Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
Read Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Copyright © 2016 by Dinesh D’Souza
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First e-book edition 2016: ISBN 978-1-62157-532-0
Originally published in hardcover, 2016
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For my brother Shashi and my sister Nandini
CONTENTS
The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God
.
—Thomas Jefferson
SECRETS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds timorous and slothful
.
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—John Milton on the devil Belial,
Paradise Lost
T
o understand Hillary, we must solve the Hillary enigma. The Hillary enigma is why anyone—any American, any Democrat, even Bill—would consider voting for her. Yes, I know she wants to be the first woman president. But women across the country, in high positions and in low, are doing things, accomplishing things. This woman has been in public life for decades, and yet she has accomplished nothing.
In a classic case of nepotism, Hillary was appointed to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform during Clinton’s first term. The plan was so half-baked, and presented so poorly, that even Democrats shunned it, and the whole scheme collapsed and had to be withdrawn.
Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”
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Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no
treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing.
Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons
No One Left to Lie To
. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”
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She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join.
She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”
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If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.
As first lady, she claimed to know nothing about the Travelgate firings when the evidence showed she ordered them herself. Later, on the 2008 campaign trail, she repeatedly told a story about how she had been under sniper fire and ran for cover when her plane landed in Tuzla, Bosnia. Video footage, however, showed there was no sniper fire and in fact Hillary was greeted on the tarmac by a child who read her a poem. She blamed the Benghazi attacks on an Internet video when she knew that was a fable. This is a highly abbreviated list.
She is more than just a liar; she and her husband Bill are corrupt and known to be corrupt, going back to their Arkansas days. Just prior to leaving the White House, the Clintons pardoned a notorious fugitive who had fled the country to escape prosecution on racketeering and tax fraud.
Pardons don’t come free—the man’s family and friends poured millions of dollars into the Clinton coffers in exchange.
This was too much even for Hamilton Jordan—Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Jordan said the Clintons “are not a couple but a business partnership.” Every move they make is “part of their grand scheme to claw their way to the very top.” Jordan dubbed the Clintons “the first grifters . . . a term used in the Great Depression to describe fast-talking con artists who roamed the countryside, always one step ahead of the law, moving on before they were held accountable for their schemes and half-truths.”
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The
Wall Street Journal
reports that during Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state, some sixty companies that lobbied the State Department donated more than $26 million to the Clinton Foundation. “At least 44 of those 60 companies also participated in philanthropic projects valued at $3.2 billion that were set up through a wing of the foundation called the Clinton Global Initiative.”
In some cases, the
Journal
reports, “donations came after Mrs. Clinton took action that helped a company. In other cases, the donation came first. In some instances, donations came before and after.” In 2012, for example, Hillary lobbied the Algerian government to let GE build power plants in that country. A month later, GE gave between $500,000 and $1 million to the Foundation. The following September, GE got the contract.
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This is how Hillary conducts government policy.
She is ruthless, she is grasping, she appears to have little empathy or concern for people. She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch’s cackle. There is almost nothing appealing about her. How, then, could she be the first choice of progressive Democrats and the apparent frontrunner for winning the presidency in November 2016?
The Hillary enigma is very different than the Obama enigma. The enigma of Obama was: Who is this guy? In 2008, Obama came out of nowhere. Very little was known about his past. What little was known was mostly camouflage. So there was an understandable appetite to learn
about him. Moreover, Obama was intriguing; his story generated obvious interest.
As an immigrant, I was fascinated by Obama’s background, his charisma, his objectives. I wrote two books,
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
and
Obama’s America
, trying to explain Obama and predict what he would do. I predicted he was an anti-colonialist, in his father’s image, and that he would seek to “remake America” by reducing its wealth and power. Many people, even many conservatives, were initially baffled by my interpretation of this strange man. Only now—eight years later—do most people see that I was largely correct.
With Hillary, however, there is no guesswork about her background, her personality, or her ideology. We all know who this broad is. She has been part of our public life for a generation now. Not only are we all too familiar with her, we are sick of her. Even Democrats seem mildly nauseated; why else would so many of them turn to the Rip Van Winkle candidacy of Bernie Sanders?
Normally an out-of-it socialist who just woke up from a twenty-year nap would not be a serious contender in the Democratic Party. Just yesterday Bernie was sleeping on his neighbor’s couch, unable to pay his own rent. But just as Democrats in 2008 turned to Obama because they wanted anyone-but-another-Clinton, this year many have turned to Bernie because they want anyone-but-Hillary.
Yet enough Democrats voted for Hillary, and she received sufficiently robust backing from the Democratic and progressive establishment, that the success of her candidacy was never really in doubt. Even when Bernie got the votes, Hillary got the delegates. From the beginning, Bernie seemed to be running a “show” candidacy designed to fade at the appropriate moment and become part of the Hillary coronation pageant.
Hillary marched inexorably toward the nomination even while shunting aside the risks of an FBI investigation. While some Republicans have long suspected the FBI would recommend an indictment that would end her candidacy, Hillary has operated on the premise that the Obama Justice Department won’t indict her—the Democratic Party’s frontrunner, and Obama’s presumptive successor. So far, she’s proven right.
