A Tale of Two Scandals

…of Nikitas3.com

Of two end-of-August scandals, only one is of lasting import. No, not the one about Republican Senator Larry Craig and his Minneapolis bathroom arrest, but the fact that one of Hillary Clinton’s top fundraisers, Chinese-American businessman Norman Hsu, has been wanted on fraud charges for 15 years.

That law-enforcement officials could not find Hsu at the same time that he was acting as a major money-bagger for Clinton in New York City is highly suspicious to say the least. Shades of Arkansas? And as Hsu was funneling $200,000 to Democrats in illegal contributions through the middle-class Chinese-American Paw family in San Francisco, he even had listed the Paw home as his own address. Couldn’t just a modicum of police work and a few questions at that address have tracked him down?

Then again, we should not wonder about petty details like these: This is the psychedelic world of the Clintons we are dealing with, where nothing ever is quite what it seems. Or should be.

In Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential fundraising scandal, in which even the communist Chinese government was acting as an official Friend of Bill, the Teflon Don Juan came out smelling only half-dirty because 120 people either fled the country or took the 5th Amendment. With witnesses like those, who needs a legal system?

“You could have knocked me over with a straw” said a “shocked” Bill Clinton about the criminal past of Hsu. Yes, shocked indeed, just as we all were thoroughly shocked at the gambling at Rick’s Café in the movie Casablanca.

The Clintons’ unending attraction to scandal is a pattern of behavior which some commentators, including liberals, have grudgingly managed to notice. But once again, Friends of Bill and Now Hillary in the media are doing at least one job thoroughly, and it isn’t uncovering George Bush’s National Guard records. It is that of finding other things to talk about at precisely the moment that Mrs. Clinton needed desperately to divert the nation’s spotlight from her latest criminal eruption.

Enter Senator Craig, whom the media managed to indict, convict and march to the political gallows within days. So the question is: Where are the due-process media constitutionalists and anti-Guantanamo warriors concerning Craig’s case, those who are obsessively and compulsively fixated on every legal aspect of the well-being of captured terrorists and American mass murderers?

Answer: They probably are hiding out on the campus of Duke University with their professor friends who rushed to judgment over the lacrosse-team rape charges.

And as they are claiming that the Republicans are hypocritical on the issue of sex because of the alleged involvement of the minor figure of Senator Craig in scandal, the media are managing to ignore the fact that the Clinton fundraising dirt dating back to 1996 is infinitely more egregious and more damaging to our Constitutional republican system in that the Clintons are the top two figures in one major political party.

Yet the major networks gave the August 2007 Hsu installment minor attention compared to the wall-to-wall jihad over the concurrent Craig story, just as the media buried the 1996 Clinton fundraising scandal until well after the election that November.

Here’s Allen Colmes, the liberal side of the Fox network’s Hannity & Colmes political talk show. Within just two days of the Hsu scandal breaking, he said: “There’s no public record or indication that Hsu reimbursed, for example, the Paw family”.

No, Allen, there usually is no public record of people as they are doing illegal things like reimbursing campaign contributions. That’s why they are called “illegal”, and that is why the Clintons have gotten away with this stuff — because cover-uppers like you make senseless and obfuscating commentary in the face of the obvious.

The Clintons have shows a pattern of bad and illegal behavior that transcends our standard three dimensions of reality. From renting out the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House, to Troopergate, to Whitewater, to 500 FBI files, the intimidation of Kathleen Willey, and on and on, shady characters, funny money and even funnier girls seem to be the staple of this pair. Yet it always was interesting in the 1990s that the media would predict a “backlash” of sympathy for the besieged Clinton, and then themselves would generate it, forever inflating Bill’s popularity meter.

“Insanity” is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Is America ready to re-live a new era of deceit and denial by electing a Clinton in 2008, and watching the same story repeat itself for four or eight years? Let’s pray not.