Committee. She was known to feel deep, person antipathy for President Richard Nixon, and to take great pleasure in getting members of his administration who were hauled before the committee to squirm. There have been allegations that she was so eager to see President Nixon impeached that she may have crossed a professional line or two, though those are not relevant to this post, except in a grand, karmic kind of way.
Little did I realize that Watergate wasn’t really about President Nixon’s misconduct and dishonesty, it was a personal vendetta by Hillary Clinton against a man she hated. And speaking of misconduct and dishonesty, if you want to claim Clinton crossed a professional line or two during Watergate, tell us what she did and stand by the accusations. Don’t tell us the accusations may or may not be true, and that it doesn’t matter really, and then proceed to argue that the Benghazi hearings are a just revenge for that same misconduct that you won’t name or stand by.
Schiffren continues:
This year, the 100th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s birth, it is fascinating — riveting, really — to watch the older, more practiced, but not necessarily wiser Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, now our secretary of state, end her public career on the other side of a hearing table. In a very similar room, she faced infinitely less hostile questioning over her own abuses of the political contract between leaders and citizens in a democracy. Just as Richard Nixon stood accused of lying to the American people and to Congress, covering up a campaign break-in while seeking to be reelected, Mrs. Clinton stands accused of lying to the American people to divert attention from a huge political fiasco in which four American were killed, as her department dithered and then lied about the events, in the course of a campaign to reelect the president whose Administration she serves.
Now, Schiffren would have us believe that Clinton’s conduct is on par with Nixon’s. Clinton broke no laws, nor is she accused of having done so. And despite Schiffren’s claim to the contrary, I don’t see anyone in these hearings calling Clinton a liar. The desperate Republican search for a scandal to bring down the President continues. In the meantime, we get a real glimpse into the purpose of these hearings at the end of Schiffren’s post:
There are sound reasons why Republicans, conservatives especially, are depressed and dismayed about our party’s appeal going forward. But those who have suggested that if Hillary Clinton throws her hat into the ring in 2016, it’s a done deal that she wins . . . should feel better after today. I know I do.
Republicans can’t get to Obama, so they’re going after the odds-on favorite to be the next President, hoping they can stop her campaign before it starts. Facts be damned.
