Posted on November 26, 2001

by

Daniel Clark

Just a year ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the Senate from the state of New York in a landslide, winning an overwhelming majority of the vote in New York City. It must have been with that in mind that her handlers encouraged her to appear at Paul McCartney's Twin Towers Relief Concert in Madison Square Garden.

It's understandable, in a way, that she and her supporters were so startled by the hostile response to her presence at that event, where she was booed off the stage while trying to introduce a video clip. After all, this is a time of national unity. Even if the crowd were heavily populated with policemen and firefighters, who tend to be more conservative than the general public, they wouldn't heckle just any politician with whom they didn't see eye to eye on law-and-order issues. We're all Americans, and many of our internal disputes must be put aside when facing a common foe. So why, in a time of war, would any American look at a U.S. Senator as an enemy?

For an answer to that, compare the audience's response to Mrs. Clinton to its reception of the man who organized the benefit concert, Paul McCartney -- not himself exactly a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. McCartney, perhaps the world's most famous pacifist and animal-rights activist, is an international symbol of the vegetarian far-Left. Yet the very same people who were offended by the presence of Hillary had packed the Garden to see him play.

The difference is that McCartney shows an acute understanding of, and appreciation for, the value of the Western republican form of government, and the freedoms that it protects. Indeed, although he is not an American, the former Beatle has had much kinder things to say about the United States since September 11^th than either Mr. or Mrs. Clinton has had.

McCartney is donating the proceeds from two of his newly released singles to the New York fire and police departments. It's important to note that this is not a slapdash effort to derive personal gain from the attacks. His new album, Driving Rain, was due to be released anyway, so the money from the single releases is genuine charity, not part of some Eltonesque scheme.

When interviewed about his charitable efforts, he explained, "I have great admiration for the courage of the emergency services. I feel a connection with the firemen because my father was a volunteer fireman in Liverpool during World War Two. We're doing this big concert in New York to stand up for democracy, to honor the rescue workers and to benefit the victims of the attacks ... America is one of the greatest democracies on earth, containing people from all races and religions, and this attack on September 11^th was a threat to that freedom. This is why we all need to stand up and be counted, and that's why I'll be standing on stage at Madison Square Garden with a bunch of mates in a show of solidarity ... To some people, there may appear to be millions of faults with the West, but the West does not allow Hitlers and that is our strength."

Clearly, the Clintons are among those "some people" he spoke of. In a speech at Georgetown University, the former president essentially chalked up the terrorist attacks to karma, saying that "we are still paying a price today" for slavery, abuses against American Indians, and the Crusades. By the way he figured it, the unprovoked slaughter of thousands of innocent people is our due punishment for being Americans and/or Christians.

A few days later, Mrs. Clinton pointed the finger of blame more specifically at an individual American Christian, President George W. Bush. Oh, she didn't mention him by name, but who else are we to infer is responsible when she cites one of his policies -- indeed, his central campaign issue -- as the cause?

In an interview with CNN's Jonathan Karl, the senator said that, "If we hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today." Don't be fooled by her use of the pronoun "we" here. Everyone knows that Hillary voted against the tax cut, and so she, by her reasoning, is free of blame.

She didn't try to argue that any particular anti-terrorism effort has suffered as a result of the Bush tax cut. Instead, she issued a general warning to the American people that terrible things would continue to happen to them unless the government is allowed to keep more of their money. Interestingly, she does not extend this direct correlation between funding and security to the areas of national defense and drug enforcement, both of which were slashed severely during her own co-presidency.

Typically, the Clintons seem less concerned with what was done to America on September 11^th than with the fact that it didn't happen on their watch. That's why Hillary describes terrorism as a "new threat." Her remarks assume that whatever might have aided the terrorists had to be the result of something that Bush had done in the eight months he'd been in office, and not of the eight years in which she and her husband systematically dismantled our system of national security.

New Yorkers undoubtedly remember that it was for the sake of Hillary's senate run that President Clinton granted clemency to sixteen terrorists, in one of the most cynical exercises in racial politics ever seen. The FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation) are a group of Puerto Ricans, among the tiny minority of those who demand that island's independence from the United States -- something that it would have in a minute, if only a majority of its inhabitants would vote for it. The FALN is believed to be responsible for at least 130 bombings and six deaths in New York and Chicago during the seventies and early eighties. Clinton justified his actions because none of the members who were the objects of his generosity had been directly guilty of murder. If applied to our current situation, that would mean that, since the hijackers are all dead, there's nobody else to hold responsible.

