Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been through the political battles more than any major politician since Richard Nixon – and she has a lot in common with her former foe. But despite the blanket coverage of the former First Lady and her ubiquitous husband, there are still a good number of interesting facts about her that have been buried over the years.
She likes to get her drink on. Hanging out in Cartagena in 2012 with her staff at the Summit of the Americas, then-Secretary of State Clinton was photographed with her hair down and a drink in her hand. Hillary apparently outdrank Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) when they were touring Estonia in 2004. According to a witness, “Hillary won. She stayed correct after four shots.” Terry McAuliffe, new governor of Virginia and Clinton ally, said, “She loves to sit, throw ’em back…She’s a girl from Illinois who likes to throw ’em down with the rest of us.” And, of course, she conveniently left town for a wine tour in Australia just in time to miss her first round of questioning on Benghazi.
She’s old. Yes, you knew this. But the media, which portrayed John McCain as ancient in 2008, when he was 72, has largely minimized the fact that Hillary will be 68 when she runs in 2016. Hillary says her favorite TV show of all time is The Ed Sullivan Show. The show stopped airing in 1971. She hasn’t driven a car since 1996. Her favorite music: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. “I’m a child of the ’60s, which is before any of you were born,” she said in 2011. She’s actually a child of the 1950s, given that she was born in 1947, when Harry Truman was president.
Her age has been seen by many commentators as a positive; it burgeons the “we owe it to her” campaign she will undoubtedly run come 2016. But she’s also out of touch, which is why her right hand, Phillippe Reines, mocked BuzzFeed for asking questions about her use of Facebook and Twitter.
She thinks women who accuse men of sexual harassment are “whiny.” Were Hillary Clinton a Republican, the report this week that she termed sexual harassment victims of former Senator Bob Packwood (R-OR) “whiney women.” According to the notes of her good friend, the late Professor Diane Blair, Hillary Clinton was “tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care.”
Because political priorities take precedence over sexual mistreatment. This from the lady who proposes that she has faced glass ceilings and invokes the “war on women” regularly to push her agenda. That’s cynical stuff.
She’s intimately familiar with the criminal investigation process. No, this isn’t a reference to Benghazi. Hillary was the only First Lady in American history to be subpoenaed, for her role in the Whitewater scandal. And she was deposed, too – a lot, during Travelgate and Filegate. She was fingerprinted by the FBI. Her fingerprints were found on relevant documents requested by investigators…two years later, in her family quarters.
Hillary made cash from pollution. Before Bill was elected president, Hillary was raking in the big dough via her law firm and sitting on various boards of corporations. Some of her money came from Lafarge – roughly $31,000, in a time when her husband was pulling down $35,000 as governor of Arkansas. That company was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution in 1992. The Clinton administration promptly knocked the fine down to under $600,000.
She loves Saul Alinsky. While Hillary’s 92-page college thesis for Wellesley College focused on the supposed shortcomings of Alinsky’s community organizing methods, it was highly complimentary of Alinsky’s aspirations. She was actually offered a job by Alinsky. Upon entry to the White House, Hillary and company requested that Wellesley keep the thesis under wraps. It was only opened up to the public after her husband left office, in 2001.
About those lesbian rumors… There is no evidence that Hillary is a lesbian. Edward Klein infamously quoted one of her classmates at Wellesley saying that “The notion of a woman being a lesbian was fascinating to Hillary. But she was much more interested in lesbianism as a political statement than a sexual practice.” Carl Bernstein wrote, “At Wellesley, her experimentation is known to have been with men. And to this day, she is playful, even flirtatious, in an innocent manner with men she likes, and less likely to physically embrace female friends or be ‘touchy’ with them or look deeply into their eyes in conversation, as she does with men.”
Hillary took cash from Wal-Mart. Between 1986 and 1992, Hillary sat on the board of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has been repeatedly criticized for supposed anti-union activity. Hillary did nothing about it. Her campaign biography in 2008 avoided all mention of Wal-Mart. One of Clinton’s fellow board members was one John Tate, who was famed for stating, “Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.” According to ABC News, “A former board member told ABCNews.com that he had no recollection of Clinton defending unions during more than 20 board meetings held in private The tapes show Clinton in the role of a loyal company woman.” Clinton refused ABC News’ request for an interview on the subject.
Hillary may or may not have tried to join the Marines. But only as a political ploy. John Solomon of the Washington Post reported that Clinton tried to join up in 1975, before she married bill, likely in an attempt to make a stink about gender inequality. Jim Geraghty of National Review makes a good case that the entire story is nonsense.
She’s a weirdo. In Bob Woodward’s book, The Choice, the famed journalist reports that while in the White House, Hillary chatted with the long-dead former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as the long-dead Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. The conversations were facilitated by co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research Jean Houston, who provided Hillary with the basis for her sophomoric book on raising children, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. Houston even moved into the White House for a spell, according to Woodward. When Houston asked if Hillary would ever want to address Jesus, however, Hillary said that would be “too personal.”
President Clinton himself admitted to his wife’s odd Eleanor Roosevelt conversations in 2012 during a speech:
A special thanks to the members of the Roosevelt family who are here. And the one who is not, Eleanor, who made sure that the four freedoms were included in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. I know that because, as all of you famously learned when I served as president, my wife, now the secretary of state, was known to commune with Eleanor on a regular basis. And so she called me last night on her way home from Peru to remind me to say that. That Eleanor had talked to her and reminded her that I should say that.
This story alone demonstrates the power of leftist media bias. You probably haven’t heard it. But you know that Nancy Reagan loved her astrologers, don’t you?
In the end, it will be up to the American people to determine what is relevant about Clinton and what isn’t. But there’s little doubt that many of the most interesting facts about who Hillary Clinton is have been minimized for years. And it will take an awful lot of digging to get to the bottom of the foremost political chameleon of the past 40 years.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.