— by Polydamas
The history books tell us an apocryphal story about Marie Antoinette, the 18th century Queen of France who was married to King Louis XVI. When she was told that the French peasants were starving because they had no bread to eat, she is reputed to have haughtily said “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, which means “let them eat cake”. Only a pampered and spoiled aristocrat could have blithely ignored the reality that, unlike her, impoverished peasants who could not afford plain bread, lacked the luxury of resorting to expensive cake. After the French people revolted against their well-fed king and his aristocracy in September of 1792, Queen Marie Antoinette was tried and executed by guillotine on October 16, 1793.
In the 25 years since President Bill “Louis” Clinton and his so-called co-president Hillary “Antoinette” Clinton arrived in Washington, D.C. in January 1992, they have lived like royalty. They lived luxuriously in the White House for eight years, becoming so attached to its finery that they could not help themselves from purloining some of its furniture upon their departure in January of 2001.
For a quarter of a century, “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton received a generous government salary and, later, a pension befitting his two terms as President of the United States and her two terms as Democratic Senator from New York. They availed themselves of stupendous government benefits, including the best healthcare on Earth and round-the-clock Secret Service protection. They rubbed shoulders with Hollywood’s glitterati, Silicon Valley’s billionaire tech moguls, and wealthy campaign donors. They surrounded themselves with fawning acolytes, think-tank academicians, and various policy wonks who promoted their latest utopian schemes for benefacting their flocks at stupendous costs to be borne by the government and, by extension, the American taxpayers. They vacationed early and often in exotic retreats and dined sumptuously. Their private chefs ensured that they had a steady supply of cake and that they ate it, too.
In the meantime, “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton’s lowly subjects in “Flyover Country”, that vast, red, and backward expanse of land between the hip, fashionable, and “woke” cities of the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, were left to subsist on crumbs. When they lost their middle class lives and manufacturing jobs to China and to Mexico, courtesy of the Clinton administration’s 1990s trade policies with China and also the North American Free Trade Agreement, they were told to accept their losses as inevitable. The were lectured about the march of the global economy and America’s inexorable transition into a knowledge economy. To borrow some of the apt analogy of the incomparable PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s October 31, 2016 speech at the National Press Club, they were rudely ushered out of the physical world of “atoms and molecules” and told to find themselves a place in the digital internet world of “bits and bytes”.
The people of “Flyover Country” were advised to retrain themselves for the new global economy. Instead of retaining their own jobs, they were blithely counseled to quickly learn how to make their living in the world of “bits and bytes” by competing for limited tech jobs with their own tech-savvy children and grandchildren to write computer code for iPhone and Android applications, hawk various and sundry items and trinkets on eBay and Craigslist, make youtube movies for clicks and dollars, and write blogs that would be monetized with Google’s “adsense” technology. In short, they were to transform their cities and towns into scaled copies of the information economies of Blue America, New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. They were hectored to become the “woke” and cosmopolitan denizens of these havens of so-called enlightened thought and speech, not remain the benighted clingers to religion and guns, which President Barack Hussein Obama once called them.
During the 2016 election season, the denizens of “Flyover Country” may not have been unanimously sure whether “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton’s $200 million wealth accumulated and secreted in the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was proven quid pro quo for selling access to themselves and a pay-for-play scheme in violation of federal law. Peter Schweizer’s 2015 book Clinton Cash and subsequent 2016 movie sure make a very good case for this, which a fair grand jury and independent prosecutor should consider.
The citizens of “Flyover Country” may not have known for certain whether “Antoinette” Clinton’s bathroom e-mail server and destruction of 33,000 e-mails were definitely a federal crime. What they did know with a certainty was that, whether or not it was a crime, “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton raked in upwards of $200 million for selling something valuable and that no buyer would ever part company with these huge sums and expect absolutely nothing in return. They implicitly understood that, for a quarter of a century, “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton sold America and “Flyover Country” Americans down the river in a variety of ways and collected a $200 million commission.
They also knew that no one in federal or state government — not even “Antoinette” Clinton — sets up a secret e-mail server if she had nothing to hide. They were wise enough to discern that no one shreds 33,000 e-mails that should have been on a secure government server unless the contents of these e-mails were damaging to her and were intended to evade public scrutiny and accountability.
Further, they knew that, although the WikiLeaks revelations from campaign manager John Podesta’s e-mail were attacked by the Democrats as a hack and a nefarious scheme by Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin to get Donald Trump elected President, no one disputed the authenticity of the contents of these e-mails. Despite being told by the mainstream media that “there was nothing to see here”, they realized that the WikiLeaks e-mails contained very damaging information and proof of the Clinton Foundation’s fundamental corruption, if not a variety of federal crimes. Just as an example, “Louis and Antoinette” Clinton’s misuse of the Clinton Foundation’s funds to pay the exorbitant costs of Chelsea Clinton’s lavish wedding was, at the very least, a breach of ethics and the public trust if not a crime.
The lowly subjects of America’s own Queen “Antoinette” Clinton correctly concluded that, four or eight more years of her reign in the White House would most likely resemble the previous 25 years of accelerating decline in their personal well being, economic prospects, healthcare, safety and security, standard of living, and their children’s inheritances. Given a choice between the tried-and-true failure that was “Antoinette” Clinton, who sought to double down on the failed leftist policies of President Obama and her primary challenger Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, they opted instead for a shot to be Donald Trump’s apprentices and for a fighting chance at success. They chose wisely.