That insight into the Clinton administration's understanding of terrorism helps explain its approach to the Middle East. It was through talks mediated by Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, that PLO leader Yasir Arafat was given the appearance of a legitimate head of state. The Clintons actively encouraged Israel's lemming diplomacy, by which it agreed to "trade land for peace," a transaction that is known in most contexts as a surrender.

The message to terrorists worldwide could not have been more clear. The civilized world was going to try to make them stop killing and maiming people through negotiation. This meant that the more terrorist acts they committed, the more they'd have to bargain with. If they kill a thousand people today, they'll get more tomorrow in exchange for not killing a thousand people than they would have for merely not killing a hundred.

Terrorists have also been emboldened by Bill Clinton's lack of responsiveness to their previous attacks against Americans in the U.S. and abroad. Six people were killed, and over a thousand injured, the first time the World Trade Center was bombed, in 1993. Three years later, nineteen American soldiers were murdered in the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Two years after that were the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Twelve Americans were among the 224 people killed, with another five thousand injured. In October of 2000, the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemeni port, killing 17 American sailors, and injuring 39.

All these attacks occurred during the Clinton presidency, and how did he respond? With a single, ineffective wave of cruise missile attacks in Afghanistan and the Sudan, apparently based on sketchy intelligence, and launched on August 20, 1998 ... the very same day of Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony. Despite the mission's failure, Clinton made no further efforts to kill, capture, disable, or even discourage Osama bin Laden and his supporters. But then, once he'd beaten the rap in his impeachment trial, he no longer needed a diversion.

Of further encouragement to America's enemies was the Clintons' vandalism of our national security system. One of the most infamous examples of this was when Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary banned her department's color-coded personnel badges, which indicated varying levels of security clearance, because she found them "discriminatory."

Self-righteous liberal dingbattery was not the only internal threat to our defenses, though. There was also the endemic corruption that the Clinton administration became famous for. When Loral Space and Communications was found to have illegally transferred booster rocket technology to the Red Chinese, Bill Clinton signed a waiver, retroactively authorizing the transaction. The technology was intended to help the Chinese launch a Loral satellite, but the Pentagon believed it could also be used to improve their ability to deliver missiles.

Clinton took a lot of criticism, even in the mainstream press, for personally approving the deal, so he took himself out of the loop, by putting his people more directly in charge of the process. He shifted the responsibility to approve the export of satellite technology from the State Department to the thoroughly corrupted Commerce Department, which obviously is far less qualified to make such decisions even if it were responsibly inclined.

Not coincidentally, Loral CEO Bernard L. Schwartz was the largest single contributor to the Democratic National Committee. The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the Clintons facilitated the sale of American missile technology in order to enrich their political careers, yet Hillary would have us believe that it's the greed of the taxpayers that is an immediate danger to our security.

Bill and Hillary's boundless lust for self-gratification has corroded America's national security at every level, including the security of the White House itself. Their illegal fundraising activities included solicitations from foreign criminals, who they invited over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for coffee. The guest lists read like an Interpol reunion. Those who dropped by for some quality time with the Clintons included Cuban cocaine dealer Jorge Cabrera, Russian mobster Grigory Loutchansky, and Chinese gun runner Wang Jun. It didn't matter where you were from, or what illegal activity you were engaged in. As long as you were able to pay the price of admission, you could get a private audience with the president in the White House.

Nobody would expect either of the Clintons to stand up and admit that they've deliberately endangered their country for personal gain. One might have hoped, however, that seeing thousands of innocent people murdered by terrorists would have made Senator Hillary eager to cooperate with the present administration, to do some of the things that she and her husband had declined or neglected to do. That's not what America saw, however, during President Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress on September 20^th. Almost every member of either party was visibly enthusiastic in support of the president ... but not Hillary. The grimace that was fixed on the former First Lady's face made it clear that the woman who had hugged Mrs. Arafat could not bring herself to be an ally of a Republican president, even against the sworn enemies of the United States.

Taking advantage of a wave of patriotism in which she and her husband refuse to participate, Mrs. Clinton actually had the nerve to use the McCartney benefit concert as a personal photo-op. The crowd's anger was overwhelmingly justified, but the situation allowed only one way to express it. If a member of that audience had been approached by Hillary directly, he might have calmly presented her with a long list of grievances, but in the absence of such an opportunity, a hearty "BOO" gets the idea across more than well enough.

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