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Hard Choices

Read Hillary Clinton's book first? Or just bad-mouth it anyway...?
 
HILLARY's smiling face has looked up from the desk for two weeks, writes Bill Bonner in his Diary of a Rogue Economist.
 
We wanted to read her book, if only to mock and jeer, but we couldn't bring ourselves to open it. It was too big. Too earnest. Too carefully put together. There would be no surprises.
Like Hillary's photo on the cover, every detail had been checked by pollsters and approved image consultants. No facts that didn't support the uplift of the narrative were allowed. No ideas that don't appeal to the majority voter were permitted.
 
Hillary is made appear tough, but fair...well-informed...hard working...with a razor-sharp intellect and a heart like road kill on a hot, sunny day: warm, soft and overpowering.
 
Finally, we had to do our duty, on your behalf, dear reader. We opened the book so you don't have to. The book, called Hard Choices, is hard to pick up. And easy to put down.
 
Not because you will disagree with its ideas; there are no ideas to disagree with. Instead, the book is full of self-serving and empty blah blah. It wallows in the glory of the US Empire...and of course, the incredible, gracious tenacity of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
 
All you have to do is to look at the photos. There you find Hillary shaking hands with every corrupt, incompetent leader the world has to offer...as well as demonstrating all the qualities the dim voter may look for.
 
In one she is compassionate towards children. In another she is an activist for women. She is a fun-loving secretary of State, too. There's a photo of her at the piano with Bono. Another of her dancing at a party in Cartagena, Colombia. And there's Joe Biden whispering in the ear of a giggling Hillary.
 
What a gal!
 
The premise of the book is that leaders have to make tough decisions. Her first was her decision to leave a promising career as a Washington lawyer to go to Little Rock and help Bill with his political career.
 
On the evidence, this paid off. Bill hit it big in politics. Hillary became his partner – like Evita to Juan Perón. Or Christina to Néstor Kirchner. Now, Hillary is in line to be the first woman president.
 
This seems not only alarming, but also likely...
 
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that she and Bill had raised more than $1 billion from corporate donors during their two decades on the national stage. Zombie industries and crony capitalists know Hillary can be bought...and at a reasonable price.
 
The voters will fall in line. They don't have a hard choice or an easy choice. Most likely, they will have no choice at all. The Republicans will probably field a candidate with essentially the same policies.
 
The next hard choice Hillary faced was whether or not to accept President Obama's offer to head up the State Department. She always says and does the right thing. So she took the job because "when your president asks you to serve you should say yes."
 
So far, we are only in the opening pages of the book, and already Hillary is nauseating. She says she's been doing "public service" for her entire adult life. But what possible service is it? In every post she has held, she was more served than serving.
 
When she was first lady, for example, who put the bread on the table? Who baked it? Who washed the dishes? Not Hillary!
 
As secretary of State she says she spent 2,000 hours and flew a million miles. Airborne, at taxpayer expense, she and her friends would "enjoy a glass of wine." And "watch movies."
 
How did the public get anything out of it?
 
"I didn't enjoy playing the bad cop," she says of a conversation with the Israeli prime minister, "but it was part of the job."
 
Speaking for ourselves, we didn't ask her to say anything at all...and we'll make our own choices, thank you very much.
 
One of the hardest choices she had to make was whether or not to send Navy SEALs "to bring Osama bin Laden to justice." In the event, they didn't even try. They assassinated him on the spot.
 
But around and around the world she went, a dervish diplomat. Asia, the Middle East, the Far East, the Arab Spring, the Russian winter, the European fall. Blah after blah...well-meaning public servant after well-meaning public servant...human rights, women's rights, children's rights. Six hundred pages.
 
How does she remember so many details? Why does she bother, except to glorify her own mastery of pointless detail?
 
She says something to somebody who says something else...bumbling from one scene of mischief to another of mayhem. Involving the free and independent citizens of the United States of America in dozens of conflicts in which they have no interest of any kind.
 
Hillary has been on the government payroll since she was 13 years old, she tells us, when she had a summer job "supervising a small park."
 
We don't know how much supervising a 13-year old can do. But heck, Hillary can do anything. On one page she's rescuing children from a brothel. On another, she's cleaning the air. On another, she's preventing a war.
 
We are suspicious of people who stay up too late. Stalin worked until 5am. Hitler was a night owl, too. Staying up late is linked to addictions – alcohol, pornography or video games. But over and over, Hillary tells us that she was up until the "wee hours" talking to someone.
 
Good God, what awful calamity would have happened if she had just gone to bed and turned off her cellphone?
 
And now, the poor woman must be tired. So many hard choices! So much public service!
 
She needs a rest. Retire her.

New York Times best-selling finance author Bill Bonner founded The Agora, a worldwide community for private researchers and publishers, in 1979. Financial analysts within the group exposed and predicted some of the world's biggest shifts since, starting with the fall of the Soviet Union back in the late 1980s, to the collapse of the Dot Com (2000) and then mortgage finance (2008) bubbles, and the election of President Trump (2016). Sharing his personal thoughts and opinions each day from 1999 in the globally successful Daily Reckoning and then his Diary of a Rogue Economist, Bonner now makes his views and ideas available alongside analysis from a small hand-picked team of specialists through Bonner Private Research.

See full archive of Bill Bonner articles

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