Claire Conger

I’m having dinner with my parents in their kitchen and we’re talking, as people do when they eat. It’s about the elections and my mother offers that she voted for Obama. (My dad’s a Republican, so his ballot contained McCain and other people I don’t know. This is the primary in California and your ballot contains only candidates in your party.)

My dad asks me who I voted for. This is a trick question and I know it. I consider for a moment telling him that voting is confidential, end of story, but I don’t. He wants an excuse to rage against Hillary and I give it to him. (Must stay calm!)

I tell my dad that I voted for Hillary because she’s been dragged through the mud and she must have learned something.

It seems that it’s just that mud that brings Hillary my father’s vilification. He sites her slowness to turn over the Whitewater papers and the “magic” of her investment profits.

I tell him he doesn’t know what other people have done because the press hasn’t made a field day of it. He doesn’t understand. I tell him about a small article I read in The Economist about U.S. politics and how the party out of office always tries to bring down the party in office by exposing scandals. I’m not sure he understands this, either.

I tell him he that asked me who I voted for just so he could argue about Hillary. He says “I’m not arguing.” My mother bursts out laughing. Then we all laugh.

So I went to the library and found the book The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton.

This is a great read—better than a novel! More characters than Disney! It goes on and on.

Clinton fires someone for not doing his job and the guy wants revenge, so he makes up the Jennifer Flowers sex scandal. That Flowers and Nichols ever got national attention tries my faith in our fourth estate.

Arkansas, apparently, is full of just such nefarious characters. Nefarious characters who point fingers at others. This pointing of fingers has a two-fold advantage. First it deflects attention, directing it at others and away from the characters’ own misdeeds. Second our fourth estate-cum-tabloid press repeat the silly things they say as if it were news. Thus the nefarious characters gain credence and full-blown investigations ensue, to the political advantage of the nefarious.

Whitewater, it would seem, is just such an affair, begun by lies, lies, and more lies.

So my father denigrates Hillary because she was slow to turn over her Whitewater papers. Would he expect a woman in Salem accused of being a witch to bring forth her cauldron for all to examine? Why should she participate?

You may recall the Vincent Foster, the Clintons’ personal lawyer, killed himself. At the time of his death, there was no Whitewater investigation and “the transfer of the [Clintons’ Whitewater] papers was of no significance,” occurred after the investigators were finished with the crime scene, and was performed by someone other than Hillary. None of the investigators (into Foster’s death) ever subpoenaed those papers (page 97). Why would Hillary even know where those papers were?

My dad also mentions Hillary’s $100,000 gain on $1,000 invested in futures trading. Incorrect reporting in The Times certainly fueled the notion that something fishy must be happening. Unfortunately, Hillary back-peddled, saying she’d done most of the trading when in fact it had been “a shrewd friend who had little to gain apart from something he already had: the new governor’s ear.” But it was “the first lady’s foolish attempt to mislead [that] permanently injured her credibility.” (pages 150-151)

Conason and Lyons describe this 10,000% gain as developing “over time”; my dad decries it as “over night.” In any case, this stratospheric return shouldn’t surprise dear old Dad—some of his stogy old equities have done just as well.

The most salient point of the book lies on page 185 where Conason and Lyons are quoting Judge Henry Woods’s use of Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson’s words on the “dangerous power of the prosecutor . . . it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

Unfortunately it seems that’s just what happened. My faith in our government is surely tried.