If you read Alexander Cockburn’s Jan. 12 “Wild Justice” column in the New York Press, you already know that the Clintons are still trying to bury their hands in the pockets of the U.S. taxpayers, stuffing those diabolical digits clear down to the pant cuffs.
Guess old habits die harder than Al Gore presidential bids.
“It looks as though we’ll all be footing the bill for the Clintons’ place in Chappaqua,” begins Cockburn. The $1.7 million house was purchased along with Hillary’s New York Yankee’s cap and Johnny Cash look-alike costume to make it seem as though the carpetbagger from Arkansas had something more in common with the Big Apple than the occasional breakfast bagel. If Rick Lazio’s showing at the polls is anything to go by, it must have worked.
What also seems to be working is the same sort of accounting that makes tax-free legal defense funds a growth industry.
Let me explain:
The perk of Secret Service protection is certainly a plus for any departing president. Who wouldn’t appreciate a troop of guys in black suits trained to jump out from behind the white pickets and pyracantha to plug nosey neighbors for you?
The trouble is, you’ve got to lodge the hired muscle somewhere, and the bedroom down the hall would probably not be a good idea. When Hillary starts pitching potted plants and lamps at Bill — and hubby lets his famous temper blow like Old Faithless — what are the agents supposed to do? Any one who’s ever tried intervening between two fighting dogs knows the outcome of foolish endeavors — how much more two fighting Clintons? Can you imagine Hillary with a jawlock on your leg?
Much wiser to stick the Praetorians out back, just out of angry-spouse-shouting-match range.
And it seems that’s basically what the Clintons are doing. “The Secret Service needs a place on the property to house its agents,” writes Cockburn, “and the Clintons have been so good as to make available a structure for their bodyguards.”
How decent of them. But since that’s entirely out of character, it might be good to ask, “What’s the catch?”
Simple: “By an amazing coincidence,” explains Cockburn, “the rent matches the monthly mortgage payment for the entire property.” Fancy that.
The new senator from New York, who just received $8 million to write a worthless piece of coffee-table clutter, and her husband, said to be in command of $100,000 per speaking engagement, are so short on cash that they have to foist their mortgage payment onto the hapless citizens of the United States. Not that this is anything new.
Next to panhandlers, politicians are the closest thing in the human species comparable to leeches. Panhandlers are at least nice enough to beg, however. Politicians just take. Absorbing the fruits of productive citizens through taxes, fees, licenses and other sorts of financial bloodsucking, politicians never ask or say please — they simply use the coercive power of the state to snatch, filch and plunder the purses of those “under” them.
“The State,” explained sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, “is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion [has] no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.”
Hello U.S. government!
Can’t pay bills? No worry. Perform some creative accounting and leave it all to Joe and Josephine Citizen. Given Bill’s monstrous $7 million pension — a record thus far in the history of American government — Clinton could easily afford the mortgage on the new digs, without even having to bob for dollars in Hillary’s bank account. Just in his first year out of office, Bill is expected to receive $161,200 in pension dough. Instead of using that, however, he’s sticking us with the bill.
While we should be outraged, we should not be surprised. As a member of the sponging class, it’s his nature.
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WND Staff