Get ready fans of the 90’s, another Clinton wants the White House.
Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton managed to cross borders with her rhetoric last week when she stated the proposed Keystone XL pipeline was a “distraction,” apparently preventing Americans from focusing on important issues such as climate change. Clinton rolled out her own plan to make the U.S.A. more environmentally-friendly, but anyone interested in taking advice from Hillary Clinton should remember that she is not a scientist or a climate expert, and should look at her track record of failure, especially big-ticket failure, when given major jobs.
Anyone who’s curious about what kind of president Hillary Clinton would make should look up topics such as Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate or cattle futures trading. They also need only look at her track record of hot air, denial of responsibility and, yes, bungling on the national healthcare reform effort in 1993. How did that end up?
In 1993, when her husband Bill Clinton was president, Hillary was given what seemed like an impossible job: reform the American healthcare system. Take it back from corporations and instead focus it on the average American family or senior.
Hillary was given the Task Force on National Healthcare Reform to chair and instead of gathering consensus, facts, information and options, Hillary appears to have operated the task force as an autocratic nation and, of course, this approach to a problem that affects every single person in the country ended up in court battling lawsuits, accusing Hillary of “back room” meetings and secret negotiations out of the public eye. This was a taste of things to come.
Critics lambasted Hillary’s task force and proposals as, essentially, a “you will do as we say” draconian attempt to force a system on America apparently so that Bill and Hillary Clinton could bask in the success of being the people who “fixed” healthcare. By 1994 there was so little support for the task force’s work that even other Democrats couldn’t be counted on to support it. Besides Hillary’s autocratic and elitist approach, the plan was deeply bureaucratic. As anyone who’s dealt with the healthcare industry knows, except Hillary Clinton, not everyone or everything fits neatly into a box on an application form.
Let’s switch gears and look at the disastrous term Hillary spent as President Barak Obama’s secretary of state beginning in 2009. On Sept. 11, 2012 the American consulate in Tunisia was attacked, and the ambassador along with several other people were killed. An investigation later revealed requests from the consulate for more security were apparently ignored, despite the fact the so-called “Arab Spring” had inflamed anti-American sentiment and general violence in Tunisia, Libya and other countries.
Then, it was revealed Clinton, as secretary of state, didn’t use a government-secured email account for her duties. Rather, she used a private and personal account and apparently her aides didn’t keep a record of her correspondence. As a citizen in the modern world of computer hackers and certainly as secretary of state she should have realized the security risk this creates. There is no way for state department personnel to know if the software and servers for Hillary’s private address are secure.
Why would one of the leading diplomats in the world make such a gaffe? One possibility is that a private and personal email account is easier to control, delete and edit and perhaps as mentioned above, there was no record kept of certain correspondence…likely an attractive feature for someone who has already displayed a secretive, autocratic style of leadership.
The same secretive, autocratic leadership style Hillary claims will make her more qualified to be president than anyone else.
Stu Salkeld is the new editor of The Leduc/Wetaskiwin Pipestone Flyer and writes a regular column for the paper.