A FLASHFORWARD TO A $CLINTON$ WHITEHOUSE

A FLASHFORWARD TO A $CLINTON$ WHITEHOUSE

  Speaking Fees 
As former President Bill Clinton prepares to step up his role in his wife’s presidential campaign, his high-profile activities pose a unique challenge. We report that more than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid Mr. Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had policy matters before Hillary Clinton’s State Department. One speech in Abu Dhabi came just before Mrs. Clinton’s department ruled in favor of the Gulf state in a controversial visa issue. The Clintons struck an agreement early on with the Obama administration to allow State Department ethics officers to check for conflicts between speech sponsors and Mrs. Clinton’s government work. Mr. Clinton was paid for more than 200 speeches while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state; the ethics office turned down five of his speech requests. The former president has given mixed signals about whether he would abandon the paid-speaking circuit if his wife becomes president. (Wall St. Journal 12/31/15)

I REPEAT: “Here is a country in which all political thought and activity are concentrated upon the scramble for jobs – in which the normal politician, whether he be a President or a village road supervisor, is willing to renounce any principle, however precious to him, and to adopt any lunacy, however offensive to him, in order to keep his place at the trough.”

H.L. Mencken’s essay “On Being an American,”