Attorney General Leslie Rutledge has that good-ol’-girl, Glock-gripping, Hillary-hatin’ thing going on.
“This is what a real Arkansas woman sounds like,” she drawled at the Republican National Convention, caricaturing herself to oblige her party’s instruction and take a poke at Hillary Clinton.
It’s as if Arkansas Republicans decided to take the outdated Democratic Blanche Lincoln model and recreate a new Arkansas political persona without the sophistication.
Last week Rutledge published a guest column on a website started by former Republican Party staffers. She wrote that the Clintons began their “careers of corruption” and “deception [and] dishonesty” in 1979 in Arkansas when Bill held the office she now holds.
Her press aide explained the context when I inquired, saying, “With the passing of Labor Day and the debates just around the corner, the attorney general felt it was appropriate to remind Americans who she is supporting in the election and why.”
I confess I had missed the national clamor for Rutledge’s political counsel in the matter.
My main interest is in the substance of what Rutledge wrote. I readily concede deception and dishonesty on the Clintons’ part. But I asked Rutledge’s office to enumerate the actual incidents of “corruption” that the Clintons began when he was attorney general, then governor.
Her office replied with a list of supposed “scandals,” most of them matters occurring since the Clintons left Arkansas in 1993 and generally more appropriately called indiscretions, irregularities, truth-shadings, allegations, absences of circumspection and partisan contrivances.
The only items on the list that dated to 1979 were “cattle futures” and “Whitewater.”
“Cattle futures” had to do with Hillary reaping about $100,000 in a short time with commodities trades encouraged by her friend and Tyson Foods lawyer Jim Blair. Some of her profits reportedly came from trades based on cash she didn’t always actually have at the time, but was considered good for because Blair, a very active trader, was vouching for her.
Corruption? Oh, all right. We’ll cheapen the language and call it that. A governor’s wife making money curiously and quickly with the special aid of the counsel for a large state-based corporation is certainly not ethically pristine.
Whitewater was nothing. The Republicans spent millions in taxpayer money and came up dry on the Clintons until a plump young girl bailed them out by flashing her underpants to a weak-of-the-flesh president.
I see where the new Miss America from Arkansas, Savvy Shields, said in answer to her pageant question that the news media so sensationalize charges in the presidential race that you can’t tell what’s scandal and what isn’t. Perhaps I can help. It’s actually the campaigns and their agents like Rutledge who do that to each other.
For Miss America’s benefit and everyone else’s, here is the remainder of the Rutledge-provided bill of not-very particulars, and my disposition:
• Troopergate. State troopers said Bill Clinton used them to make connections with female sexual conquests when he was governor, and there is evidence enough of Bill’s radiator-overheating tomcatting to believe that such scandalous inappropriateness happened.
• Travelgate. Hillary’s attempt to dump the longstanding White House travel office was arrogant and clumsy, but not confirmable as corrupt.
• Health-care task force. There is no remote scandal, but only nobility, in trying to reform health care.
• Lincoln bedroom for sale. It wasn’t for sale to donors during Bill’s presidency. It was for rent. And it is less a matter of corruption than politics sadly as usual.
• Impeachment. That was a scandal for sure … by the impeaching Republicans. Dale Bumpers explained it in his closing argument.
• Rose Law Firm and “filegate.” The scandal in the Rose Law Firm was Webb Hubbell’s, not Hillary’s, and the billing records in question showed up.
• Clinton Foundation and foreign donations. It is not corruption, but charity, to take big donations from rich people for good causes and ask the State Department to meet with some of those donors.
• Clinton pardons. Yes, pardoning rich fugitive Marc Rich after taking his ex-wife’s donation to the presidential library was a scandal. It galls and sickens to this day.
• Looting the White House. The Clintons took some things that were gifts either to them or the White House, and, after criticism, gave some of them back. Politifact found the charge of looting mostly false.
• Sidney Blumenthal. It’s not corruption that Hillary is the only person known to like the guy.
• Email server, Benghazi and paid speech transcripts, by my lumping. The Republicans have investigated ad infinitum the server and Benghazi, nailing down nothing. And it is not corrupt, but merely tacky, to give quarter-million-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs when you’re out of office, then not release the transcripts of what you said.
To conclude: The Clintons misbehave and Rutledge exploits and vastly overstates for partisan purposes. So we’ve broken no news today.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.