The Clintons’ long and mendacious road

Here we are again with Hillary Rodham Clinton confronted by charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and general improbity. Such behavior has been going on with her for a long time. Some journalists who today chronicle the charges facing the Clintons were not even born when it all began.

For those of us with unflagging memories and abundant experience, it goes back decades. I would date the first official charges of Hillary’s crookedness and reckless disregard for the law to Watergate in 1974 when she improbably served on the Watergate impeachment staff. Her boss then was the general counsel and chief of staff for the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Zeifman, a Democrat. In a personal evaluation of Hillary’s performance he wrote, “I decided that I could not recommend her for any future position of public or private trust.” Why? Mr. Zeifman had learned that in this historic undertaking “she had lied” to him and to others repeatedly. Had Americans been attentive then, or at least had Democrats been attentive, America might have been sparedHillary’s decades-long cavalcade of mendacity and intrigue.

Looking back on her bouts with Republicans, the media and what are generally referred to as the authorities, not much has changed. To some of us Clinton-watchers her scrapes with the law have been endlessly amusing but, in truth, we have seen it all before. I suppose her negligence about security at Benghazi is new, but before 2009 she had never been responsible for security anywhere. Had she been responsible for the lives of ambassadors and others earlier we would doubtless have been witnesses to the cover-up, the stonewalling, and such melodrama as her congressional lament, “What does it matter?” Aside from her career at State, there is nothing new on her record.

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