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Tuesday, August 23, 2016

If the Clinton Foundation Closes, People are Going to Die

This is yet another reason I love James Carville; yep, these are his words.

"Democratic strategist and long-time Clinton supporter James Carville said Monday if there is a complete shutdown of the Clinton Foundation, people will die."
"The press has decided that we're going to go after this and shut it down," Carville said. "You are probably going to be successful. There will be people that are going to die because of this."
"Bill Clinton announced that the Clinton Foundation will stop accepting foreign and corporate donations if Hillary Clinton is elected president. The changes to the Foundation's donation policy comes as critics slam Hillary Clinton for leading an alleged pay-to-play operation while at the State Department."
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/23/politics/james-carville-defends-clinton-foundation/index.html
Preach it James. The idea now seems to be that if you're a high ranking government official, you should't contribute to philanthrophy, you should not try to help anyone, you should be like Donald Trump who does nothing for no one. He's never given anyone anything and he's ripped off too many people to count. 
Or maybe be like Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC Morning Joe host.

"Somebody is going to hell" over the political attacks on the Clinton Foundation, longtime Clinton confidant James Carville declared Tuesday, denouncing the recent scrutiny and criticism of the charitable organization.

"If the Clinton Foundation had decided not to accept foreign donations while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, as it has recently announced it would do if she is elected president, Carville said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the "good" thing would be that the organization would not be part of the political discussion."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/james-carville-clinton-foundation-attacks-227305#ixzz4IA6Z5bSh

Preach it, James! Right in the belly of the beast of Morning Joe. People say MSNBC is a liberal network and they have Morning Joe on for three hours every morning. 
There's a special place in hell for these self righteous scrooges who want to destroy such a fine organization.

"The bad would be you'd be out hundreds of millions of dollars that are doing good. What the Clinton Foundation does, it takes money from rich people and gives it to poor people. Most people think that's a pretty good idea," Carville said.

"Bill Clinton also announced to supporters on Monday that he would step down from his position on the foundation board if his wife wins in November and would cease fundraising activities for the organization."

"Pressed on whether the Clinton Foundation should have clamped down on foreign donations before Clinton became secretary of state, Carville responded, "If you ask me as a political adviser, of course."

"If you ask me as a human being, eh, I’m not too sure. As a human being I think the foundation does an enormous amount of good. From a strictly political standpoint, yeah," Carville said, invoking his Catholic sixth-grade teacher to say, "somebody is going to hell over this. Because somebody, now I’m not saying here—or somewhere is. This is saving people’s lives."

"Co-host Joe Scarborough did not take kindly to the sentiment."

“I wish I could say the word I want to say. I’ll just say that’s BS," Scarborough remarked. "You know the fact is if it's a great charity and it’s a five-star rated charity, guess what, other people can raise the money. It doesn't have to be Bill Clinton calling somebody up making people think, if I give him money it could help me out. If it's a great charity, it can stand on its own and other people can raise money for it. It's not a zero-sum game. It's not having Bill Clinton raise money while his wife is running for president or else we're all going to hell and little kids are going to die across the planet.”

“They’re gonna," Carville shot back. "The other thing is, Bill Clinton has more charm and people around the world have an enormous amount of faith in him. I've traveled with him. I've seen it myself. There are not many people that have the relationships and are held in the affection around the world as Bill Clinto

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/james-carville-clinton-foundation-attacks-227305#ixzz4IA7ASItO

What Morning Joe said there is so stupid. Sure someone else could do it. Maybe get some guy off the street who nobody knows. Call it the Joe Schmo Foundation. How many donations will that get?

This misses the point of what philanthropy is. Obviously people who give money want something: often some sort of social recognition, etc. Or it can be a tax break. Whatever. What difference does it make if it's helping world poverty, AIDs research, fighting malaria, etc?

If you're a rich guy with billions and you want to do something for those in need, wouldn't you rather donate to a former President's charity than Joe Schmo's?

Matt Yglesias praises Hillary for bowing to politics. I find it very depressing that politics is going to hurt this many people just so some self righteous prigs on the Right wing and in the media get to feel morally superior.

Yglesias also argues that the Clinton Foundation can be understood as old fashion machine politics.

"The best way to think about the Clinton Foundation is probably as a 21st-century version of a classic political machine. It provides a mechanism for people who want to help the Clintons to contribute financially to the cause of helping the Clintons. And it provides a mechanism for the Clintons to help themselves by offering jobs to people in the Clinton circle."

"That the foundation does genuine good in the world in no way detracts from that machine-like quality."

"Any half-decent political machine would, in fact, spend a great deal of time and energy being genuinely useful to people. The choice between an influence-peddling operation and a helping-people operation is ultimately a false one. As Terry Galway’s excellent book Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics argues persuasively, a good machine was not just a mechanism for extraction. To deliver favors, the machine had to deliver votes, and to deliver votes, the machine had to deliver real services to real people."

"But if you want to defend the operation on machine terms, then you would need to actually mount the defense. The Clintons’ grudging, day-late, dollar-short concessions to the viewpoint that the foundation is an unacceptable conflict of interest prevent them from mounting a coherent argument in its favor while also failing to conform to modern ideas about proper political conduct."
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/22/12584580/clinton-foundation

To tell you the truth, I'd be happy to make the argument for old political machines. The progressive reformers cared more about men's souls than their needs.

The old machines realized a man can't live on moral superiority alone.
P.S. Here's a thought from Matthew Chapman, a fellow Hillary supporter on Twitter. 
"The Clinton Foundation was the first ever org to set up a children's hospital in the Congo. Shut your ignorant mouth."

https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/768048445533876224

That goes for all these phony moral prigs attacking the Clinton Foundation.

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