Will the REAL candidates stand up?

Of all the candidates, Hillary Clinton is the most repulsive… in my humble opinion. She tries to portray herself as one who has dedicated her life to helping others less fortunate. She has been quoted as saying she has “been working to bring positive change to people’s lives for 35 years.” and that “”I’ve spent so much of my life in the nonprofit sector.”. Even her husband is stretching the truth when he says that his wife “could have taken a job with a firm … Instead she went to work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund.” Of course all deceptions are based upon some amount of truth. But it is not truth unless all of it is factual. Here is what her 35 years of experience has amounted to:

• She did work at the Children’s Defense fund… for less than a year. Just long enough to list that as honorable mention on your resume.
• According to her hubby she “could have taken a job with a firm”… well she did. In fact the prestigious Arkansas Ross Law firm for 15 years. A lot longer than her very, very brief stint at the CDF.
• While at the Rose Law she represented, not the downtrodden, but corporate interests against the common man. From “American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power,” by Christopher Andersen, pp 62 – 63:
  

  Hillary did not let her conscience get in the way of defending a canning company against a man who opened a can of pork and beans to discover a rat’s derriere poking up at him. The sight was so nauseating, said the plaintiff, that he could not, among other things, bring himself to kiss his fiancee.

  Arguing that the rodent parts had been sterilized in the canning process and “might be considered edible” in certain parts of the world, Hillary somehow managed to convince the jury to award the man only a token amount. Hillary and Bill would often joke about her first legal victory for the Rose Law Firm in what she dubbed “The Rat’s Ass Case.”</li>
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  Not long after, she took on another case that seemed to contradict much of what she had stood for. In her first criminal case, Hillary defended a three-hundred-pound man charged with assaulting his girlfriend. </li>
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  Prosecutors viewed the case as cut-and-dried—police would testify that the woman had been severely beaten—but were blind-sided during the preliminary hearing when Hillary convinced the judge to drop the charges on a technicality.

  Both “The Rat’s Ass Case” and Hillary’s successful defense of a man accused of brutally attacking the woman he lived with underscored her willingness to compromise her values if that’s what it took to be on the fast track to partner.

  In 1977, President Carter rewarded Hillary for her help in Indiana [where she had worked on his campaign] with an appointment to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit organization established by Congress. When she was asked during her Senate confirmation hearings whether the Rose Law Firm would recuse itself from cases involving organizations that received money from the LSC, Hillary waffled. In the end, she would not say yes.

  While she continued to rack up hefty fees at her Arkansas law firm, Hillary oversaw an LSC budget that swelled from $90 million to $321 million—money that was used, among other things, to try to defeat California’s tax-cutting Proposition 9, get Medicare to pay for a welfare recipient’s sex-change operation, and support legal efforts in Michigan to give standing to “Black English” (Ebonics) as a separate language. In the final days of the Carter administration, the LSC would frantically dole out $260 million in taxpayer funds to various liberal causes in an effort to keep the money out of the hands of incoming Reagan appointees. The General Accounting Office would issue a report on the LSC under Hillary Rodham and conclude that “many of the people associated with it are uniquely reprehensible.”

  And there is nothing wrong with that. I suppose everyone, including the most vial clients, are entitled to vigorous representation in court. But don’t deceive people by saying that she sought to “bring positive change to people’s lives for 35 years”. She is trying to position herself as Mother Teressa.

• While she was at the Rose Law firm she represented Madison Guaranty… a central player in the Whitewater scandal. And then some of those records suddenly found a “home” residing at the White House. Webster Hubbell who wound up being a high-ranked Justice Department official was later convicted of fraud charges in relation to Whitewater. Cozy… not what you call an exemplary consumer advocacy record.

Of course Obama has some of the same credibility problems. Hillary herself raised the “slum landlord business” issue earlier this month in one of the Democratic debates.  Obama counters that while Clinton was on the board of Wal-Mart he was a “civil rights attorney” in Chicago. But he was also a member of the law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, a small firm helping craft housing deals involving millions of dollars in public subsidies. One of those involved was Obama contributor Tony Rezko. Today is awaiting trial in Federal court on fraud charges.