Even in the unlikely event she is indicted, I expect her to slog on, with her trademark tenacity, hoping to deal with the problem after she wins the presidency.
Yet when is the last time a major political party nominated someone who has been investigated for corruption so many times, and with an ongoing FBI inquiry? Nixon of course was impeached and resigned in disgrace, but there was no investigation and no impeachment prior to his 1972 reelection. Nixon up to that point had a spotless record, while Hillary’s record could only be described as very, very spotty. Yet she has a whole team rooting for her.
THE MOVEMENT BEHIND HILLARY
So the Hillary enigma is actually the enigma of her supporters—the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. That’s why this book isn’t just about Hillary; it is also about the party and ideological movement that propel her forward. I wrote about Obama as an individual because that is the best way to understand him; I’m writing about Hillary as the head of a movement or gang because that is the best way to understand her and what she represents.
I call this book about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party the “secret history” because the story I tell is true and yet will come as a surprise. Did you know about the Democratic president who is the founder of modern progressivism—and also responsible for the revival of the Ku Klux Klan? What about the most popular Democratic president of the twentieth century—who blocked anti-lynching laws and for more than a decade cut deals with racists to exclude blacks from government programs? Then there is the president who is the hero of the Civil Rights laws—the same fellow that called blacks “niggers” and said he wanted to keep them confined to the Democratic plantation.
Hillary places herself in this progressive tradition, and in a sense she belongs there. She’s just as bad—actually worse—than her shameful predecessors. It’s an eye-opening story. The facts told here, both about history and about Hillary’s story, are indisputable and yet they are
scarcely known to most people. Until I researched this book, I didn’t know them all myself. That’s because I’m a victim, as you are, of a progressive cover-up.
The cover-up is the work of progressives in education and the media. The progressives are part of the Democratic team; they are, in fact, the ideologues of the party. They have been given a very specific assignment: to bury the truth and spin a lie to sell their team’s political merchandise. This they have assiduously and effectively carried out. Progressives can be counted on to respond with outrage to this book, not because what I say is false, but rather because it is true.
For years, I bought into the lie, as have most conservatives and Republicans. If you ask most people on the Right, they will say: The Democratic Party used to be a good party, made up of good people. The leaders of the Democratic Party were stalwarts like FDR, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. This party was patriotic and principled, and the disagreements of American politics were not disagreements of goals, but of means.
Unfortunately, of late—so the right-wing narrative continues—the Democrats have changed. At some point, whether it be Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Obama in 2008, the Democratic Party lost its moorings and became radicalized. It became the party that we know today. Basically the story of the Democrats is a story of how a basically good bunch of people went astray.
The Democrats, of course, tell a different story. This story has two separate versions, both of which I deal with in this book. The first version is that the Democrats have always been the good guys. This story is the equivalent of the defense lawyer who says, “My client is not guilty and has always been, as he is now, an upstanding citizen.”
This is the portrait of the Democratic Party that will be on full display at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. In a sense, this entire book is a refutation of what will be presented there that week. There we’ll hear about how the Democrats are the party of racial equality, social justice, and economic opportunity. This is the moral basis for the party’s claim to rule.
Democrats—the mantra goes—are the party of the common man, the ordinary person. For two hundred years, Democrats have been looking out for the little guy, including historically marginalized groups like women, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities. Where would these people be without the Democratic Party to protect them and secure their basic rights? Democrats are the party of equal rights, civil rights, and human dignity.
Democrats—the mantra continues—support not only racial and social justice but also economic justice, in other words widely shared prosperity and Obama’s “fair share.” Economic justice is the centerpiece of Hillary’s 2016 campaign. Why, she asks, should the fat cats—the top 1 percent—take the lion’s share of the profits that accrue from American productivity? Why should they be permitted to cause so much inequality? In Hillary’s view, government is the instrument that takes from those at the very top and redistributes to the rest of us.
Interestingly Democrats say they are not merely the party that did great things in the past; they are also the party of the future. That’s why most Democrats like to be called “progressives”; the term links them with progress. At one time Democrats called themselves “liberals,” until the term fell into disrepute. Progressive is now the preferred label. Voting for progressive Democrats, we will hear, assures that America’s future will be better than America’s past.
By contrast, Democrats insist, the Republican Party is the party of racism and reaction. The Democrats’ prime exhibit is the GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. We hear that Trump is completely beyond the pale because he is a racist and a fascist. He represents the rotten core of the Republican Party, the crazy bigoted uncle who has come out of the basement and taken over the party, embarrassing the hosts who had attempted to keep him hidden away from sight.
Listen to progressive darling, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who tweeted recently that Trump “incites supporters to violence” and “built his campaign on racism, sexism and xenophobia.” Warren added, “There’s more enthusiasm for @realdonaldtrump among leaders of the KKK than leaders of the political party he now controls.” Robert Reich,
labor secretary under Bill Clinton, writes, “Viewing Donald Trump in light of the fascists of the first half of the twentieth century . . . helps explain what he is doing and how he is succeeding.”
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