November 29, 2012
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005

RE: If but her shadow were to fall on us, if we could touch the hem of her gown…how many miracles have been ascribed to Venerable Hillary, the first non-dead person to be nominated for sainthood? Some comments on the stars in your eyes column in today’s Miami Herald.

Ms. Carlson,

Having gotten the gift of a free AM hour I could think of nothing better than to get out my trusty poleax and seek out your column. And no, I won’t be mentioning anything about American GIs being tax cheats. You covered that earlier.

I was a bit unfamiliar with the person in your column. I thought the article would end with her dying on a Friday afternoon and – mirabile dictu! – showing up for breakfast on Sunday morning. It turned out it was about Hillary Clinton, the poster girl for abused wives. That Hillary Clinton.

I know that going from a senior thesis saying what a swell guy Saul Alinsky was, to shattering the glass ceiling in Arkansas – Would it brand me as a bounder if I were to point out that the largest law firm in the state hired her when her husband was elected Attorney General? Would you think less of me if I mentioned that she was made a partner after her husband was elected Governor? A case, not a very good case but a case nonetheless, can be made that those things were coincidental. Like ”finding trout in the milk” as Jeeves told Bertie - to beating the big boys in the commodities market just by reading the Wall Street Journal, to using her life-long love of yogurt to getting a seat on the board of TCBY, to using her vast retail experience to become an outside director at Wal-Mart, to doing the one thing that she did superbly well for decades; viz. covering for her husband, Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, the King of the One-Eyed Trouser Snakes, to becoming the most admired chick in the world or maybe the universe is not done easily and should be praised.

I still marvel at how she, despite being born and raised in Chicago, was able to keep her secret of being a lifelong Yankee fan.

The beauty of being a card carrying modern American Liberal ink-stained wench is that you get to write the following:

“She gets credit for handling the crisis in Libya and took
responsibility when the U.S. Consulate was attacked.”

I know of no place in the real world where style points trump a disaster. In this case the disaster involved the murder of 4 Americans. She was quick to tell the families of those who were killed in battle that we would “get” the film maker who caused all this to happen. [Do you think the poor WOG in the pokey is the new Ezra Pound?]

I am sure the mail boxes of the White Star Lines were stuffed with letters from the families of the 1500 dead passengers saying how happy they were that the band played so well as RMS Titanic went down.

You mention how she has helped the Obamas – Wasn’t B.O. just called “Our Lord and Savior”? Won’t that make it a wee bit crowded when they call the roll in the Pantheon? – and their children “who attend the same school as Chelsea did”.

Pray tell, what school is that? Is it any of the really fine public schools in Washington, DC? If not, why not? As non-paying tenants of the largest single family public housing project in the universe wouldn’t it be fair if their children had to attend public school? In fact, I think it’s time for the children of all elected officials to attend public schools.

How long has it been since anyone mentioned Whitewater?

The deal died. That happens all the time. The most galling part of it, the part that will never pass the bag test, was the purchase agreement that was written by “one of the country’s 100 best lawyers”. It was designed to hornswoggle and then trap Mr., & Mrs. Rufus Redneck.

It succeeded.

A mortgage is a personal loan secured by a lien on real property. If you miss payments the lender begins foreclosure. No matter how unbelievable the story is the person in default gets to tell it to a judge. Something called “due process” is involved. In Whitewater the buyer signed a time-sales contract. It’s just like buying a used car. If you miss a payment a nice man with a tow truck comes to your house and repos it. Case closed

And that’s how you become the “most admired woman in the world”?

So there. I managed to get through this without mentioning the GI tax cheats you managed to uncover 12 years ago. I wonder how many of them got toe-tagged?


Kevin Smith