A Moment That Should Cost Hillary the Nomination: Blaming Bernie for Her Husband’s Sin

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Journalist and Professor Robert Scheer published a must-read column yesterday that is 100% dead right.  It addresses the absolute worst moment of the Democratic Presidential nomination fight so far — the moment in last Sunday night’s debate when Hillary Clinton tried to tarnish Bernie Sanders as a supporter of the law that did more than any other — far more than the reprehensible repeal of Glass-Steagall — to precipitate the 2007-2008 financial meltdown.

The bill was called the “Commodities Futures Modernization Act,” or “CFMA — and it legalized credit default swaps and other fog-generating instruments that were used to make huge bets with the public’s money that were eventually and inevitably at the public’s expense.  Texas Sen. Phil Gramm — one of the old conservative Democratic segregationists who lived long enough to switch to the Republican Party and remind people who was really whom — shoehorned it in the dark of night into the 2000 Omnibus Budget Bill, a “must pass” bill that, if defeated, would have led to another government shutdown.  In other words, hardly anyone would vote against the whole bill but Ron Paul, and it was this a perfect opportunity for mischief.

The horrific CFMA was Phil Gramm’s baby — but then-President Bill Clinton was only too happy to tickle its chin, hug it, and adopt it as his own.

It’s hard to pick only four Scheer’s paragraphs to quote, so let’s take the first three and cheat a little in creating the fourth:

The Clintons have no shame, that much you can count on. That stupefying arrogance was on full display in the most recent presidential campaign debate when Hillary Clinton countered Bernie Sanders’ charge that she was compromised by her close ties to Goldman Sachs and other rapacious Wall Street interests with the retort:

“Sen. Sanders, you’re the only one on this stage that voted to deregulate the financial markets in 2000, … to make the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission no longer able to regulate swaps and derivatives, which were one of the main causes of the collapse in ’08.”

Hillary knows that the disastrous legislation, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), had nothing to do with Sanders and everything to do with then-President Bill Clinton, who devoted his presidency to sucking up to Wall Street. Clinton signed this bill into law as a lame-duck president, ensuring his wife would have massive Wall Street contributions for her Senate run.

You’ll need to read the story to get a load of the still-living villain, Gary Gensler, who very likely prompted this “too clever by half-a-million” attack on Sanders.  But I’ll graft a new beginning from the paragraph preceding and a new ending from paragraph following to Scheer’s main paragraph on him just to whet your appetite to read more:

[One of CFMA’s key authors was Gary Gensler, the former Goldman Sachs partner recruited by Clinton to be undersecretary of the treasury.]  Eight years later, when President Obama nominated Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, it was Sanders who put a temporary hold on the nomination, stating: “Mr. Gensler worked with Sen. Phil Gramm and [former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan to exempt credit default swaps from regulation, which led to the collapse of AIG and has resulted in the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history.”  [Today, Gensler is the top economic adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.]

Yes, Bernie had to vote for the 2000 Omnibus Budget Bill — a “must pass” bill to avoid a government shutdown — despite the presence of CFMA.  And yes, Hillary’s “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” condemnation of Sanders, that he was “the only one on the stage who had” voted for it, was true — because he was the only one in Congress in December 2000. Hillary had already won her Senate seat, with Wall Street’s help, but had not yet taken office.

Does anyone truly imagine that Hillary WOULD NOT have voted for it? Bernie tried to neuter it and you can see above what he did to block Gensler from a high government appointment. She must have REALLY enjoyed pulling the wool over an unsuspecting public’s eyes with THAT one!

Hey, do you want to look into her very soul?  Watch her eyes — what we may think of as “Nixonian” eyes, except that Tricky Dick carefully trained himself to be able to look straight into people’s eyes as he lied — as from 8:24 to 9:11 on the video she utters the paragraph blockquoted above, and more:

When her eyes are that unfocused she’s either spewing out a memorized false political attack on someone or she’s stone cold drunk — and I didn’t hear her slurring her words.

(Note, by the way, that in her final ten seconds, having introduced her attack as the “last point on this” and then gotten in her stabby-stab-stab, she tries to close by turning the topic to “aren’t we Democrats great and aren’t the Republicans awful!” — which just shows us that even at this late moment she has no idea who she is dealing with in the irrepressible Bernie Sanders.  Watch it all!)

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I would like THE ENTIRE REST OF THE PRIMARY CAMPAIGN to be about this one moment — that moment of Hillary being so authentically, grotesquely, inauthentic and contemptuous of a voting public that she believes can be so easily fooled.  HOW DARE YOU, HILLARY!

HEY, MEDIA! — here’s a good question to ask Hillary: if the CFMA had come up a month later, when she was in the Senate, WOULD SHE HAVE VOTED FOR IT?  If not, was really she willing to see the government shut down?  If so, then WHAT POINT WAS SHE TRYING TO MAKE ABOUT BERNIE SANDERS’S SHARE OF THE BLAME DURING THE DEBATE?

Do you wonder why people who love truth often hate Hillary? Right there, that’s why!  Planting the economy’s murder weapon on Bernie Sanders just to trick people into voting for her — and no doubt relishing the irony.  You don’t want to see a negative campaign against Hillary? Then you should have demanded that she show some true character right now in this election — instead of retreating back to what she does best, and showing the sorry and ugly character that Bill Clinton could pull off beautifully but that THANK GOD she somehow can’t.  (Too bad that Trump and Cruz both can so well.)

If I have the time, I’ll write about this EVERY DAY until the primary campaign is over.  Every day!  It’s THAT perfectly telling of a moment.  Is THIS going to bring out the voters — or repel them?